BREAKING NEWS
Consumer NZ (formerly the Consumers Institute) is adamant that the new Snapper card replacing 10-trip tickets on Go Wellington buses is covered by the Consumer Guarantees Act, as I had thought.
Many passengers trying to use Snapper on Go Wellington buses have been told by the driver they have to pay cash when the bus either doesn’t have a Snapper reader or the reader rejects their card.
NZ Bus CEO Bruce Emson tried to claim Snapper was not covered by the act and said if anyone had a problem with Snapper on a bus, passengers needed to take that up with Snapper Services, the company responsible for the card.
“Snapper is not a bus ticket,” Bruce Emson told me last week. “It is a method of payment we accept on the bus to pay for a bus fare. It is Snapper Services who provide the Snapper system which is a payment system used for various types of transactions, including bus fares. Snapper Services is responsible for the performance of that payment system and any issues experienced with Snapper cards should be taken up with Snapper Services directly.”
Sorry Bruce. The problem for you is that Snapper Services, NZ Bus and Go Wellington are all part of the same company, Infratil.
I contacted Consumer NZ saying I thought NZ Bus was being disingenuous and they agreed.
“Absolutely it’s covered by the Consumer Guarantees Act,” Paul from Consumer NZ told me today. “The reply from Bruce Emson is as you say disingenuous and absurd. They are the same company. Here they have introduced a new product and when something goes wrong they don’t want to know. They can’t do that.”
The Consumer Guarantees Act requires that goods and services be fit for their advertised purpose. Go Wellington is marketing Snapper as the better, cashless replacement for the 10-trip ticket.
Paul says drivers are required by the act to let passengers with a Snapper card ride the bus. He says he is forwarding the issue to the editorial staff of Consumer magazine for a possible article.
The ad for Snapper in my bus home tonight proclaimed it to be “Just the ticket!” In the face of his own advertising, how can Bruce Emson claim Snapper is not a bus ticket? If the Snapper equipment on a bus is not turned on or will not accept a Snapper card that has enough cash on it to pay the fare (or if the bus does not even have a Snapper terminal, and some still don’t), that is the company’s problem, not the passenger’s. The bus company wants passengers to pay by Snapper. It thus has to accept Snapper even if there is some fault with the technology.
I remain astonished that a great Wellington company like Infratil can introduce an internationally proven technology like Snapper in such a careless way.
21 Comments
August 12, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Interesting. Transport for London is terminating its £100m contract with Transys, the supplier consortium which manages the Oyster card.
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/08/11/231787/100m-oyster-contract-terminated.htm
August 12, 2008 at 11:09 pm
As I noted in an earlier post, my email to info@snapper.co.nz ended up being replied to by a person with an @nzbus.co.nz email.
But she seemed confused by Snapper’s pricing and acted as if they were a totally different company that she was unable to have any contact with. It was up to me to check things out with Snapper myself (but I thought that’s what I was doing… )
I’m surprised at how poor Infratil’s customer service has turned how to be.
August 13, 2008 at 7:31 am
And I noticed that the ad on the bus says something along the lines of “no coins, no clipping etc”
August 13, 2008 at 8:01 am
Good story!!!
And it’s pretty rank the company CEO trying to claim they’re not covered by the Consumer Guarantees Act.
I can understand (but not condone) frontline staff thinking that.
But the CEO should have damn well known.
August 13, 2008 at 10:37 am
I saw something funny on the bus this morning.
Standing near me was a man clutching his Snapper card. It was still in the little plastic sleeve they’re sold in, along with the instruction guide that comes with it.
Now, the instruction guide has a bar code on one side of it, which retailers use when they’re selling Snapper cards.
When the man came to tag off, he purposefully positioned his Snapper card with the bar code facing the Snapper reader. He held it about 2 cm away from the surface and moved it across the surface, just how you’d use a bar-code reader in a supermarket.
Of course, the Snapper reader beeped and gave him the green O, confirming for him that this was the correct way to tag-off.
No doubt he’ll keep thinking that the Snapper reading is “reading” the barcode.
August 13, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Hang on, what you are saying is the equivalent of : if a shop offers eftpos as a payment method and I go to pay using eftpos and the machine breaks down, then I effectively should get the goods for free.
