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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have looked at three blog posts and am more confused than when I started.  We are a family with two kids between ages 12-16 who will be in London for 8 days.  The info about kid discounts is very confusing.  Do we want an Oyster card?  A week travel card?  An Oyster card plus week travel card?  A visitor's Oyster card?  Maybe visitor's Oysters for the adults and week travel card's for the kids?  I did not think about this in advance, so we don't have time to order online before leaving, and will have to buy at Heathrow.

Thanks.[/quote]

This is the best site I have seen.

https://www.londontoolkit.com/briefing/london_transport_child_fares.htm

It depends on how much train/bus riding you will do.  For the 12 year old kid you will want to buy an oyster card at a machine, and then find an Underground agent (they are normally out of their booths to help people at big stations like Heathrow and Paddington), and ask them to apply a "Young Visitor Discount" on the card for your 12 year old.  They will take the card to a ticket machine and take about 30 seconds to basically log into the machine as an employee an recode the card to add the discount. The 12 year old uses that card now has half fares on all trips. Almost certainly the best discount for kids visitors.

The 16 year old is considered an adult (unless you go through a registration process to go to a London post office, mail a form with a photo, wait 2 weeks for the card to come back...).  Basically you need to figure out if you will be riding the Tube/buses enough over the week to be worth it to buy an Oyster card and add a week pass. It also depends on where you are traveling.  If all your trips are in Zones 1-2, and you will be taking say 4 rides/day or more, a week pass is a good deal.  It will be 47 pounds including the cost of the Oyster card, and daily capping is normally 8 pounds in zone 1-2, so that would be 56 pounds.  But it gets more complicated if you are traveling outside of central London.  In our case we had a couple of days where we only took a few Tube rides, and one day where we went to Harry Potter studio pretty much as our days activity (other than walking around near our hotel after dinner), and in that case it was way outside of zone 1-2, so the pass wouldn't have helped.  Here's info on the weekly pass (Travelcard).

https://www.londontoolkit.com/briefing/travelcard.htm

If you are gonna be riding trains in zones 1-2 quite a bit for 6 or more days, I think buying the 16 year old and the adults an Oyster card and adding a 7 day travelcard to all of them will probably be the best deal.  If you may not ride as much for a few days, or are doing a day trip out of central London (zones 1-2 cover a radius of say 5 miles from Charing Cross), I would just use contactless cards for the 16 year old and the adults, especially if you have 3 cards which don't have foreign transaction fees.  You could also use the same card with no fee if one person uses the physical card, and the other person uses that card loaded onto a phone for Apple/Google Wallet.  That way you save the 7 pounds nonrefundable cost of the Oyster card, plus don't have to faff about on departure of getting a refund on whatever funds you have left over on the Oyster cards (which you will get in coins).[/quote]

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