on the 11th of August this year I got the train from Glasgow Central to Chippenham, I may have mentioned this before of course. However, as we all know by now the train journey did not go to plan. I got chucked off the train at Stafford and had to find my own way to Chippenham, well with a lot of help from my friend Roseanne.

She was the one that told me that I could claim for a refund due to the delay that I endured, however the funny thing is that I was only about 10 mins later than the original time at Chippenham where I alighted.

When I got home, I applied via the website (19th Aug) and that was where the saga began. My first claim was rejected as it did not meet the criteria. I got an email from Sasha in customer service and she explained that I had filled the form out incorrectly and if I submit it once more then I should be ok because she confirmed that my train was running late.

I did as advised and once more my claim was rejected. I did another one and that too got refused. I emailed Sasha to give her an update and she asked me to submit another claim with a few amendments and if I had any more trouble she would assist me.

I was getting a wee bit pissed off by now as you can imagine, and guess what my fourth claim was refused. I emailed Sasha with a very short email saying that the AI Bots had once more refused my claim even although I had been told by Avanti that my train had been late. She asked me to give her a breakdown of my plan B trains and times if possible, to assist with the claim. Luckily, I still had the conversation on Messenger between Roseanne and myself with the trains she told me to take and so it was a relatively easy process to get the train times.

By this time I had lost all hope of a positive resolution but was merely going through the process to see what the outcome would be, was it going to be futile?

Now was I surprised today (30th Sep) when I got an email from the wonderful Sasha to tell me that my claim has been successful and I will get a 50% refund for my ticket because my train was delayed from 30 mins to 59 mins and this equates to a 50% refund. £69.03

It only took 6 weeks from my first interaction with Avanti and part of the reason I think for this crazy fiasco is that the claim website is not well designed. When you fill out the claim you need to put in the details of the train journey. On the first occasion I entered the amended journey that I was forced to take and of course this was wrong. So, then I entered my actual journey and was told that there had been no problem even although by now I had been told by Avanti that my train had been delayed. Go figure. There are only around 200 characters I believe where you can give an explanation which of course is not sufficient. So thankfully Sasha stepped in and I was able to explain in detail what had happened.

So there you go, persevere and you sometimes have a win.