Pricewatch »

• No-value voucher

  June 25, 2007 @ 3:38 pm | by Conor Pope

  A reader contacted us last week to draw our attention to what they regard as “a highly unethical practice by Ryanair”. She received €75 worth of airline vouchers as a Christmas present from her brother. “Whilst it was a lovely gesture I was immediately sceptical as to whether there would be any value to them,” she writes

  Her initial doubts appeared to have been confirmed when she discovered that the vouchers could only be used to book flights through Ryanair’s call centre, which can only be contacted through a premium rate phone line. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she writes, “the prices of flights are vastly increased compared to the online fares.”

  She says she tried to book a return flight to London Stansted from Dublin and was quoted around €140 through the call centre “while online the exact same flight came to €63″. Both these prices included all taxes and one checked-in bag.

  She says the attitude of the girl she spoke to in the call centre was very much “‘sorry, that’s just how it is’ and in fact I was advised to book online instead which obviously I did”. She says there was “no point getting into the madness of the situation with the poor girl – especially not on a premium rate phone line.

  She points out that she has always flown Ryanair has always defended them, believing that you get what you pay for.

  “However, this is why I would never have bought gift vouchers from them in the first place and I am certain that anybody who has flown with them regularly would not have either,” she writes. She says it is people like her brother who is not a frequent flyer “who are being duped – his €75 was essentially free money for Ryanair as those vouchers will never be used,” she writes.

  As long as three years ago, the airline admitted that its vouchers could only be used to book flights over the phone and accepted that flights booked through its website were always cheaper. At the time – in July 2004 – it said that the technology for verifying vouchers online was not yet available. Even at the time that response sounded a bit woolly to PriceWatch. But with all the technological advances that have been made since, surely the IT people at Ryanair must have resolved this little difficulty.

  We contacted the airline to find out. A spokeswoman said calls were at the national rate of five cent a minute from landlines and the airline’s redemption policy was “clearly stated on all Ryanair vouchers”.

• Get covered this summer

  @ 3:37 pm | by Conor Pope

  Not only is travel insurance almost certainly the dullest thing on any summer holiday check list, it is also considered by many to be a complete waste of money, thanks to some unscrupulous tour operators who zealously flog over-priced policies to unwitting holidaymakers.

  But once you look beyond the boredom and the sharks, it probably should be the first thing in your suitcase. If something goes wrong while you’re on holidays this year and you’re one of the 40 per cent of Irish people who don’t have insurance, the oversight could end up costing you an arm and a leg.
  (more…)

• Dell boys in bother

  June 20, 2007 @ 4:06 pm | by Conor Pope

  Am a bit late to this but it still warrants a mention. A former Dell employee submitted a post to The Consumerist blog a week ago offering tips to consumers keen to get the best deal from Dell. The posting contained a huge amount of information about how to get the best prices and the best customer service from the computer maker. While it makes for interesting reading, it would probably not have attracted much notice except counsel for Dell rather foolishly contacted the site and demanded that the post be removed on the grounds that it contained information that was “confidential and proprietary to Dell”. And well it might have. But the folk at the consumerist declined to pull the post and published Dell’s request and saw traffic to the site go through the roof. More than 300,000 people have now read the original post and Dell have had to issue a statement accepting that it had been wrong to try and have the post removed and should have instead concentrated on rebutting any of the material in the original post it believed to be false.

• Only 16th

  June 18, 2007 @ 7:10 pm | by Conor Pope

  Okay, so it may be disappointing but what matters most is not our lowly position but the fact that at least we are moving in the right direction. Last year Dublin was the 18th most expensive city in the world and this year it’s ranked 16th. Not much of an improvement but an improvement nonetheless. Ireland has beaten off challenges from great cities like New York, Paris and London when it comes to pricey coffee according to the annual Mercer Worldwide Cost of Living survey. The average cost of a cup of coffee, including service, is €3 in Dublin, compared with €2.95 in London, €2.85 in New York and €2.30 in Paris. We can also be happy that hamburger meals are dearer here than elsewhere while Dublin is also the place to be if you want to be ripped off when buying a CD. Go us!!!

• The food’s not ready

  @ 5:19 pm | by Conor Pope

  People should pay special attention to what ready meals they are buying if they wish to keep their salt content in check, according to British consumer lobby group Which?. Some ready meals are “crammed” with salt and fat, Which? has warned.

  It found huge variations in recipes for different pizzas, curries and lasagnes sold in supermarkets with some dishes containing five times more fat and four times more salt than the healthiest versions.

  But the product packaging doesn’t always make it obvious to shoppers what they are eating, Which? said. The consumer group has called on all manufacturers and retailers to add traffic light labels (see below) to their products to indicate levels of fat, sugar and salt.

