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If you’ve bought the Dublin Bus Adult 2-Easy bus tickets to use on your daily commute, given the frequency that the ticket checkers onboard are not working, you’re quite likely to get a free journey fairly often.

For convenience, I bought a batch of these tickets recently online to use on my daily commute.

In the last 3 weeks, I guess that I haven’t had to use the ticket on about 5 occasions. Unlike the weekly or monthly tickets where you’re sort of paying anyway whether or not the machine is working, with these particular tickets you’re on a freebie.

Thanks Dublin Bus!!!

There’s been lots of coverage across many blogs about the problems that Damian Mulley has had with Sky Handling Partners who lost his luggage in or out of Cork Airport – you can read his original blog here.

While I fully sympathise with Mr.Mulley and his difficulties with having his luggage lost, the second piece of advice in the Value Ireland Tips on How to Complain does state “Always be polite - There is no point in “attacking first”. Calmly and politely explaining the situation is the best way to get a good reaction from those you are complaining to.”

Since we don’t know the ins and outs of the specific situation, we don’t know if Mr.Mulley tried this at first but still got nowhere. It does appear from his blog that he did get the runaround and did act differently than he might normally have done so.

Still, I can’t help feeling that the tone of his original blog was massively over the top (and despite the nastiness and possible illegality of the alleged Sky Handling Partners response - detailed here) and has probably caused Mr.Mulley to lose any sympathy that he might have had originally when being dealt with when complaining about a customer service issue.

Obviously, one absolutely cannot condone the alleged response of Sky Handling Partners, and I find it hard to believe the stance they have taken since this has all come out. But in fairness, it’s not hard to see the reasons for such an alleged response given what I see to be the original provocation within Mr.Mulleys post first.

Fairplay to Irish Rail for sending me a response last week. As per my comments about Ulster Bank below, it’s not always the case that companies will follow up on queries. Here’s the response:

Thank you for your mail of June 16th.

Firstly, I would like to apologise for the obvious delay in responding to your initial request for assistance in amending your reservation. Without wishing to make an excuse, we had encountered difficulties with the volume of mails received on the day in question due to a number of factors.

Our response times to reservation amendments has always been excellent, however the system obviously suffered a fall down on June 8th and, as such, we are in the process of organising a separate, priority mailbox for our customers that wish to amend their reservation by email prior to departure.

Please note that reservations can continue to be amended over the telephone on (01) 703 4070, during office hours (Mon-Fri 09.00–17.00hrs).

It’s a fair response, but the key is the phone number provided above should be useful anyone wishing to cancel or amend online reservations in the future. It’s a number that doesn’t seem to be available anywhere on their site, so I’ll leave it up here for future reference.

I was reading this evening in AskAboutMoney about the experiences of one reader about their frustration regarding Ulster Bank customer service - you can read the thread here.

I’d like to echo this given my frustrations with Ulster Bank over the past couple of months. This has also included a complete refusal to reply or acknowledge any letters sent to them, including one directly to the bank manager.

Given all the advertising Ulster Bank have at the moment offering money to prospective new customers, I’d recommend to anyone thinking about it not to bother. While you’ll get €150 for a new bank account or €1500 for a new mortgage, you’ll actually only be repaid with your own frustrations in the future.

Here’s an interesting post on the Consumer Issues pages of boards.ie where a poster was told they’d be charged €7 by a taxi company after cancelling a booking they’d only just made.

There’s much discussion in response to the post - basically outrage at the idea that a taxi company could try something like this.

Given that the taxi business is now regulated by the Taxi Regulator, you would expect that if such a charge was legitimate that it would be included on their site - but there’s nothing.

Also, as pointed out by some posters, if a cancellation fee were to be part of the transaction, they would have to tell the prospective customer up front - i.e. as part of the terms and conditions.

However, it doesn’t appear that this is a legitimate fee, so if a dodgy taxi company tries this out on you, tell them:

• Thanks, but no thanks
• You won’t be using their service again
• You’ll be telling others not to use their service
• You’ll be reporting them to the Taxi Regulator (but make sure you do!)

