Pricewatch »

• Fair play to BA

  May 30, 2008 @ 11:09 am | by Conor Pope

  I flew with British Airways from Dublin to London recently and it was an absolute joy. Yes, it was a bit more expensive then some of the alternative carriers I could have flown with but it was so much more pleasant, that the extra 40 or 50 quid it cost me per person was well worth it. Seats could be pre-booked without having to pay extra, passengers with young children were boarded first, there was no charge for checked-in bags – and the baggage allowance of 23 kg was a whole lot more generous than you get on many airlines which operate out of this country.

  Staff were all lovely – unfailingly polite, efficient and genuinely friendly – and there was no need to worry in the weeks leading up to departure about what would happen if the flight was delayed or cancelled because, say what you like about BA, they’re never going to completely absolve themselves of their responsibilities to their passengers and leave them stranded in an unfamiliar place or in an information vacuum like some airlines I could name.

  It reminded me of what air travel used to be like.

• Finally, some action

  May 27, 2008 @ 7:41 pm | by Conor Pope

  The Government has decided to something about the ever widening gap between euro and sterling prices in Ireland. It is to demand that UK retailers pass on savings to Irish shoppers from the current euro/sterling exchange rate, the Dáil heard today.

• A bit late but. . .

  May 26, 2008 @ 9:24 pm | by Conor Pope

  Not sure what’s more disturbing about this, the video or the singing…

• Am back

  @ 8:00 pm | by Conor Pope

  So I had all these great plans to update the blog from Sardinia where I was on my holidays these last two weeks but due to some circumstances beyond my control (techie problems) and some circumstance within my control (otherwise engaged in two inches of water in the kiddie pool) I never got round to it. Sorry about that. I see that in a Dail debate about sterling/euro price discrepancies (have they only just noticed? Have we not been banging on about it here for months now?) the Taoiseach swore, which was nice, although who he was swearing at, I haven’t been able to work out.

• Ryanair Vouchers

  May 12, 2008 @ 10:16 am | by Conor Pope

  Paddy Clarke from Dublin got in touch to complain about Ryanair gift vouchers. He received two with a value of €200 each, but his experience in trying to redeem them has left him “very, very frustrated and indeed poorer.” He says there are two phoneline options to redeem vouchers but on the day he tried “and indeed several times since”, the cheaper option, which is chargeable at national rate, “was either not working or on the one occasion it was simply of no assistance as the menu options did not cover gift vouchers, nor indeed did it offer general live operator assistance”.

  So Clarke had to call a premium rate number which costs €1.75 per minute. This number was answered immediately. “Although I had established the relevant flight numbers for my three short holiday flights, the operator persisted in dragging out the call for approximately 30 minutes at a cost to me of €50 plus.” He explains that because the expiry date on the vouchers was the end of this month he was in a “catch- 22 position in that to terminate the call would result in even more expense on a necessary repeat call”.

  Part of the delay was due to the operator requesting a reference number from the gift voucher which unhelpfully was not the printed reference number on the actual voucher. To further complicate matters, “Ryanair chose to convert my two €200 vouchers into eight €50 vouchers, with a consequential phone-time delay in relaying eight alpha/numeric numbers to an already bewildered customer. I presume that this attitude is generated by company policy.” He still has some vouchers left and is dismayed that there appears to be no alternative to using the premium number again. “Ryanair will not accept complaints via e-mail yet will reply in this way, if they choose.”

• A plea for fair play over rates

  @ 10:15 am | by Conor Pope

  A Dublin reader is infuriated at the casual way online music store play.com seems to be taking advantage of Irish customers when it comes to exchange rates. “For the past six months I have noticed the euro/sterling exchange rate sliding wildly out of kilter with the actual current fx rates,” he writes.” I doubt Play doesn’t notice that they have been holding back the recent strength of the euro against sterling to their benefit,” he adds.
  (more…)

• A year of slow change

  @ 10:10 am | by Conor Pope

  The head of the National Consumer Agency, Ann Fitzgerald, is in a hurry. On at least six occasions over the course of a biref interview, conducted to mark the agency’s first birthday, she complained that change was happening too slowly and admitted that she’d like to have achieved a lot more during her first 12 months in office.

  Her impatience is easy to understand. Every day, she and the agency she runs confront misleading pricing, dreadful customer service, anti-competitive behaviour, fraudulent practices, antiquated public services and the bully-boy approach of some companies that seem to believe the customer is always wrong.

  At least the NCA is making some progress. Calls to its helpline have doubled to 70,000 a year and Fitzgerald says it is increasingly recognised as the agency which will defend consumers’ rights. (more…)

• Sad news

  May 10, 2008 @ 1:24 pm | by Conor Pope

  I was sad to hear of the death of Nuala O’Faolain this morning. Although we both worked for the same paper for many years, I only met her once, more than ten years ago at a press event which had the aim of bringing senior journalists from north and south together and getting them very, very drunk – although to what end, I can’t really remember and what I was doing there, I’ve never known. All the journalists from the south sat at one table while those working for papers and broadcasters on the other side of the border sat at another – so I’m not sure if the aim of fostering togetherness, if that was the plan, was achieved.

