Train delay claim tools, and which of them still exist

The tool people search for has closed

Delay Repay Sniper was the best known of the services that claimed on your behalf, and it is gone. Companies House records DELAY REPAY SNIPER LIMITED, company number 08653481, as dissolved on 19 July 2024. Its old address, delayrepaysniper.com, now redirects to an unrelated hotel booking site, which is what happens when a domain lapses and somebody else picks it up.

Delay Repay Genie, which ran as part of Tracsis, has closed as well. Between them, those two are the subject of most of the set-it-and-forget-it advice still sitting on forums and in articles nobody has revisited.

So if you came here looking for a Delay Repay Sniper alternative, the honest answer is that nothing has replaced it in the same shape. What exists instead is a smaller and odder set of things, and the difference between them is worth twenty minutes of your attention, because one of those differences decides whether the money reaches you at all.

Automatic payment versus one click

Several operators advertise an automatic or automated Delay Repay scheme. Read the wording on their own pages and most of them are describing something else: the operator notices the delay, fills the claim in for you, and then emails you to confirm before anything is paid. Miss the email and nothing arrives.

As of August 2026, c2c is the only operator on the network that pays with no action from you after the initial setup. Its own page says it will “automatically credit your account with an eVoucher for the amount of compensation assigned to the delay”. You need a c2c Smartcard with the ticket loaded, an active online account, and you have to tap in and out. It also pays 3p a minute from the second minute on delays of 2 to 14 minutes, which is below the point every other scheme starts at. The money arrives as a monthly eVoucher and can be taken as cash once it is above £5.

The practical consequence is small and annoying. On three of the four schemes above, a claim sits waiting in an inbox until you act on it, and the confirmation email looks exactly like every other automated message an operator sends. If you are on one of those schemes, the thing to watch for is not the delay. It is the email afterwards.

Claiming direct, in full

None of this is necessary. The direct route is free, it is the same money, and it is the route every tool above eventually hands you back to.

The first thing to establish is your operator’s entry threshold, because it is not uniform and this is the fact most often got wrong. Most operators pay from 15 minutes of delay. CrossCountry, LNER and ScotRail start at 30 minutes and have no 15 to 29 minute band at all, so a 20 minute delay on those three is worth nothing. National Rail does not publish a single table for this; it says each train company has its own compensation threshold and points you at the individual charters.

Then the claim itself. You need the date of travel, the scheduled and actual times, the booking reference or a photo of the ticket, and the account you want the money paid into. Every operator takes this through its own online form. There is no central portal, and you claim from the operator named on the ticket even if you bought it through a retailer.

Twenty-eight days from the date of travel is the usual window, and it is the reason most claims are never made: nothing reminds you, and by the time you think of it the journey is out of scope.

The operator is on a clock too. The Office of Rail and Road requires delay compensation claims to be closed within 20 working days, and in 2024 to 2025 operators closed 99.1% of them inside that window, with 81.6% approved. Across rail periods 8 to 10, in the winter of 2025 to 2026, operators closed 2.6 million Delay Repay claims, up 13% on the same period a year earlier. Claims do get paid. The failure point is almost always that nobody asked.

The other money people miss

Delay Repay is one of three ways a delayed or cancelled journey puts money back in your pocket, and the other two changed recently enough that most advice online still describes the old rules.

If you decide not to travel because the train you were going to catch is delayed or cancelled, the ticket is refundable in full, with no admin fee, direct from whoever sold it to you. That is a refund rather than compensation, and you use the refund form rather than the Delay Repay one.

If you cancel for any other reason, you can get a refund up to 23:59 the day before the ticket becomes valid, and the retailer may charge an admin fee of up to £5 per ticket. That cap was £10 until 1 April 2026, when a review by the Office of Rail and Road halved it.

The same date brought a change in the other direction. From 1 April 2026, Anytime, Off-Peak, Day Travelcard and most Ranger and Rover tickets are no longer refundable on the day they become valid. The cut-off moves back to 23:59 the day before. Advance tickets and season tickets are unaffected, and refunds for disruption or genuinely exceptional circumstances, a medical emergency for instance, are preserved.

