Oyster Effect

One of my colleagues spoke about the "Oyster Effect" on his blog and I can see where he is coming from.

A frequent problem we get, is the negative balance. A common situation is a customer has a zone 2&3 travelcard on their Oyster and they have incurred a negative balance of £1.70. Only way this can really happen is if the customer in question has travelled into or through zone 1, and they didn't have sufficient pre-pay on their Oyster card. Many customers will swear blind they never went into zone 1. We then have to interrogate the card and once we give them the exact time, date, and station that they went to, they automatically recall this journey.

All the new student photocards are now issued on Oystercards, so if they wish to purchase the discounted tickets they will have no choice but to pay for zone 1, if they are travelling through it, I've had a few of the students ask to go back to the magnetic tickets for this reason but we're not allowed to issue them anymore, if they have the new Oyster student photocards.

All the supervisors on my group got an email stating that we are no longer permitted to sell weekly magnetic tickets from the QTM (Quick Ticket Machine) except on Monday - Wednesday between 07:00 - 10:00 am. I think this is to try and encourage everyone to switch over to Oystercards.