Monday, 7 April 2014

Incomplete journeys on Oyster - swiping out and in mid journey.

Last month I travelled from Holborn to Barking changing at Bank and Limehouse (where one has to swipe out of the system and back in again to change between DLR and c2c). A couple of days ago I logged in to my Oyster account, and an incomplete journey was flagged up -  a very useful feature.

I looked in my diary, and saw that I had been to Holborn that day, so I supplied Holborn as the missing swipe. However, when I went to the journey history, it transpired that the missing swipe was the one at Limehouse c2c, so now I have a journey from Holborn to Limehouse and amother journey from Holborn to Barking.

Now it seems to me that Oyster should be able to work out the journey I actually took from the times, or make an assumption that as I live in Barking, and had travelled from Barking to Holborn, that my return journey was Holborn to Barking. Maybe this is a refinement that is on the cards.

In the meantime, this could be fixed by the way the Oyster website works. I can't reproduce the presentation of the problem  so I don't know what options I had, but I think that the user should be taken to the journey history to assess the missing swipes there.