READERS' FORUM:Have your say

Declan Doyle contacted us about Ryanair but before he made his complaint he said he is “a fan of Ryanair, notwithstanding some of their irritating habits”.

His problem is that last Christmas his next-door neighbours gave him two €50 Ryanair gift vouchers as a thank you for putting up with a big building project of theirs during the year.

“The problem arising is that my name on my passport is Patrick Declan Doyle whilst I have always been known to friends – including my neighbours – as Declan Doyle. So I cannot use the vouchers in the latter name as it would not correspond with my passport for on-line check in purposes. I wrote to Michael O’Leary on January 8th asking for the vouchers to be re-issued in my passport name; I also copied the vouchers to him,” he writes.

“I received no response so I followed up with a letter to Ryanair customer services in April, copying the original correspondence. No response.” He also says that the vouchers “are quite restrictive and not at all easy to use”, but he says “ignoring me like this is not good enough”.

Ryanair were able to tell us within an hour that an e-mail had been sent to the person who had made the booking – in this case the neighbour – on January 14th, 2010, less than a week after receiving the query, changing the name on the vouchers and issuing new codes, which are still valid. We passed this information on to Doyle who said it had restored his shaken faith in the airline.

Slipppery price hike

Not long ago Jane O’Carroll was in Tesco in Midleton, Co Cork and noticed that their own-brand butter had a yellow shelf tag which usually denotes a price reduction. On closer inspection, she writes, “it actually said ‘triple clubcard points’ which on a €1.99 purchase is really going to help.” So far, so good. Then she checked her receipt from two weeks previously when she had last bought the same butter “and it cost €1.79 then. A cunningly disguised price increase if ever I saw one!”.

Sky high prices

Last week we carried a short item about a Fine Gael survey which showed Sky television customers here pay up to 20 per cent more than customers in the UK and get an inferior service. The service here does not include the 20mb broadband and free evening and weekend calls as we only get the TV channels.

In response, Sky pointed out that the BBC and ITV are free-to-air in the UK but not here. We’re not convinced that justifies the price differentials, particularly when you consider we are getting a dramatically inferior product with no broadband or phone calls.

Liam Kennedy was one of several readers to take issue with this response. He said the claim about BBC and ITV being free-to-air was “completely bogus” and pointed out that “they’re free-to-air here as well and anyone with a cheap satellite receiver can pick them up without subscription. They charge more in Ireland because they can, because the only competitor is UPC who have limited reach and until recently (and still in many places), a really shoddy service.”

Eircom hang up

A reader called Rosarie got in touch to share her recent experience with Eircom which, she says, is a fine example of good and bad customer service.

“My Eircom bill showed a charge for an item which had been paid for on the previous bill. So I rang 1901 and explained this to an operative who was rude, dismissive and without any warning hung up.”

She called back and spoke “with a lovely lady called Bernie, who was polite, friendly and dealt with the error immediately. One company, two different styles of customer service.”