Andrew Gray ([info]shimgray) wrote,
@ 2009-07-09 11:54:00
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for fuck's sake
So, Vodafone offer an international-roaming system called "Passport"; it's opt-in, it's advertised to all of their customers, and it seems quite a good idea.

I went to set it up, yesterday. I'd heard nothing from them, so I called them today.

Their terms and conditions: "Vodafone Passport is available to customers on all Your Plan, Anytime, Anynet, Smartstep, Smartplus and Simply price plans and all Business price plans"

The person on the phone: "Oh, it's not available on old price plans, like yours. Yours was registered in 2007. Yes, yours is an Anytime price plan. That doesn't count. Yes, we were offering Passport to you in 2007. No, that doesn't mean anything."

I am... not best pleased with these people. Am I missing something here, or does this just not make sense?



ETA: well, I thought, I'll give them a second call. 50 minutes later:

  • yes, they seem entirely unconcerned by words like "misleading" and "deceptive" floating around
  • no, they don't seem to believe the published terms and conditions signify anything at all
  • they are willing to try and buy me off with a very generous new contract, but strangely this vanishes when I actually talk to the sales department.


I think I may well consider someone new when I get back. Mendacious bastards. Any recommendations? The one thing I actually use from Vodafone is the "stop the clock" package; other than that, I apparently use about fifteen minutes of daytime calls a month...

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[info]vampire_kitten
2009-07-09 11:30 am UTC (link)
Don't they make you resign contracts every year,so arguing it's a old price plan is rather off.

Ask to talk to someone higher up/ threaten to call trading standards?

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[info]shimgray
2009-07-09 11:54 am UTC (link)
Well, quite. Their argument seems to be that if I want to get it, I have to renew my contract again, and - oh, as it happens, lose the one part of it which is the reason I bother staying with Vodafone.

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[info]vampire_kitten
2009-07-09 11:58 am UTC (link)
I hate them sometimes, so useless.

I ended up having to go through my bills for three months, when they "lost" all my free call details - still charging me for the family add-on, but deleted all the relevant numbers every time any update happened to my phone.

I found not-quite-yelling at the people on the phone got me all my money back and £20 :) Bouncing it up higher might help?

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[info]shimgray
2009-07-09 12:05 pm UTC (link)
Going through my bills is tricky, mind, as at some point they just stopped sending me them, and their website function never lets me log in...

If I don't get anything useful out of the people in the shop, I'll try calling back and trying to escalate it.

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[info]tigerfort
2009-07-09 11:48 am UTC (link)
I suspect that mentioning trading and/or advertising standards might help. Also suggest that since you're clearly a customer of at least a couple of years' standing, they might consider that deliberately pissing you off is not in fact optimal behaviour....

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[info]shimgray
2009-07-09 11:56 am UTC (link)
My plan is to drop by the Cornmarket shop on my way to London, see if I can get some coherence out of them, and if not, start making noises about contracts, things written in them, misleading advertising, etc etc.

(I will be particularly interested to see if I get the same runaround, or a different one.)

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[info]artela
2009-07-09 12:08 pm UTC (link)
You're missing the part where the person on the phone has a target to sell x number of new contracts every day, and that one way of doing that is to get old customers to sign up to a new 12/18 month contract.

Mentioning trading standards and various watchdog bodies, and asking to speak to supervisors, might be advisable.

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[info]shimgray
2009-07-09 01:15 pm UTC (link)
I was surprised, even when talking to the supervisor, how ineffective this stick was.

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[info]gerald_duck
2009-07-09 12:17 pm UTC (link)
Vodafone Passport interacts interestingly with various other features, especially Stop The Clock.

It used to be possible to make an hour-long call to the UK from abroad for 70p plus three minutes of talktime. I think they're letting people who took the offer at the time continue to get away with it, but for people who didn't they're insisting on your shifting tariff in order to get Passport. In the process, you have to move from the old Stop The Clock to the slightly restricted and not-for-free MkII Stop The Clock.

On the other hand, I believe it's still possible for someone in the UK using Vodafone Family to make free calls to someone in their Family group who also has Vodafone Passport and is currently abroad. Certainly, that's what I'm doing at the moment and I intend to raise merry hell if the calls turn up on my bill. (-8

The trick is to play silly buggers with them harder than they play them with you.

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[info]shimgray
2009-07-09 12:22 pm UTC (link)
This sounds exactly like it; I have STC, the only reason I stay with them. Hmm.

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[info]the_marquis
2009-07-09 12:40 pm UTC (link)
Sounds a lot like "Brand new customers only"

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[info]shimgray
2009-07-09 01:14 pm UTC (link)
"All customers except those who're still on a pre-2008 contract", apparently, is the unwritten implication.

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[info]jacinthsong
2009-07-09 01:26 pm UTC (link)
How much are you paying per month at the moment? There are some really generous SIM only deals around that don't have any features, but might have enough minutes to make up for it.

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[info]shimgray
2009-07-09 01:34 pm UTC (link)
I have their "stop the clock" thing - essentially, an hour-long call for three minutes. This makes it a bit hard to figure out what I want to change to...

hrm. Will look at this next week, I think. For now, disposable Vodafone PAYG sim, and register it for Passport!

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[info]amchau
2009-07-09 03:38 pm UTC (link)
All I know is that they keep trying to argue me off STC but there's no way I'm budging.

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