Sounding off

We've got mail: Ripped off? Stunned by good value? Write, text or blog your experience to us.

Broadband brouhaha

Mary McMullan from Dublin sent us a mail wondering whether other readers share her extreme frustration with BT customer service. Both she and her husband work from home and have a business broadband connection for which they pay a substantial €90 per month. It stopped working on January 3rd and the problem took three weeks to resolve.

"We feel that even this snail's rate of progress would not have been achieved had we not phoned the BT customer service desk almost daily, pleading for action. We spoke to 10 different individuals in total." It wasn't until Day 14 that one of the call centre operatives "finally assumed some responsibility for sorting out the situation". It turned out that the problem lay in her local telephone exchange - so BT needed co-operation from Eircom, which they claimed was slow to materialise. "It was not until Day 21 that a BT engineer and an Eircom engineer were able to get together, and - eureka! - by plugging our connection into a different port in their system, they immediately restored our service." She says the whole experience would not have rankled quite so much "if we hadn't gone through a similar one in 2006. Same company, similar problem and, strangely enough, 21 days to fix it. If this is the best that can be done for business customers, heaven help domestic users."

Hire ire

Kate Frazer recently hired a car from the Alamo depot in the Cranford Centre in Stillorgan and paid for it using a credit card. She was less than impressed to be charged a 10 per cent surcharge for doing so, particularly as their was no option to pay with cash. "Is this the largest mark-up for using a credit card?" she asks. "When I queried why this charge was there the employee said it was their normal charge."

We called National Car Rental, the Cork-based company which operates the Alamo franchise in Ireland to find out more. A call centre operative told us that there wasn't a 10 per cent charge with National Car Rental, but a flat transaction fee of €10 which, she said, was added to every credit card booking. She said it didn't matter if we booked the car for 10 minutes or 10 days - we'd still have to pay the €10 transaction fee. We also checked on the company's website; there was no facility to hire a car paying by cash.

Par for the course

Last week we carried an item about the VHI's travel insurance policy. A reader was annoyed that the policy for him and his wife had increased from €83 a year to €103 despite the fact that a leaflet attached to his renewal notice had promised him the same price as last year if he renewed on time. When he called the VHI to complain about the price hike he was told that, while the basic travel insurance policy remained unchanged, the golf add-on had increased from €14 to €34. We did call the VHI last week, and a spokeswoman told us that the price hike was "quite simply down to the fact that the product has been changed substantially to give enhanced benefits based on feedback from members availing of this particular add-on". She said that, "for an increase of just €10 per person", the new policy "gives much better benefits and more relevant cover". She said the add-ons were not referred to in the leaflet "as they are optional".