Season tickets are the one most people get wrong, because the refund is not pro rata. On a standard season ticket, the calculation is the price you paid, minus the equivalent weekly price for every week you have used, minus an admin fee. The multi-week discount baked into a long season is what makes this bite: the longer you hold it, the faster the refundable value falls away, and it reaches nothing well before the ticket expires. On a Flexi Season, the deduction is the cost of an Anytime Return for each day you actually travelled, again minus an admin fee. Apply through whoever sold it to you, or the train operator if you bought it at a station.

The tools that exist now

With the two best-known services gone, the field is thinner than the search results suggest. Here is everything we could confirm was live in August 2026.

Notice what is missing from that table: anything that watches every journey you take, across every operator, and claims without being asked. We went looking for one in August 2026 and could not find it. Outside c2c’s own smartcard, anything advertised that way turned out to be one of the confirm-first schemes above.

On whether paying a percentage is ever worth it, we have written the arithmetic out separately in do you need a claims company for Delay Repay. The short version is that a percentage of a fixed statutory flight payout is a business, and a percentage of half a £12 fare is not.

Why so few people claim

In the most recent wave of Rail Delays and Compensation, the research the Department for Transport runs with Transport Focus, 45% of passengers who were eligible for compensation actually claimed it. That is down from a peak of 47% in the previous wave, and it is the first fall after nine consecutive years of increases from a base of 35% in 2016. Fieldwork was carried out in early 2025 with around 11,000 respondents per wave, and the figure sits in Table 4.1 of the May 2025 report.

The breakdown is where it gets useful. Passengers holding paper barcode tickets claim at 70%, the highest of any group, because they have a booking reference and a form that expects one. Commuters in London and the South East fell to 43%, a statistically significant four point drop. Regional passengers sit at 35%.

And people paying by contactless or pay as you go claim at 23%, down from 35% in the previous wave. That is the lowest rate of any group and the sharpest fall in the data. The reason is not mysterious. Pay as you go has no booking, no confirmation email and no reference number, so there is nothing to remind you the journey happened, and nothing to paste into the form. The more frictionless the ticket, the less likely the compensation is ever collected.

When the operator says no

If a claim is refused and you think that is wrong, the escalation is the Rail Ombudsman, and it costs you nothing. It is funded by the industry it has jurisdiction over, so the service is free to passengers.

Two different clocks get confused here, so it is worth separating them.

• Twenty working days is what the Office of Rail and Road requires of the operator: that is the window in which a delay compensation claim has to be closed, and it is the number our per-operator pages quote for how long a claim should take.
• Forty working days, roughly eight weeks, is how long you have to give the operator after complaining before the Rail Ombudsman will take the case. You can go sooner only if the operator has already told you it will do no more. The Ombudsman then aims, without guaranteeing, to complete an accepted case within another 40 working days.

The Ombudsman covers train and station operators in England, Wales and Scotland: delays, cancellations, ticket refunds, customer service, station facilities, on-board amenities and accessibility. It cannot take complaints about public policy, strikes or industry regulation, and it cannot handle a claim worth more than £2,500. For a Delay Repay dispute that ceiling is rarely the problem.

How Untap helps

Untap reads the booking confirmations you forward to it, checks each journey against live National Rail delay data, and tells you which ones qualify while there is still time to claim. It is the remembering part, which is the part the 45% figure is really about.

We do not file the claim for you and we take no percentage of what you get back. You need to sign in, and the claim itself stays yours to make on your operator’s form. If flights are also part of your year, the same reading happens for UK261.

Sources

• Companies House, DELAY REPAY SNIPER LIMITED, company number 08653481, dissolved 19 July 2024.
• c2c, Automatic Delay Repay.
• Great Western Railway, Automated Delay Repay.
• National Rail, Compensation and refunds and the refund rules changing on 1 April 2026.
• National Rail, Season Tickets terms and conditions.
• Office of Rail and Road, review cutting the maximum refund fee by 50% and the Annual Rail Consumer Report 2024 to 2025.
• Department for Transport and Transport Focus, Rail Delays and Compensation 2025, Table 4.1, published May 2025.
• Rail Ombudsman, frequently asked questions.
• Trainline, Delay Repay. Resolver, Delay Repay complaints. MoneySavingExpert, train delays.

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