RefundMyRail is going mobile
The Delay Repay tools are free on the web today, and the app that spots your delays for you is next.
Trains run late. The money you're owed when they do is called Delay Repay, and most of it is never claimed. Not because people don't want it, but because a twenty-minute delay on a wet Tuesday has stopped mattering by Wednesday morning.
RefundMyRail exists to fix that. Half of it you can use right now at refundmyrail.co.uk, free, with nothing to install. The other half is an app, and that's where this is heading.
What's live today
The calculator is a basic one, deliberately. Give it your operator, your ticket and how late you were, and it tells you what that journey is worth. Nine operators have a page of their own: GWR, LNER, Avanti, Greater Anglia, Northern, South Western Railway, Southeastern, Thameslink and TransPennine Express. Each one carries that operator's real thresholds, its claim window, and a link to the form you actually need.※1
The part we're most pleased with is the daily report. Every morning we pull the previous day's performance data from across the network and publish what was claimable: which operators ran late, on which routes, and by how much. You can look up the mess you sat through yesterday and find out whether it was worth a claim. No account, no cost. The app does the same thing, for the journeys you actually took.
Moving to mobile
A web page can tell you what a delay was worth. It can't work out that you were on the train, and that's the part people don't do for themselves. Nobody opens a calculator on a Tuesday night about a train they've already given up on.
So you set your commute once, in the app, and then you stop thinking about it. It goes back over the journeys you've already made, checks them against what the operators actually ran, and tells you which ones you can still claim for. The claim takes a couple of taps.
It covers the network from launch rather than opening one route at a time. Every line we track gets a view of its own, and you can search any route you like. The waitlist is how you hear when it's out.※2 If you commute by train, the calculator and yesterday's report are worth five minutes today. If you'd rather never think about any of it again, that's what the app is for.