Travelcard / Oyster zones
 

We're visiting London and primarily will visit the key tourist attractions. Do I need to get anything other than a Zone 1-2 Travelcard/Visitor Oyster card?

No, zones 1-2 should be enough.

If you do find you need to travel outside zones 1 and 2, you can just pay for the add-on cost. If you do, you may need to put it on an Oystercard if you travel by tube. For trips on suburban national rail trains (e.g., Windsor or Hampton Court) it's probably simpler to just buy the normal train ticket.

You don't need a VISITOR Oystercard, you may need an Oystercard PAYG and/ or Travelcard depending on your plans, length of stay and group size

If I'm not mistaken, an Oyster card will cap at the price of a daily travelcard so the most cost effective way of doing things is just to buy an Oyster card for each of you travelling and add PAYG credit. The main exception would be if you needed national rail tickets for 2for1 deals but that' another thread altogether!

After 5 days of Pay As You Go you are better off getting a 7 day travelcard.

Thanks for the clarification jamikins

If you plan to visit the major tourist attractions it might be better to get a travelcard to avail of the 2for1 deals.

www.daysoutguide.co.uk will give you more information about 2for1s. Biggest thing is that Oysters are not eligible, you must get a travelcard or ticket from a National Rail station.

Is there a National Rail station at Heathrow? IS that the easiest place to buy a travelcard? Also for the passport size photo's can I just use my own printed on my colour printer to passport size.

>>Is there a National Rail station at Heathrow?<<

No. If you want to buy the paper travelcard for the 2for1s, you'll have to wait till you get into central London.

>>Also for the passport size photo's can I just use my own printed on my colour printer to passport size.<<

On the National Rail website, it says
<i>You will need a recent passport-type photograph for the accompanying photo card</i>
so presumably it all depends on the quality of the image you're able to print; but in any case, there are photobooths in many stations.

Not sure if I should ask my question here or add yet another thread on this topic, but since there seem to be about a million already, I'll start out just hijacking this one (until better minds tell me to start a new thread).

I will be on my honeymoon in London for 10 days next month. Arriving at LHR at 9:10 am on May 21st and leaving at 4:15 pm on the 30th. I already have an oyster card which I will just add money onto. We'll need to get one for my fiance. We will be travelling to/from the airport via tube -- I've done it before and have no issues with it (and since the apartment we're renting is near the South Ken. station, it's convenient).

We've gone through the various 2 for 1 offers and there are at least 6 or 7 we might very reasonably want to take advantage of, with total savingss og about 100 GBP (and quite a few more that you never know about, if we can fit them in). Now, we can, of course, buy the 7-day paper travelcards and just use the Oysters for the time at the beginning and end of our trip that is outside the 7 days. But what I was wondering was if it might make more sense (for the sake of convenience) to just buy a cheap round trip rail ticket and not use it, in order to not be bound by the 7 days on the 2 for 1's. Thoughts? Thanks a bunch!

The rail ticket will need to be valid during the time you visit the sites. For 10 days you are better off getting a 7 day travel card for 7 consecutive days anyways, so may as well get the paper version. You can add some cash to the oysters for your arrival day and the last couple days...just plan to visit the sites during the validity of the travel card.

The photos need to be actual photographs...whether printed at home or at a store...they can't be on regular paper from my experience.

It's a dodge somebody else suggested a while back in some thread i.e. buying the cheapest return ticket (round trip ticket) from somewhere into London for a few quid and then taking advantage of the oyster cards which are by far the most flexible way of doing it if local transport were your only consideration.

There must be somebody here who can suggest the cheapest return fare possible.

(Incidentally I don't know how the thing works but let's say you are "legitimately" buying a return from some point into London and will be there say for a week. Don't they collect the inbound ticket when you leave the train....so to take advantage of the 2 4 1's wouldn't you just show the return portion which is no different than just buying a return and eating the first part...(many do that ll the time with some of the illogical airfares although they eat the return...I did that several times when the price for a round trip air ticket in the USA was far cheaper than even a one way and never had any difficulty.....

So in theory, this should work, shouldn't it? (And I expect our dear friend flanneruk to start mouthing off how immoral this is and damn foreigners and all the rest that usually comes from him. But let me say before I get creamed, I don't know the mechanism for this.

Thanks for your responses, jamikins and xyz123.

As for the photos, I have one from a couple of years ago from a visa I had to get and my fiance said he still has one from when he got his passport last year, so they are real pictures on photo paper, not regular paper.

I think I had seen the suggestion here somewhere about the return ticket and just not using it, but I never saw anything further on it, so thought I'd bring it up. Yes, it is cheaper to not waste money on a pair of tickets you are not using, but I thought given how much we might potentially save, it might be worth it for the convenience of not having to worry about using the 2 for 1's within the 7 days of the travelcard.

But I guess since it is an absolute that the travelcard works, and the inconvenience is minimal, we'll just get our travelcards either sometime on that Tuesday we arrive or Wed morning and make sure we use the vouchers before the last couple days. It's really only about a day and a half to worry about, so not too big a deal.