  Anyways, I ended up sitting beside Nuala and her buddy Marian Finucane at dinner on the first night. She was hilarious, instantly engaging, interested in other people’s stories and wonderfully indiscrete, (direct might be a better word ) particularly when it came to winding up the editor of ireland.com, Seamus Martin, about the low rates which the people working on the website (including myself) were then being paid. She was one of very few journalists working on the big paper to show solidarity with the web journalists at the time and for that I’ll always think of her fondly. Like many people, I found her recent interview on the Marian Finucane show compelling and moving, if very difficult, radio, and I am glad, for her sake, that she did not suffer the slow lingering death that had filled her with completely understandable dread.

• Goodbye to Habitat

  @ 10:02 am | by Conor Pope

  Habitat went out of business in Ireland yesterday afternoon. “Slow sales and high costs” were blamed for the store’s collapse. I’d say slow delivery and high prices are the more likely explanation, frankly. While I’ve bought my fair share of Habitat tat, I really used to hate the way they’d make you wait months for delivery of even small pieces of furniture and make you pay through the nose for stuff while almost identical furniture and lamps and cutsey candles and the like were selling in Ikeas everywhere else in the world for a quarter of the price. Even though I hadn’t bought anything there in ages, I reckon I’ll still miss it now that it’s gone.

• Ripped off, misled or confused?

  May 9, 2008 @ 9:25 am | by Conor Pope

  A third of us who book airline tickets online are being “ripped off, misled or confused”, the European Commission said today. Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva has threatened to take action against airlines and tour operators for what she says are “serious and persistent” consumer problems, including misleading advertising in relation to online ticket sales. Misleading pricing is the biggest problem and was recorded in 58 per cent of the sites under investigation while in 49 per cent of the sites, there were irregularities related to contract terms. Problems with non-availability of advertised offers also appeared frequently.

• “Springfield’s newest trend: wasting food!”

  May 8, 2008 @ 4:11 pm | by Conor Pope

  Britons throw away 4.4 million apples, 1.6 million bananas, 1.3 million yoghurt pots, 660,000 eggs, 550,000 chickens, 300,000 packs of crisps and 440,000 ready meals, according to a British government-backed report published today. And most of the food waste is made up of untouched food inluding whole chickens and chocolate gateaux that lie uneaten in cupboards and fridges before being shamefull dumped. I wonder what the numbers are like in this country? Not great, I suspect.

• Baggage charges just keep climbing

  May 6, 2008 @ 9:22 pm | by Conor Pope

  More bad news today from Aer Lingus. The airline announced that from Thursday its baggage charges will increase by as much as 50 per cent.

• Ch ch ch ch changes

  @ 8:49 pm | by Conor Pope

  Well, I’ve just been on the change.ie website where I spent ages calculating my carbon footprint. I dutifully answered all the questions and according to the site I am responsible for exactly 0.0 tonnes of carbon emissions every year. I reckon that’s pretty good seeing as how I leave all my lights on all the time, burn mountains of coal in my back garden and spend way too long on my computer logging on to sites that fail to deliver on their promise to work out my carbon footprint.

• An interesting letter

  @ 1:12 pm | by Conor Pope

  The letter pasted below appeared in The Irish Times this morning. It makes for interesting reading.
  
  Madam, – I read with interest the report of May 1st by Conor Pope on the exorbitant prices being charged by “low-cost” airlines to fly to Bristol and other nearby cities for the Heineken Cup rugby final.

  On January 26th I booked two seats on Ryanair flight FR506 flying to Bristol at 6.50am on May 24 for a price, before taxes and charges, of €49.99. On March 27th I received a schedule change from Ryanair advising that this flight was now departing at 15.00 and that I could avail of a full refund. As this flight would not have arrived in Bristol in time for the start of the Heineken Cup match, I had no alternative but to accept the refund and rebook the flight with Aer Lingus from Birmingham.

  Surprise, surprise, flight FR506 is now departing again at 6.50am with a seat price of €229.99. I would be very interested to hear Mr Peter Sherard’s explanation for this. – Yours, etc,
  TERRI KIERNAN MERLIN, Sarah Curran Avenue, Dublin 16.

• A bad news story

  May 1, 2008 @ 1:28 pm | by Conor Pope

  From today’s paper. . .

  Martin admits he cannot ban credit card surcharges
  MINISTER FOR Enterprise Micheál Martin has withdrawn a plan to ban credit surcharges because, he says, the move would not be compatible with EU law.

  The U-turn has been strongly criticised by the Opposition and consumer groups who said hopes that unpopular surcharges were to be outlawed had been raised unnecessarily and unfairly.
  (more…)