It’s been a hair-raising year. There’s the prospect of that eye-watering “divorce” settlement required to end the relationship, the isolation as we are cut off from essential services, the panic when flights are grounded and the fallout from an unregulated free-for-all. Yes, life on the British high street, real and virtual, has been predictably alarming for Observer readers – and that’s before Brexit kicks in.
Airlines and tour operators have been the theme of 2018 – probably because more households have felt the need to seek respite from corporate Britain. The trouble with passengers is that they are naive. They believe that £80 will buy them a passage to the sun. Savvy readers know this is a delusion. By the time you’ve selected your seat, booked in your suitcase and discovered the cunning new levy on hand baggage, the advertised fare is likely to have tripled. And a ticket is no guarantee that you’ll be going anywhere because the crew might be on strike or rain might be falling or the travel agent you booked with might have forgotten to make the reservation.
If you make it overseas there’s the chance your hotel has no record of you or that it hasn’t been fully built yet, while your luggage may have gone on a trip all of its own. All in all, it’s best to regard two nights spent in the airport as your mini break and make yourself comfortable on the departure lounge floor because the airline may be loathe to stump up for a bed and there is no travel ombudsman with statutory powers to force their hand.
Perhaps the lucky ones are those dozens whose banks have closed their accounts without warning, possibly trapping their savings. It’s a nuisance when they want to pay the rent, but, hey, at least it spares them the risks of spending.
So, as carols ring out, it’s time to celebrate entrepreneurial spirit. Even if Brexit decimates goods and services we can be confident that corporate monoliths will still be taking our money and finding ever more creative reasons why we won’t get anything for it.
Licence to print money award
Step up all private parking enforcement firms. They don’t let the fact that a motorist has paid for a ticket stand in the way of big bucks. Maybe that motorist spent 10 minutes seeking a space and queuing for the ticket machine. Or mistook the O on their number plate for an identically configured 0. A three-figure “fine” is fully justified because the small sign at the top of the telegraph pole on the other side of the car park points out that the clock starts ticking as you drive over the threshold and that registration plates must be correctly entered. You could appeal the charge, but if you do you lose the early-payment rebate and if you pay upfront to prevent the sum escalating you lose the right to appeal.
Money for nothing award
So many contenders for this one. Pizza Hut, which failed to deliver prepaid pizzas and failed to refund supperless customers. The reason? A recent upgrade of its customer service processes. Or the now defunct Drive Dynamics, which described itself as “the UK’s most liked driving school”. Its 10 lessons for £99 deal was certainly appealing, but there was a rub: the £99 payment went through but the lessons often failed to materialise. The reason: an upgrade of its computer systems. Then there’s Opodo, which stranded several readers after failing to book the flights they’d paid for. But the winner has to be Virgin Media because its charging for thin air is not incompetence but official policy. Customers who move to an area not served by Virgin – 50% of the country – must pay up to £240 to exit their contract early. In November it was fined £7m by Ofcom for overcharging departing customers almost £2.8m.
Miser’s award
Congratulations to Booking.com. One of its customers arrived at his pre-booked hotel in Turkey at 2am to find that there was no record of his reservation. The receptionist refused to help and he had to tow his luggage round the sleeping streets with his elderly father and young daughters until he found a hotel with a room available. Booking.com refused to refund him the £47 cost because he had not asked them to “assist with the relocation”, despite the fact it was 2am, they had not provided him with a number and a phone call from Turkey could have cost as much as the room. To placate the Observer it eventually handed over £20. At least Expedia, which stranded two young women in Marrakech in identical circumstances, stumped up for alternative accommodation, albeit only after the Observer intervened.
The most clueless experts
Curry’s Know How does know how, but not in a good way. It knows how to turn up two hours late with a delivery, install the wrong washing machine, forbid the householder to use it until the mistake is rectified, reappear six days later with the correct machine, refuse to disconnect the erroneously installed appliance, depart with the correct machine still on board and refuse to cancel the order until it collected the incorrect machine 15 days later. It also knows how to turn up two hours early and dump a £2,000 cooker in a roofless garage when snow storms were forecast and how to leave a family with a redundant £2,500 TV because three times over as many weeks failed to work out how to install it.
Most lucrative blunder
Again, there was hot competition for this accolade. Recognition should be given to npower, which in a single day credited the closed account of an ex-customer with £15,646 then debited it to the tune of £22,343. And to O2, which hit upon the notion that a single mother on a £25 a month contract was renting a BT radio mast for which it charged her three-figure sums several times a month. But the honour has to go to Thames Water, which billed a lone flat-dweller £206,209.91 for six months’ usage.
Corporate logic award
I have to give a nod here to Etihad Airlines, which tried to bar a passenger because her surname was hyphenated in her passport but not on the ticket. The reason? Etihad’s online booking form does not permit hyphens. And all credit to Easirent, which declared it would not be refunding a car hire customer an erroneous £291 charge because the hire had already happened. But the winner is Paypal. When a hacker made an illegal transaction on a customer’s account then fraudulently closed it, PayPal refused the victim’s appeal for a refund because she was no longer a customer.
