[https://tidbits.com/2018/06/15/uk-travel-tips-giffgaff-for-cellular-and-apple-pay-for-transit/](UK Travel Tips: Giffgaff for Cellular and Apple Pay for Transit)
Apple Pay for Transit
The challenge of driving on the opposite side of the road was one thing when we were out on the motorways and around Stratford-Upon-Avon, but driving in London was insane, what with the traffic, squirrely little roads, trying to match Google Maps directions with difficult to find street signs, and more. We were happy to return our rental car right after arriving and planned to use London's famed public transit system-the London Tube!-for the rest of the trip.
Relying on public transit systems as a tourist is often quite stressful, between the confusion of trying to figure out routes and figuring out the local payment systems and policies. Luckily, both Google Maps and Apple's Maps did a good job of providing detailed directions that included walking routes when switching from a bus to the Tube, for instance. But payments were still a worry because there are all sorts of variables based on zones, time of day, age, and more.
The advice we'd been given by tech-savvy friends who had been to London recently was to just use Apple Pay. When you do that, TfL's system tracks your usage throughout the day and charges you the lowest appropriate fare-taking into account daily caps that make the final amounts cheaper than day or week passes. (An alternative would have been to buy one of TfL's contactless Oyster cards, add money to it, and then get it refunded when we left the country. Our friends did that for their young children, who didn't have iPhones. Also, we could have used contactless credit cards, which are still rare in the US, if we'd had them.)
The physical process of paying with Apple Pay is brilliant-most of the time. There's a yellow payment pad on gates in the Tube stations and at the front of buses. You invoke Apple Pay, authenticate, and then touch your device to the pad. (You're supposed to be able to touch your device to the pad to invoke Apple Pay and then authenticate, but that didn't work the one time I tried it.) The gates then open, or a light turns green, indicating you can proceed. For the Tube, you have to touch in when you enter the station and touch out when you leave; for buses, you just touch in when you board and don't need to touch out.
If you want to use Apple Pay for public transit in London, there are a few quirks to keep in mind:
• Use a supported credit card. Our debit cards from our local credit union had no currency conversion fees, so we thought we'd use them with Apple Pay. However, it turned out that US debit cards generally aren't accepted in the UK, so we had to set Apple Pay to use a different credit card. Make sure you have a few credit cards loaded into Apple Pay to be safe.
• Use the same device each time. To avoid higher fares for seemingly incomplete journeys and to take advantage of the daily capping, you have to touch in and touch out with the same device for all your trips in a day. In other words, settle on your iPhone or your Apple Watch, and don't switch. We only used our iPhones because I've had more trouble in general with Apple Pay payments registering from the Apple Watch. (Although I'm sad that I didn't try it one day when we had little travel planned.)
• Be patient and try again if necessary. We had a non-trivial number of failures, where Tristan and I would get through the gates, for instance, but the system would reject Tonya's payment. Some of that was user error, as we all figured out how to use Apple Pay more fluidly, but other failures had no obvious cause. It might have been related to all three of us using the same credit card in too quick succession, but sometimes everything worked as expected. Apart from suffering dirty looks from other commuters who we were blocking, there was no problem with waiting briefly or trying another gate-it always worked in the end.
Regular readers know I enjoy a good contactless payment travel story. While not as frictionless as the Japan system(s), this seems workable for a visit.