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Price rise and billing change make UPC customer irate:Joanne Hunt has been a UPC customer for over four years but is not best pleased with its practices in recent days. On February 10th she received a text from the company which read: "You can now view and pay your latest UPC bill on www.upc.ie. This bill includes a price change. Log on to MyUPC and select My Messages for more information."

She had not requested e-billing or been advised of any price change. “I’d never heard of “MyUPC” nor received any log-in details for it,” she writes. On February 21st, her bank account was debited by €70, not the usual €67.49, an increase of €2.51. “I eventually got around to calling customer care on February 23rd and was told that she had been moved to e-billing in early February. “Didn’t you receive any letters to advise that you were moving to e-billing?” she was asked. “I said no, I had not requested e-billing.”

Hunt asked how she was opted in to the system without her consent and was told: “They opt you in automatically, you have to opt out. They are moving everyone to e-billing unless they want to opt out.” When she asked why she wasn’t not notified in advance, they said: “A letter was sent around February 8th.” This was February 23rd and she still hadn’t received the letter. “When I asked why the letter might not have arrived, the agent said: “When they say a letter was sent to the customer on February 8th, maybe they mean a text message. So perhaps there was no letter.”

She asked if all UPC customers had been automatically switched to e-billing and they said it was only direct debit customers. “My second issue was the price change. The agent explained that I was on the ‘max pack’ and the TV companies from which UPC buys channels had raised their prices so these were being passed on to customers. The agent said, “so your bill has gone up by €2.50 every two months.” In fact, it had gone up by a cent more, from €67.49 to €70. I’m sure an extra cent out of the pockets of several hundred thousand customers adds up.” Hunt said she thought the company had a duty to notify the customer of price increases in advance. The agent said “first of all, notification was in the public press last November. It was also in that text message you got. They were telling you to go online to view it, they had probably sent a text message to your MyUPC and all the information was in that.” When Hunt said she had never heard of “MyUPC” before and hadn’t been sent any log-in details, “the agent explained I could register using my account number which was written on my bill”. We were both mystified as to how I was supposed to know my account number when they hadn’t sent me a bill.

She is sure the poor agents are getting a hammering from the spike in irate calls from confused customers. “Those further up the ladder would do well to spend time listening in on these calls. The company has earned over €1,000 from me in my time as a customer. With treatment like this, I’ll be spending my hard-earned cash somewhere it’s better appreciated.”

The falling price of corkage

Following on from a recent item on weddings, Peter Boland who runs a wine warehouse in Galway contacted us. The company specialises in wines for weddings and has been supplying wines for about 120 such events a year. In the four years since the company was established everything has changed he says. “In 2007, the typical corkage charge to bring your own wine to a west of Ireland hotel for a wedding ranged between €8 and €15. This has now reduced to between zero and €8 and most hotels will negotiate on it prior to you confirming a booking,” he writes.

He says with a wedding wine costing from €6 plus corkage of €5, you could bring in your own wines for about €11 per bottle compared to hotel house wines at an average of €18. He says a wedding party made up of 200 guests will go through 100 bottles, so a couple could save themselves a handy €700 by going down the corkage route.

Boland says that corkage charges appear to be a lot higher on the east coast. “I strongly agree with the principle of corkage as hotels and restaurants have costs associated with serving a customer’s wines, but the days of scalping couples for €15 to €20, which I’ve come across, should be well and truly over at this stage.”