I see a feature today in the Sunday Business Post about the Galway Advertiser set of free newspapers, which also publishes the Athlone Advertiser. The article mentions that part of the success of the newspapers is their “quality editorial”. Hah!!!

I blogged here previously where a journalist from the Athlone Advertiser just copied and pasted an article that they published straight from the Value Ireland site.

I thought I’d publish the response that I got from Irish Rail to my request to change my ticket to a later train last Friday. The response that I received 16hrs after my train had departed.

I apologise that I did not reply to you before this. There has been a severe backlog of emails due to many passengers wishing to cancel tickets and alter bookings these last several weeks along with the many emails we received over the George Michael concert being cancelled last Tuesday and passengers looking for refunds on their tickets.

The e-mail was unsigned, and anonymous response - a key error in customer service handling.

I have followed up with Irish Rail for the purposes of this blog to see why they would handle cancellations for customer who have no intention of traveling while ignoring requests for reservation changes for those who actually still want to travel.

I’d just like to follow up on the e-mail below. I think it’s absolutely ridiculous that I get an e-mail at 9.43am on the day AFTER I try to change a train ticket with you. The only method you provide for changing or cancelling rail tickets booked on your website is via e-mail, so you would expect that e-mails would be addressed in time.

Can I make a suggestion?

Would it be possible that you could prioritise how you handle the e-mails that are sent to your reservations@irishrail.ie?

Given the excuses provided to me below as to why my request wasn’t processed, I would have expected that requests for changes in reservations be handled before any ticket cancellations are handled? It seems to me that changing reservations for
customers who still expect to travel would be more important than processing
cancellations and refunds for people who do not intend to travel.

I used Irish Rail to go to Limerick last weekend where I experienced two extremes of their customer service. Because of that, it’s hard to be completely positive or negative about how Irish Rail treated me. Neutral would be the best description I suppose.

Firstly the poor service, I thought I wouldn’t make the 6pm train, so I tried to find a way to either cancel the ticket I had or at least change my booking - I’d booked online a few days before.

You’ll find that it is not possible to actually speak to anyone in person to cancel or amend an online booking with Irish Rail. You can only send them an e-mail with your booking reference. So, I e-mailed them without much hope at 9.30am Friday morning. I sort of thought that if they only had an e-mail address to monitor that I might get some response. And I did. At 9.43am on Saturday morning, nearly 16hours after my train departed. How useless is that!!!!

On the positive side, after not getting any response by 5pm Friday, and finding no way to chase up on my earlier mail, I legged it for the train at 6pm. However, by the time I’d arrived at Heuston, I realised I didn’t have the correct credit card from by booking, or even have my e-mail confirmation with me.

In similar experiences within the UK, this would normally cause a problem in either getting a copy of my ticket, or even getting on the train. However, after queueing up at the ticket desk and giving my name and my “problem”, the kind lady behind the counter (after a wry smile that I’d arrived 5minutes before the train was due to depart) she went away and very quickly came back with a copy of my ticket for me. Excellent, and without any trouble!

However, after all that, the clincher was the actual service on the train. The Limerick/Cork train I was on which is supposed to be fast, was going at a speed which meant that the carriage I was in was moving quite violently from side to side. It was most uncomfortable, and caused much discomfort for myself for myself and my fellow travellers.

I regularly check the web statistics for Value Ireland to see how our site visitors are getting to the site. This week there were a couple of new entries on the site, both of which I’ve added to my links list here.

The Frugal Tiger - Set up by Deborah, who describes herself as a happy housewife who has returned to live in Ireland after living in the US. The site looks pretty good so far, with some very good tips and advice for consumers. Worth visiting regularly I say.

IWillNotHold - Customer Service In Ireland - According to Deborah above (where I found the link from) the blog has been set up by Damien Mulley (of the recently ended IrelandOffLine campaign). It seems pretty new also but it will be interesting to see the posts it gets. Again, people should use this - given Mr.Mulleys media outlets and ability to get coverage, complaints here are likely to get more general media coverage.