Following the announcement of lockdown in England from 5 November to 2 December, and anticipating changes to your normal operations, we are putting measures in place to help you best serve your customers.
There are a number of actions you may wish to consider implementing, intended to help your customers quickly find the information they need, reduce their financial losses and ensure your platforms are reflective of the increased travel restrictions coming into place.
There are two optional steps we’ve put in place for Premium apps and websites to help you support your customers during the lockdown:
- Pausing Activated Tickets
- Temporary removal of “Things to Do” and “Rewards” listings
Please read the following carefully and confirm how you would like to proceed. We will not action anything without hearing from you.
1) Pausing Activated Tickets
Pause all active flexible mobile tickets with a total validity of more than 7-days from 5 November.
Tickets meeting all the following criteria will be paused:
- Flexible validity (i.e. not “fixed date”)
- Have a total validity of greater than 1 week
- Currently active
- Have at least 1 day remaining
When paused, tickets will show in apps as “activate to travel” and include “part used” in the title.
Users can activate them immediately (such as for key workers) or at a later date. When activated, they will have an expiry date based on the balance remaining when paused (e.g. a 30-day ticket paused with 20 days remaining will expire 20 days after it is activated again).
All long period tickets will show as inactive, so people still travelling will need to activate their ticket to be able to use it again. Unfortunately, we’re not able to email all customers or display a different message in the app. This process won’t cover fixed date tickets (such as term tickets) either.
Here’s some copy you can share with your users:
IMPORTANT – PAUSING MOBILE TICKETS
Many of you have mobile tickets that you are now unable to use to travel with us during the November lockdown. At this challenging time for us all, we want to make sure you don’t lose the travel you have already paid for.
From [date, time], we will pause all active monthly mobile tickets with more than a day remaining. You can choose when to begin travelling with us again.
We understand that our services continue to be critical to many of you who are key workers and are caring for others. You can simply re-activate your mobile ticket to continue to travel. As usual, you’ll need an internet connection to do this. Once re-activated, you won’t be able to pause a second time. Part-used tickets will show as “part used” in the app and when activated, will be valid for the same number of days and hours that were remaining when it was paused.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us in the normal way. We will continue to support you in any way we can. Stay safe.
2) Temporary removal of “Things to Do” and “Rewards” listings
You can temporarily remove “Things to Do” content from both apps and websites, and “Rewards” content from apps (if you have this feature enabled).
On websites, we will hide the “Things to Do” content from navigation but not from the website itself, so that any SEO strategies are not negatively affected for future traffic via search engines.
We will not hide this content without clear confirmation from you.
We continue to closely monitor the situation and will contact you with any further updates. If you have any questions for us, just get in touch.