Super annoying that TFL insist that contactless payments are the same price as oyster. They don’t take into account that you can link your railcard to your Oyster card to get 1/3rd off tube travel.
Would be great to link a railcard to your monzo card to have the same benefits ?
Unfortunately, this is a TfL thing. And it isn’t just 16-25. There are lots of missing ticket options, sadly.
Yup, I have a student oyster for the travel card discount.
It would be wonderful if I could associate a student travel card to a contactless card.
It probably wouldn’t take significant effort on TfL’s end either - they already collect all journey’s until charging at the end of the day. They would just have to add some branching to check if there’s an active travel card on the account…
Liam
Yeah, I don’t quite understand why they don’t do this, especially since (last I heard) TfL was keen to phase out Oyster in favour of contactless.
The only things I can think of are either that it’s more technically complicated than we think, or the combination of travelcard fares combined with weekly caps (which you can’t get on Oyster) make it financially unattractive. I mean, they could also put a weekly cap on Oyster, but they’re seemingly choosing not to do that, either…
I think I read somewhere that they say this is due to technological limitations of the Oyster cards… whether that’s true or not, I have no idea.
(It should be noted that all fare calculations are done by the Oyster card/ticket barriers themselves, so it’s not inconceivable that it’s impossible).
I mean, they still haven’t merged their photocard and Oyster online systems. Photocard users can’t use the app, and we can’t actually get products using the new system (any station/bus, 30 minutes) [the photocard site uses the old system: nominated station and a 24 hour wait [no buses]]. You can add photocards to the newer Oyster site, but the promotional travelcard pricing isn’t available 
Liam
They were supposed to be moving Oyster processing to the backend system this year at which point all sorts of things suddenly become possible. In theory, that could then allow linking a railcard with a customer account which would make it card neutral (as long as your card was linked with your account). I haven’t heard that this has happened yet.
Well if they announced a 2018 deadline probably it will be done by 2020… probably cough cough
They’re issuing new Oyster cards to replace some of the (very) old ones - I had a note from TfL to say that if I wanted to use the app and new stuff they’d need to send me a (free) replacement card.
That’s to update the crypto to, well, not be easily hackable to change the balance (don’t bother trying, 1. you don’t want to be a criminal, 2. they’ll block the card the next day).
There’s a Twitter reply from TFL’s CTO here which implies that they’ve started working on railcards for Contactless. That was in June so hopefully they’ve made some progress by now!