Booked a journey online and changed your mind? It’s easy to get your money back on most bookings.
Plans can change, and it’s fine to change your mind – and we’ll give you a full refund when you do.
If you buy paper tickets online but don’t collect them, you can just login to your account and request a refund and we’ll give you your money back. You don’t need to give us any reason or tell us why you’ve changed your mind.
We’ll refund you using the same payment method you used to buy your paper tickets, and we aim to process all refunds within ten working days.
You’re covered by the money back guarantee if you buy any of these as paper tickets from us online:
This includes paper tickets for children and discounted railcard tickets.
It covers paper tickets on Great Northern, Thameslink, Gatwick Express, Southern and other trains.
When you make your booking, make sure you choose the option to collect paper tickets from the station (‘ticket on departure’).
This means paper tickets won’t be issued until you collect them – so if you can’t travel for any reason, we can easily refund you.
If you chose to collect your paper tickets at the station but didn’t pick them up, all you need to do is login to your online account and apply for a refund under Orders & Refunds and we'll give you your money back.
You have 28 days to ask for a refund after the expiry date on your ticket.
The way we refund you will be based on how you paid. For instance, if you paid by card, we’ll refund the money to the same account.
You can ask for refunds on as many tickets as you like, but if they’re all on the same booking we can’t separate them for the purposes of issuing refunds.
So if you don’t know whether you’ll need all your tickets, you can book each part of your trip separately. This means you can collect only the tickets you need and the rest will still be covered by the money-back guarantee.
If you can’t use the money back guarantee you can still ask for a refund, but you may have to pay a £10 administration fee.
The guarantee doesn’t cover:
And you won’t be covered if you:
Find out more about asking for a refund.
1. This offer is valid for tickets booked on southernrailway.com for any journey and for travel on any train operator, for the following ticket types:
The money back guarantee does not apply to any tickets purchased as eTickets or on The Key Smartcard.
2. Other ticket types are not included in this offer. Other ticket types include: DaySave, Season Tickets and Advance tickets
3. The guarantee also applies to Child tickets, Railcard discounted tickets, and any other discounted tickets, subject to the terms and conditions of the Railcard or discount offered
4. This offer is only valid for paper tickets purchased online at southernrailway.com with ‘Ticket on Departure’ as the delivery option, and the tickets have not been collected. We therefore advise you not to collect your tickets until you are certain you wish to use them
5. If you wish to book tickets for multiple trips in a single transaction on southernrailway.com, we advise that in order for your tickets to qualify for the money back guarantee, that you book the tickets you need for each trip in separate transactions. Otherwise, when you collect your tickets from the machine in the station for your first trip, it will give you all the tickets for all the journeys you booked so invalidating them for the money back guarantee
6. To apply for a refund of your ticket please view our refund pages
If you do collect your paper tickets from a Ticket On Departure or Ticket Vending Machine at the station, then standard refund rules will apply and you will be charged the normal £10 refund administrative fee per booking. Advance tickets are not refundable
7. All refund requests under the money back guarantee should be made within 28 days of the expiry date of the ticket
8. There is no limit to the number of times you can apply for a refund under the money back guarantee so long as the tickets you bought online via southernrailway.com are Anytime, Anytime Day, Off-Peak, Off-Peak Day, or Super Off-Peak Day tickets
9. We aim to process all refunds within 10 working days. All refunds have to be processed back to customers according to the original payment method. If you purchased your ticket using a debit/credit card, a member of the Refunds team will contact you by telephone to obtain your card details in order to process the refund