• It’s in the post. Or is it?

  @ 5:19 pm | by Conor Pope

  Have our postmen suddenly stopped delivering interesting mail? An unqualified “yes” seems to be the answer from PriceWatch readers, who have contacted us in recent weeks to complain that while bills and junk mail can be delivered without difficulty, the parcels and presents that they look forward to are struggling to get through.
  (more…)

• More places to moan!

  June 15, 2007 @ 12:27 pm | by Conor Pope

  Two new blogs (well, new to me anyways) that I happened across this morning that are well worth a look. There’s the Frugal Tiger which has all manner of money saving tips and advice on where to get good value groceries and better banking. Then there is IWillNotHold.com which will mainly be venting about poor customer service. There’s only a couple of posts on the blogs so far but I’m sure that they’ll be kept busy.

• Eircom’s price hike

  @ 11:57 am | by Conor Pope

  Eircom is to increase its prices for telephone customers from the end of July the company annouced yesterday evening at the exact time that every national newspaoer and TV station was entirely focussed on make up Bertie Ahern’s new cabinet. Line rental is to go up by €1.18 euro while local and national calls, the minimum call charge and directory inquiries calls are also set to rise. Eircom defended the price hikes and said that they weren’t nearly as high as gas and electricty price increases we have had to endure in recent months. That may well be true but it seems like a ridiculous defence to put forward.

• Let them eat fake cake

  June 12, 2007 @ 8:04 pm | by Conor Pope

  Weddings are one of the craziest money spinners of our time. It seems to me that when florists, photographers, dress makers, travel agents, hotels, priests and altar boys hear you’re getting married they automatically add a few quid onto the bill. Only that could explain why the average cost of an Irish wedding is now 25 grand. 25 thousand euro and that doesn’t even include the ring, the stag party and the honeymoon in Mauritius!!! The biggest waste of money is of course the cake. I mean, does anyone actually ever even eat the damn thing? Of course not, they’re too drunk, too full or too smart to bother with it. So why spend two grand on a glorified fruit loaf that will end up mashed into carpets and hair when you can rent a fake cake from this lot. Okay, they’re in the US and are probably not much good to anyone in Ireland yet, but surely it won’t be long before someone sets up a fake cake business here. The first ones to do it will make a packet. . .

• Music to our ears

  June 11, 2007 @ 6:09 pm | by Conor Pope

  David Power from Lucan has got in touch with rare news of a genuine bargain. The Doors back catalogue has been reissued by Elektra/Rhino Records/WEA, a move which involved the remaining Doors members and the original producers remastering the tracks from the original tapes.

  “Among other things, they reinstated items that were censored from the original albums,” says Power, and the sleeves include new notes and custom CD cases plus bonus tracks.
  (more…)

• Football focus

  @ 6:07 pm | by Conor Pope

  We were delighted when Brian from Galway recently sent us a couple of tickets for the Galway vs Mayo match in the Connacht Championship. Our joy at the unsolicited freebie was short-lived, however, when we realised that the match was over and he had sent in the tickets to illustrate a dramatic rise in the cost of supporting his team since last year.

  (more…)

• Off the rails

  @ 6:06 pm | by Conor Pope

  Recently Róisín Stapleton went in search of a one-way train ticket to take her back to Dublin after spending a weekend with her family in Mayo. When she asked about the price at the Irish Rail office in Castlebar she was told that a one-way fare was €30 while a return cost €42. As her “more impoverished younger brother” had plans to visit her for a weekend soon afterwards, she decided to buy the return ticket and allow him to use it on the return leg of his journey, saving himself €12.

  This makes economic sense everywhere but trainland. When Stapleton’s brother went looking for his one-way ticket from Castlebar to Dublin last Friday he was told that “there was no such thing on a Friday” and that passengers were obliged to pay €42 regardless of whether they intended to use the return leg or not.
  (more…)

• Tickets hit by ‘fun tax’

  @ 6:02 pm | by Conor Pope

  NME and NBC were singing from the same hymn sheet late last month when news broke that Barbra Streisand had cancelled the Roman concert which had been due to kick-start her European tour later this week.

