Rail passenger offered £10k compensation for 18-minute train delay

Exclusive: John Wareing, who travelled from Preston to London, inadvertently entered the incorrect fare

John Wareing’s lunchtime train from Preston to London on 1 December arrived a mildly irritating 18 minutes late. But Avanti West Coast has a generous delay repay policy that applies if trains are as little as a quarter-hour behind schedule. So the 72-year-old from Lancashire put in an online compensation claim.

Mr Wareing, a retired HR manager, expected £10.10 back – representing one-eighth of the cost of his £80.85 return ticket. But three days later he received an email from the rail firm saying: “If your claim is approved for the delay you have entered, you can expect to receive compensation of £10,106.25.”

Avanti West Coast’s policy to repay 12.5 per cent of the cost of a return ticket when one leg is delayed by 15-29 minutes. But the figure is 1,000 times higher than the amount stipulated.

If paid, it would allow Mr Wareing to buy a round trip from Preston to London every week for more than two years.

He told The Independent: “As yet, I am still awaiting my compensation. It will be interesting to see how automated the process is or whether they have some human intervention to stop my windfall. I will of course be telling Avanti if they do pay up the £10k.”

But when the rail firm investigated at the request of The Independent, staff discovered that Mr Wareing had slipped up when completing the online form. Instead of entering the actual cost of the ticket, £80.85, he mistakenly tapped in £80,850.

The software is programmed to calculate the potential payout based on the length of the delay and what the passenger says they paid.

An Avanti West Coast spokesperson said: “This was an autogenerated response based on the figure the customer supplied as part of the delay repay process. The claim would be looked into and they would be paid the correct amount they are due as a result of the delay.”

Mr Wareing has yet to receive any compensation, but spoke warmly of Avanti West Coast: “On delay repay, I have always found it straightforward and reliable to claim and this is based on plenty of experience.

“To be fair to Avanti, I would say that 80-90 per cent of the delays we have had over the years have been due to Network Rail infrastructure issues and not Avanti themselves. But they just naturally get all the flak.

“Although the other two long-distance trains we have taken recently – in Uzbekistan, from Tashkent to Samarkand and then on to Bukhara in October – were both bang on time.”

The Uzbekistan Railways policy on late trains is different from that of Avanti West Coast. The state-run Central Asian rail firm issues refunds for heavily delayed trains only if the traveller decides to abandon the journey – but if “the passenger is intoxicated” they will not get their money back.

Read more: Will Great British Railways actually make any difference to my journey?