That is plainly absurd and I suspect there is well established law around this. Are businesses obliged to accept any form of payment, even if they say they do, except for cash?
Emson is saying that the snapper service is an option only and your contract is with the snapper service provider. If you have a snapper problem that does not convey any rights to cardholders for use of buses.
August 13, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Snapper is being marketed as a cashless bus ticket. Look at the ads for it. No clips, no coins, the signs say. If all you have is a Snapper card (and the bus company’s ads say that is all you need), the bus company is contracted to carry you with that card. It is not your fault if there is a problem with the card reader.
The “snapper service provider” is one and the same as the bus company. They are both Infratil.
Go Wellington can’t contract out of the Consumer Guarantees Act by saying its bus tickets are managed by another subsidiary of the company that owns the bus. That would be bizarre.
Eftpos has nothing to do with it.
August 13, 2008 at 1:38 pm
poneke I think that you are being oversimplistic. If the snapper system is owned by a separate company, it doesn’t matter about common ownership as long as they maintain corporate separateness. That’s the point of limited liability. Infratil own power companies too. Does that mean they are liable when your lights go out? Of course not.
Just because you make a legal connection in your own mind doesn’t mean there is one in reality. And if Consumer believes that, then they need to take a hard look at the advice they are giving out(though I suspect it was not a fully thought out view in trying to be helpful).
Eftpos has everything to do with this because NZB are saying snapper is payment system – it’s multi use I understand and so is a competitor to eftpos, so you can’t get much more relevant. A failure confers no more rights to consumers than the failure of eftpos does to me when I go to the post office to pay my car registration.
Just as I don’t get my registration free, you don’t necessarily get a free ride. That said, doesn’t Emson say if the reader fails, you get your ride free?
It seems the big issue here is that the reason for failure is not known at the point of failure because of poor system design. It’s ridiculous that a basic piece of information like ‘insufficient funds’ wasn’t showing at roll out, given they do that on the stored value cards they offer on the Hutt buses.
They may or may not have an issue with the advertising – it depends on the level of ‘promise’ they are making I suspect. Courts have regulalry accepted that ads are often hyperbolic and simplistic so do not necessarily bind parties. I’ve not seen them so don’t know whether your interpretation of them is correct.
August 13, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Insider…..
If you use eftpos….. the money goes from your account to the retailers account at the time of the transaction…. and if the service fails, you still have all your money.
The snapper card is a “store” of money…. you have to put your money in it first….. so if the bus cant take the money out of it (after they invited you to store it there first) then that should be their problem, not yours.
Imagine you’d bought a cardboard 10-ride ticket and the bus driver made you pay cash because he couldnt find his clipper today!
August 13, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Fletcher
You still have your money with snapper if it fails don’t you?
The point about your clipper might hold if snapper was a ‘bus ticket’. But it isn’t afaik – it’s a multipurpose way of buying things, one of which is bus rides. So in my reading it’s more electronic ‘cash’ than a 10 trip. I don’t know if that is the way it is being sold.
August 13, 2008 at 3:55 pm
You still have your money with snapper if it fails don’t you? The point about your clipper might hold if snapper was a ‘bus ticket’.
I don’t want a flame war over this as obviously nothing will change your view and you are clearly not a Go Wellington bus user, but the bus company is advertising Snapper as a bus ticket to replace both cash and 10-trip tickets. The ads are in every bus and on every third bus shelter. They prominently say “no coins, no clips.” They even say “Just the ticket!”
Snapper is a bus ticket to replace cash and 10-trip tickets (and the monthly Gold Pass from early next year) and is being heavily marketed as such by the bus company. Not just on buses and at stops but in full-page newspaper ads. There is nothing about any other company in these marketing campaigns, not even in small print. These are Go Wellington bus tickets and are so being marketed.
The fact Snapper’s stored value feature can be used for other purposes does not detract from the fact it is being introduced and marketed as a bus ticket. A bus ticket. A bus ticket that replaces cash and 10-trip cards.
If I am sold a bus ticket like this (and salespeople ride many buses asking passengers to buy it) and I am told it is to replace cash and 10-trip tickets, then I do not expect that I have to pay cash if the ticket machine on the bus is not working.