  Despite the organiser’s protestations that it had been scrapped because of “production difficulties”, the indie bible and the mainstream US broadcaster, alongside many other news sources, linked the cancellation to a strident consumer protest at the prices being charged for tickets. At €150, the cheap seats were anything but and those willing to splash out to get the very best seats in the 24,000-seater Stadio Flaminio were getting little change out of €1,000.
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• IrelandOffline’s Off

  June 8, 2007 @ 12:27 pm | by Conor Pope

  Sorry to see the committee of consumer lobby group IrelandOffline calling it a day . IrelandOffline was formed in 2001 and has campaigned for the rights of consumers who wanted cheaper dialup Intenet and for those who wanted broadband. Chairman Damien Mulley said the current committee was unable
  to find enough people to take over. “Our discussion forum on boards.ie will remain open so the community that formed around IrelandOffline can still interact and perhaps we might see other lobby groups grow out of it.”

• Milking the latte

  June 4, 2007 @ 7:55 pm | by Conor Pope

  Recently we carried an item about the prices being charged by Cafe Kylemore in St James’s Hospital in Dublin. A doctor based in the hospital had complained to us about the prices in the cafe, saying in particular that €3 for a latte seemed particularly excessive. A Kylemore’s spokeswoman defended the cafe’s pricing and said that offering value to their customers has always been a “core value for Kylemore”.

  Another reader then got in touch expressing his bemusement at the management’s response. “On what planet is €3 for a latte value for money?” he asked “Kylemore prices are high across the board. I was more appalled by her expression of ‘disappointment that a customer had complained’, as if the doctor’s observations on Kylemore’s exorbitant prices was some sort of one-off aberration.”

  Our reader, who also works in the hospital, said prices in the cafe were a frequently topic of conversation among staff. “The fact that Kylemore has a captive market of patients and visitors, many with little disposable income, makes the high prices harder to accept,” this reader says. Furthermore, the reader wonders whether businesses can charge high prices because “Irish people do not make enough official complaints, probably through a sense that it won’t make any difference anyway.”

• Turning wine into water

  @ 7:55 pm | by Conor Pope

  A hard-working reader from Dublin 6 was dismayed by the discrimination she experienced at the hands of a large Dublin department store recently because she had decided against a glass of wine while having lunch. Fed up with having a rushed and distinctly unhealthy sandwich at her desk every day, this office-bound reader decided to treat herself to an hour off and arranged to meet a friend for lunch in one of the restaurants in Clerys.

  She had the special – a comparatively healthy salad – which was perfectly pleasant and cost her, she says, a perfectly reasonable 10.50. It was made to seem even better value when she learned that a quarter bottle of wine was included in the price.

  Figuring that a boozy lunch might not be the best recipe for a productive afternoon’s work, she declined the offer of the wine and asked if she could swap the little bottle of plonk for an equally small bottle of mineral water.

  She was told that such a swap would be against restaurant policy and it was wine or nothing. She expressed her surprise and disappointment to staff in the restaurant that it was not possible to exchange a bottle of mineral water for the presumably more expensive wine. As soon as she returned to her desk, sober and thirsty, she fired off an angry e-mail to PriceWatch.

  “I can’t complain about the food, which was good, or the price of it, which was fair enough, but I really think staff should be allowed to show a little flexibility if someone doesn’t fancy

  the glass of wine with their meal. Surely it wouldn’t cost the restaurant anything extra?”

  To be fair to Clerys, it is not uncommon for restaurants to adopt a policy such as this. When we contacted the store, we were told that the Tea Rooms restaurant in the store often runs lunchtime promotions offering a complimentary glass of wine.

  “It was an oversight not to offer a complimentary bottle of water as an alternative option to the wine.” Effective from last Friday “all such complimentary wine promotions will also include an alternative bottled water option,” Clerys promised.

• New bans for trans

  @ 7:53 pm | by Conor Pope

  It sounds pretty harmless, but hydrogenated vegetable oil is perhaps the most controversial and potentially the most dangerous ingredient to be commonly used in the making of many of the foods stacked on our supermarket shelves today.

  A decade ago it sat largely unnoticed on ingredient lists while all the negative attention was directed towards the E numbers which were said to cause everything from cancer to attention deficit disorder. But now hydrogenated vegetable oils, or trans fats, are taking centre stage after being linked to 30,000 fatal heart attacks annually in the US and accused of making a significant contribution to the dramatic increases in the level of obesity in the US and elsewhere. (more…)

• Phoney Business

  June 1, 2007 @ 12:56 pm | by Conor Pope

  I knew there’s be more!!! Eircom has confirmed that 100,000 customers who rang premium rate competitions phone lines in April and May were overcharged as a result of what they are calling “a software fault” . An internal investigation by the station was prompted when callers to a Late Late Show premium-rate competition line found they’d been charged for attempted but uncompleted calls. It now appears that it wasn’t just the Late Late that was affected. About 500,000 calls made to 30,000 lines between April 24th and May 17th last were involved. Eircom has not said by how much people have been overcharged but promoese to refund those affected next month at the latest.