Oyster cards in London

[WashAsDelicates]

We do not live in London, but visit from time to time, so 10-15y ago we bought an Oyster card for each member of the family. Our dc were all under 10 when we first bought the cards.

Are the Oyster cards the dc used still valid for them at 16+, or do they need to be replaced?

I can't find the answer on the TFL website, it just tells me to get Zip cards at £20 each.

You no longer need to use an Oyster card in London, you can use any contactless debit/credit card or phone with contactless.

If you still have balance on your Oyster card, it never expires according to this

tfl.gov.uk/travel-information/visiting-london/visitor-oyster-card#on-this-page-5

Did you buy zip (child) cards for your children before? If you did, and your children are now 16-18 then yes, you would need a 16+ zip card in order to take advantage of lower fares for them.

As you don't live in London, then you won't get free bus fares with the 16+ card. So, depending on how often you visit, the £20 cost of the card might outweigh the benefit of reduced bus/tube/overground fares.

If you just bought a standard oystercard for your children (and so were presumably paying adult fares for them all along?) then I think the cards you have should still be OK.

However, as a PP has said, you don't need an oystercard at all now, for anyone - you can just use a contactless debit/credit card (although you'd need to use a different card for each traveller).

We're going by train to London today. Can I just get an off-peak return to wherever is the outer limit of the Oyster card, and use our existing cards/credit cards for the rest of the journey, or should I get a ticket that combined with a day travelcard? Would the travelcard be off peak as well, in that case? In which case using our existing cards would be better.

The system is so complicated!

If you just bought a standard oystercard for your children (and so were presumably paying adult fares for them all along?) then I think the cards you have should still be OK.

I think that at the time we bought them there was a children's fare and only Londoner children needed an ID card to get the free travel which our dc weren't eligible for.

Ii think you would need a train ticket all the way in to wherever you get off in London. If you use a train ticket as far as the oyster boundary, and then try to tap out with a debit card or oystercard at the end, it will cause all sorts of charging problems!

Re: which ticket is best to buy - I'm afraid I have no idea. It is tricky when you are coming in from outside travelcard zones!

If you are just going to be travelling around central London, then you would probably only need zone 1 travel within London. I think oyster fares and the fare cap are generally cheaper than travelcard prices, though - the fare cap for zones 1 & 2 is £7.70 for an adult, whereas the cheapest one-day travel card is £14.40.

So it's probably cheaper to buy your train ticket and then use your oyster cards - but I would ask about options at the ticket office at your station and check the prices of a combined rail and travelcard price.

I think £7.70 is about the amount it costs to include a travel card in the off peak return ticket. But I'm not clear whether the travel card would also be off peak. That would be a problem. We intend to travel around in zones 1 and 2 during the day.

If your train ticket is the one day travelcard from your hometown to London it will include travel on all buses/tubes etc. It's all included in the one ticket.