Why every Londoner should have a Citymapper Pass, and why I’m getting rid of mine
Earlier this year, towards the end of February, I received an email from Citymapper offering me early bird access to their new product — an Oyster card rival designed especially for London. Having not signed up to a new fintech card in at least two weeks, I knew I had to get my hands on it.
At the time I lived in Fulham, and was commuting every day to and from work using at least 2 buses and a tube (grim I know). I was spending more and more of my income on travel and feeling more and more out of control. I wasn’t organised enough to buy a weekly oyster every week, but was finding that my travel, including at weekends, was averaging well above what I would have paid for a TfL travelcard.
On top of this, I was and still am a HUGE Citymapper fan. Other than Uber, I think there are few other apps I rely on so heavily and trust so much. Every journey I take in London I take based on Citymapper’s recommendation, so when I received the invite, I was extremely interested to learn more.
It was also quite cool to see a company and a product move from the digital into the physical. We are so used to companies going the other way that I was very interested in seeing what they had to offer. Now, after using it for around five months, I can safely say it hasn’t disappointed.
What does the Citymapper Pass offer?
At it’s core, the Pass is simply a pre-paid Mastercard, connected to your Citymapper account that acts as a replacement for your Oyster card. You manage the pass inside the Citymapper app like any other fintech-y card, and it gives you access to view your journeys and control the limited other features the card has. However, it was not the digital side of the product that interested me most, but the simple economic saving.
It costs £31 a week for the Super Pass which provides UNLIMITED zone 1–2 travel, a full £4 cheaper than the equivalent Oyster card. That includes all buses, underground, overground, DLR and rail, with pay as you go fares for the other zones. Whilst a £4 a week saving may not sound like much to get excited over, stacked up that equates to over £200 a year.
And if you want to upgrade to the Super Duper Pass, you can spend £39 a week which includes all of the above plus unlimited 30min Santander cycle trips and £10 of credit on Gett or Kapten. A pretty good deal if you ask me.
My experience using the Pass
My experience using the pass has been, so far, without fault. All management for the pass is done within the app, which keeps track of the journeys you have completed.
With any subscription service, there will become times when you want to pause your purchase, and Citymapper made this a core feature from the start. I was heading abroad within days of ordering my pass, and one of the first features released by the team was the ability to pause and restart subscriptions on a week-by-week basis. Whilst your card is frozen you still get charged a £2 a week fee to keep the account active, which I thought was a little annoying, but on the whole was a really solid. Only being able to pause the card one week at a time also proved occasionally frustrating, as when I went abroad for a few weeks this summer, I had to set a reminder to re-pause the pass after the first week, as there was no option for multi-week pausing at the time.
Other features coming soon include accruing Citymapper points for using the card, which can be redeemed for cab journeys (sick), as well as Apple Pay integration. I think this last one will be huge — the way that TfL currently deals with Apple Pay is to treat your virtual and physical cards as separate cards, so if you tap in with your virtual card, and tap out with your physical card (if for example your phone dies mid tube journey), you get charged twice. Citymapper promise to fix this, which would be huge.
And lastly, the customer support was unreal. I had a few issues at the beginning with freezing my account and being unable to log into my account, and the support team from Citymapper were possibly the best team I’ve ever interacted with in any app ever. And I mean that. Often I received replies to my questions within 10 minutes over email, and every time they were able to solve my problem immediately. I know it’s not something we often think about when we think of what makes a good product, but it was very reassuring knowing that they were on it.
So why did I cancel my card?
But, despite all this, I cancelled my card last week. And for one simple reason — I can now walk to and from work everyday.
As I mentioned earlier, the biggest reason I applied for the card was to save a bit of cash every week, and as I’m now walking to work most days, I never spend £31s worth of travel a week. I could pause the card until October, or when the weather gets bad, I don’t want to pay £2 a week for nothing…
Despite that, I know full well that when the weather turns I will be reapplying for my card right away. For the money alone it’s worth it, but the added benefits, combined with the new features in the pipeline make it a worthy addition to any Londoners wallet. If you live and commute into zones 1 and 2 everyday, the Citymapper pass is a must.
