SOUNDING OFF: Ripped off? Stunned by good service? Write, blog or text your experience to us

A reader from Dublin by the name of Eva got in touch with us after finally losing patience with Ulster Bank.

“Please help, I’m at the end of my tether,” she wrote. After comparing the credit card rates being offered by Ulster Bank – where she had an account – and a number of other banks, she realised that her card was costing her substantially more than was necessary, so she applied for a new credit card from AIB in October of last year. She looked to transfer the balance of her old Ulster Bank credit card to take advantage of the lower interest rates, “a fairly standard procedure, and one that is becoming more popular in ‘crunch times’,” she writes.

AIB then sent Ulster Bank a cheque (“very old school”) for the amount – just over €1,000 – and promptly added that sum to her new card’s balance. “So far, so good,” she writes. However, Ulster Bank claimed that they had never received the cheque, “even though it was cashed and the amount was still appearing on my Ulster Bank statements, despite me closing the account (notwithstanding the very hard sell from their customer services team).”

She says it appears that “in such cases, it is the poor customer that has to do all the mediating here, with me contacting AIB for a copy of the cheque and sending it to Ulster Bank. Ulster Bank then contacts me to say that the copy is poor quality and the dance goes on.”

She says she wrote to both companies giving her authorisation for them to speak to each other about her account in an attempt to remove herself from “what is a very basic, everyday transaction. However, we are still making no progress. Ulster Bank are still sending me letters to say that I need to do the work on solving the problem. This is under the guise of ‘data protection legislation’ which seems to me to be the lazy way out when customer services people couldn’t be bothered doing the work. In the meantime a separate department in Ulster Bank is sending me letters charging me for late payments! Argh!”

She says she wants to highlight her frustration when dealing with these companies. “It seems so wrong that the customer should have to do all the leg-work. I have written to Ulster Bank again to state that I will have no more involvement in the proceedings, but no doubt I will get another inane letter from them in a few weeks asking me for a copy of the AIB cheque again. So much for being smart with my money – any interest rate savings have been negated by the money I have spent on postage!”

Last week we contacted Ulster Bank to find out how it could possibly have taken four months to resolve what should have been a fairly straightforward issue. Four hours later a spokeswoman got back to us to say she could not comment on individual cases, citing, yep, data protection legislation. She was able to say that the matter had now been resolved and said that there were two sides to every story. But seeing as how she was unable to give the Ulster Bank side, we were left pretty much in the dark as to what the other side might have been.

Costa lot less

On a recent trip to Spain, a reader called into a chemist and found a number of items selling at a much lower cost than they cost in the Republic. Zovirax, which costs around €10.50 in the Republic, cost her €2.79. A box of 20 Motilium costs €9.47 at home while a box of 30 cost her just €3.26 in Spain.

Pasta past tense

“Does anyone know what has happened to the good Italian spaghetti?” asks a reader by the name of Catherine. She points out that the main supermarkets used to stock Barilla and De Cecco but now they seem to have only Roma and own brand. “Have Roma mounted a coup? Barilla and De Cecco are so much better and are one of the few remaining affordable luxuries, but are becoming impossible to find.” It is something we have wondered ourselves as we wandered the aisles of our local Tesco looking for good quality pasta.