Sounding Off

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Herbert Park sparks
A reader from Templeogue in Dublin contacted us to complain about the cost of parking at the Herbert Park Hotel in Ballsbridge and the way she was treated by staff when she and a friend visited the hotel for a natter and a coffee recently. Othe last Friday of August they went to the Herbert Park Hotel and had a pot of coffee, a pot of tea and a couple of scones. They spent a pleasant three hours in the lobby area and their bill came to roughly €18 so they left a €20 note to cover the tip.

When our reader handed in her parking ticket at reception to have it validated, she was surprised to be asked for an additional €18.50. She explained that she had already paid for the coffee and scones and was told the €18.50 was for parking. She said she'd had a coffee and a scone in the hotel but was told that drinks such as coffee and tea did not count when it came to parking validation. She was told that she would have to have spent at least €10 on food (their scones cost around €6) before the hotel would validate her ticket. "I said this seemed extraordinary and asked if it was a new rule [ she had had her ticket validated on a previous occasion]. I also asked to see a manager only to be told that they were both unavailable." She then asked to speak to someone in authority but says she was instead threatened with the Garda.

She and her friend sat in the lobby waiting to speak to someone about their bill and after 20 minutes, she says, the staff member returned and "told us that the longer we waited the more it was going to cost us and said that gardaí had been called". Eventually, a customer service representative of the hotel arrived and explained the rules governing parking. Our reader, realising she had little option, paid her €18.50. "It wasn't just the cost of the parking but the threat of the Garda that upset us," she says. "We never said we weren't going to pay but we just wanted to speak to someone in authority."

We called the hotel and spoke to the hotel's general manager, Ewan Plenderleith, who said management were taking this complaint "very seriously". He told us he had spoken to the staff involved and assured us that it was certainly not hotel policy to call the Garda in circumstances like these. He said he had confirmed with the local Garda station that they had not been called on this occasion. "It is not a policy or a procedure of our hotel to call the police over an issue like this. There was a protracted argument and something was either picked up incorrectly or there was a misunderstanding. I am not happy that the police would have even been mentioned in a conversation like this and I do apologise." He said the vast majority of people who used its facilities were happy with the service provided and said that in the wake of this complaint they would be "taking stock" of their training procedures.

With regard to the parking policy - which has attracted criticism from readers in the past - he said that notices about the tariffs were clearly displayed on the tickets and at the entrance to the car park. He said hotel residents, people using the conference facilities and those dining in the restaurant automatically qualified for free parking - for people dining in the lobby, it would depend on how much they spent. He said it was not uncommon for people to park in one of the hotel's 60 spaces for hours as they went about their business elsewhere before returning to the hotel for a quick cup of coffee and then asking for their ticket to be validated. "We have a parking policy that works for our guests, but it doesn't work for someone who is simply having a coffee."

This isn't the first time the Herbert Park Hotel's policies have attracted the ire of Irish Times readers, one of whom wrote to the Editor last month. On two occasions she was told by hotel staff that giving her a clean cup so she could taste her colleague's jasmine tea, for which he was already paying handsomely, was against hotel policy.

Galway game plan
Some rare good news about a positive customer service experience comes out of Galway this week. A reader recently bought three second-hand computer games for her son, who was recovering from an appendix operation, and paid in cash. She bought the games in Game on Eglinton Street but when she brought them home, one of the games didn't work. "Typically, I had thrown away the receipt so I was not all that hopeful," she writes. However, the shop assistant immediately agreed to replace the game and, when he was unable to find a second-hand copy, gave her a new one in its place.

Blog on here

Consumer groups
Ireland's innate culture of questionable business ethics needs a much more powerful organisation than the CAI with full powers of enforcement. - Alan

Apple's iPhone
A lot of these Europe-wide networks work quite independently, apart from the interconnections . . . Apple has been seriously playing each provider off each other in each country. The iPhone is going to sell and sell well in Ireland, despite the lack of 3G connection. For the serious internet users though, the 3G phones will be used here instead. - Damien Mulley

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