I never carry cash when going to and from work. I expect my bus ticket, paid for in advance, to be accepted by the driver, as it always has been in all the years I have used the buses, or else to be carried at no extra charge if for some reason not my fault, the ticket machine isn’t working on my bus this trip.
The Consumer Guarantees Act clearly applies in this case. Read it.
August 13, 2008 at 4:04 pm
“Snapper is not a bus ticket,” Bruce Emson told me last week. “It is a method of payment we accept on the bus to pay for a bus fare.
While I have a lot of time for the introduction of the Snapper Card, I think there are also a lot of issues if one accepts Bruce Emson’s position that it is only a method of patyment, not also a bus ticket. The current 10-trip bus ticket is a discounted bus ticket and so Go Wellington is essentially saying they are withdrawing 10-trip discount tickets and the only way regular users can save money is to pay for a standard ticket using the Snapper Card for payment.
Firstly, there may well be issues in respect to the bus company fulfilling their obligations under their service contract with GWRC. In particular, contracted (i.e. subsidised) the bus services must be provided using the Metlink Zone fare system. Unlike rail, it is unclear to me if there is a direct requirement to provide a discounted form of the ticket to regular commuters under the GWRC contract (there is an oblogation to provide consession tickets to the elderly and children).
Secondly, if the Snapper is not a ticket, then users receiving a discount simply due to the payment method may run into anti-competition issues with the Commerce Commission. I believe there are limits to the extent to which goods can be advertised on one price but the sold at a lower than cash price based on the use of a specific payment method. This means, for example, that Farmers can hold “Card Holders Nights” at the beginnings of sales but cannot sell a product advertised for $100 for $90 simply because the consumer makes the purchase using a Farmers Card.
Finally (I have to stop somewhere
the use of the information for transport purposes from a Snapper Card that is not a ticket could also be restricted by the Privacy Act and other legislation. The former has Principle Ten:
An agency that holds personal information that was obtained in connection with one purpose shall not use the information for any other purpose unless the agency believes, on reasonable grounds
a) . . .
(e) That the purpose for which the information is used is directly related to the purpose in connection with which the information was obtained; or
(f) That the information … Is used in a form in which the individual concerned is not identified; or …
You can see that, under (e) IF the Snapper is a ticket, then the tag on/off information IS permitted to be matched for transport management but is the Snapper is just a cash card, then it’s use could be much more restricted (possibly permitted under (f)).
August 13, 2008 at 5:01 pm
poneke
I didn’t know someone disagreeing with you is classed as a flame war.
If it is a bus ticket, then can I use snapper on buses without a snapper reader or do I get a free ride? If not, why not?
I’ve read their website, the PR sourced DomPost stories on snapper and their brochure and nowhere does it say ’snapper is replacing 10 trips’ or ’snapper is a bus ticket’. In fact I think they are very careful to avoid saying exactly that and promote it as much more – (happy to accept their temporary sales people might not have been so careful). I find it hard to believe you could have missed that. Are you sure you are not reading into it what you want to read?
To say that using a ‘ticket’ pun in an advertisement conveys that meaning onto the card is stretching things. As does no cash, no clips, given that cash is still being accepted.
It seems your interpretation of it as a replacement ticket is not one they are actually making in their brochures and website and PR. To quote you “smart cards like Snapper are much better and far more versatile than a 10-trip ticket. They can do everything a 10-trip can do and much much much more.”
Tony
I don;t think there is anything in competition law preventing preferential treatment based on payment method. In fact the opposite. There have been successful competition law cases overseas against visa to prevent them forcing merchants to offer the same price to visa card purchasers (via the merchant contract) even though it costs the retailer more to process those transactions. ie equaliseing prices was seen as anti compeititve. There was a similar case planned in NZ.
August 13, 2008 at 7:15 pm
insider,
The bus company told me
a) I don’t need to carry cash (”No coins, no clippings, no queues” )
and
b) That if I buy a Snapper (it costs money to buy one) then I can have cheap bus fares.
For them to demand I carry cash as well as a Snapper seems a little unreasonable. For them to deny me the discounted fares seems utterly unreasonable.
