This email includes three optional steps we’ve put in place to help you deliver services to your customers during the Coronavirus health emergency:

• Ability to Pause Activated Tickets
• Temporary removal of “Things to Do” and “Rewards” listings
• Network Alert and current information

Please read the following carefully and confirm how you would like to proceed. We will not action anything without clear confirmation from you. 

Ability to Pause Activated Tickets

We are currently adding support to pause all active flexible mobile tickets with a total validity of more than 7 days. 

We are taking these steps in response to our conversations with you and following an increase in customer requests for ticket refunds, which is placing an increased workload on your Customer Support staff.

We are working on this right now and expect this to be available this week.  

If you would like to take advantage of this development, please get in touch by 26th March 2020 and let us know when you would like us to do it. 

Here’s the whole process and impact…

On a day, agreed by Passenger and yourself, Passenger would initiate the “active ticket pause” process. When this happens, all 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 these tickets are paused, they will show in apps as “activate to travel” and include “part used” in the title.

Users will be able to activate them again when they want, as normal, either immediately (such as for key workers) or at a later date. When activated, they will have an expiry date based on the remaining balance at the time they were paused. For example, a 30 day ticket that is paused when it has 20 days remaining will expire 20 days after it is later activated again.

This would mean that all long period tickets would show as inactive, so people still using buses would 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 that we hope will be useful in communicating with your passengers:

IMPORTANT – PAUSING MOBILE TICKETS

Many of you have bought mobile tickets with us that you are now unable to use to travel with us because of the COVID-19 health emergency. 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 be pausing all active monthly mobile tickets with more than a day remaining so that you can choose when to begin using your travel again with us.

We understand that our services continue to be critical to many of you who are key workers and are caring for others. As such, you should simply re-activate your mobile ticket to continue to travel. As usual, you’ll need an internet connection to do this and once restarted you won’t be able to pause the travel for a second time. Part used tickets will show as “part used” in the app and when activated, they will be valid for the same number of days and hours that were remaining when it was paused.

We have been working hard to make this happen for you and to do it in a way that helps as many of our customers as possible in the fastest way possible. 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. 

Temporary removal of “Things to Do” and “Rewards” listings

Given that it may not seem appropriate to be promoting events and attractions at this time, we have the option to 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 propose to hide the “Things to Do” content from navigation but not from the website itself, so that any search engine optimization strategies are not negatively affected for future traffic via search engines. 

We will not hide this content without clear confirmation from you.

Displaying Network Alerts on every page of the website

We have released an update that displays current Network Alerts on every page of operator websites.

If you fill out the ‘Link’ field when editing the Network Alert, it will be included in the ‘Show details’ link on the website.

If multiple Network Alerts are published, users will be directed to your Service Updates page.For more information see our Network Alert update posted on 16th March 2020.