[Poneke adds: On a bus shelter near me, the Go Wellington ad for Snapper that says: "Saves cash, saves having to carry any." ]
August 14, 2008 at 12:29 pm
So are we to conclude that is purely coincidence that the planned withdrawal of the 10-trip cards has no relation to the introdution of the Snapper cards? Or that the 25% discount fares bought with a Snapper just coincidentally happens to be higher than the 20% discount on the 10-trip ticket.
I say the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing.
In other news, my Snapper transactions are taking me on a magical mystery tour of Wellington. In addition to last week’s visit to the Holy Cross Church in Miramar, Snapper has just declared that yesterday morning, instead of going to work, I went to… Hataitai School.
August 14, 2008 at 12:41 pm
To add to Robyn’s comment, NZ Bus has very publicly confirmed that Snapper replaces the 10-trip ticket from the end of this month. Bruce Emson first publicly confirmed this on July 22 on this blog:
http://poneke.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/snaps/
And then put a statement on the Go Wellington website:
http://www.gowellingtonbus.co.nz/gowellington-bus-snapper-card
Snapper has just declared that yesterday morning, instead of going to work, I went to… Hataitai School.
That is the No 5 trolley bus route, which has the oldest wires hanging above any trolley route. They are getting very thin after almost 60 years of use!
August 19, 2008 at 10:07 pm
[...] a Newlands bus has still to resort to searching for cash. Poneke has covered this further in his column, and thankfully reports that the Snapper system does not run on Windows Vista: its Linux of course, [...]
August 20, 2008 at 10:10 am
anita/robyn
Saying you don’t need to carry cash if your snapper is charged is not “demanding” you carry it. It is a statement of fact. Carrying cash is an exercise in risk managment, just like ensuring you had a spare clip on your 10 trip before you got on the bus.
It is common practice to give a discount for effectively prepaying as you do with snapper. Nothing unusual or unfair about it. Was it unfair with 10 trips or monthly passes that they were cheaper than cash fares?
Replacement does not always mean the substitution of like with like, it can mean much more.
To quote poneke “smart cards like Snapper are much better and far more versatile than a 10-trip ticket. They can do everything a 10-trip can do and much much much more.”
The automobile replaced the horse and cart, the transistor replaced the valve, digital is replacing analogue. All do a similar job, but they don’t do them exactly the same way.
It seems almost obstinately naive to expect a new technology to behave exactly the same as an old.Next you’ll be complaining your wireless doesn’t take 1o minutes to warm up anymore and the car doesn’t control the grass length like the old version did.
[Poneke says: The issue is simple. Snapper is being sold to bus passengers as a bus ticket, and passengers should expect the technology to work. When it does not, they should not be expected to pay in cash. The more so as much of the advertising expressly says there is no more need to carry cash. End of story.]
August 20, 2008 at 12:55 pm
I agree that if the technology is not working they shouldn’t have to pay. The Go Wgtn guy said in his note to you that that was their policy. No-one is disputing that so it’s a red herring.
The advertising I have seen says words along the lines of “it’s the new way to pay your fare” “pay your fare with snapper” – that is clearly not selling it as a ticket and Emson was very clear on that in his note to you. Yup, overenthusiastic or badly trained salespeople might have given you the wrong impression – that stuff does happen in all sorts of business and is not right, but that doesn’t appear to have been the company’s intent, as your own references show.
In your link above to the gowgtn website you appear to have missed this banner headline:
“We’re making changes to the way you pay for your bus fare. ” and
“Q. What is Snapper?
Snapper is a faster, simpler and easier way to pay your bus fare.”
Pretty clear it is talking about payment not ticketing.
August 20, 2008 at 5:56 pm
You know, I might agree with you, were they not advertising this product as if it’s not only functionally equivalent to a ticket, but in fact even better.
If they want Snapper to be treated like a method of payment, they need to stop advertising it like it’s an electronic ticketing system. End of story.
September 15, 2008 at 11:55 am
The recently announced 25% discount does NOT apply to the inner City service i.e. from the Railway Station to Courtenay Place, when queried with Snapper, their response was ‘read the pamphlet’ as they do not have space on the advertising hoarding to advise this condition!
[Poneke says: The fare for that section is only $1 and has been the same since 1992. It's not something that concerns me. They have said from the start of Snapper that there is no discount on that fare.]