READERS' FORUM:Have your say
Last week Carol, a Dublin reader, bought two white shirts in Marks & Spencer for her son for his school uniform. They were €16 each. “When I brought them home, I saw the sterling sticker for £9.50 underneath. This week, the exchange rate was €1 = 0.87 sterling, so a straight translation would be just under €11.” She says that allowing for transport and administration costs, a price of €12 would be reasonable.
“Indeed, this kind of mark-up is what occurs when they have weekend meal deals – a meal combination costing £10 in Northern Ireland costs €12.50 here.” But the €16 price tag on the shirt is about €4 over what Carol feels is “defensible”. She says that it is “the best argument I have seen for a long time for travelling North to shop.”
She rang M&S customer service in the UK looking for an explanation.
“They said they’d get back to me. They didn’t.” We gave them a shout to see if they could explain the price discrepancy and received this response. We’ll leave it up to you to decide if it is satisfactory. “M&S is competitively priced within the Republic of Ireland. When setting our prices, we, like any other business, have to take into consideration factors specific only to the Irish market such as higher rental, operational and employment costs. It is therefore misleading to compare Irish prices to those in the UK.”
Caught out by an Irish Ferries early bird offer
Sandra from Drumcondra in Dublin got an e-mail from Irish Ferries in March detailing its “early bird offer” which promised savings of up to 20 per cent.
“I only had to pay €100 at the time and the balance 30 days before travel,” she writes. “The total fare for travel at the end of June for two adults, two children and a camper van was €1,416, including all fees. Imagine my surprise earlier this week when I noticed the exact same outbound dates, passenger numbers, etc is now over €250 cheaper than my early bird saver fare.” She rushed to cancel her original booking – losing the €100 deposit – but still saving €150. “Unfortunately, they had taken the balance off my card at the start of this week. Her advice to anyone who has booked an early bird offer but not yet paid the balance? “Check the fares again, cancel and re-book to save yourself some money.”
She called and e-mailed Irish Ferries to complain about “the misleading nature of their March offer. I got a not-surprising standard response. It would be good if you could investigate if the special offer in March actually saved any consumer any money. The maximum peak fare on their site even today is still €200 cheaper than the price I paid in March. I certainly will be looking at alternative means of transport to France in the future.”
We contacted Irish Ferries which explained that under its fare structure, it offered the lowest fare available at the time of booking, “in line with other transport providers and is accepted as an industry standard”.
It said its fares were “fluid and can increase or decrease from time to time as circumstances require. Usually the earlier one books, the lower the fare as, generally, fares increase closer to travel, but it can occasionally occur that some fares, for some vehicle categories on selected departures –during limited periods of time – may decrease as new special offers are introduced.”
Expensive dash of lime leaves a sour taste
Aoife Carr was in the Portmarnock Hotel Golf Links last weekend where she ordered a Ballygowan water with a dash of lime cordial. The Ballygowan set her back €2.80 but it was the price of the dash of lime that left her reeling. It cost one euro.
“When I challenged the barman he just shrugged,” she writes.
In the past we have written about pubs charging as much as €1.50 for a pint of tap water and a dash of cordial but the defence they have given was that they have to charge people drinking in their pubs something. But in this case, our reader was already paying a fairly steep €2.80 for the water, so the charge seems ridiculous, particularly when you can buy a litre of undiluted lime cordial for less than €3. This should provide at least 50 “dashes” which means the mark-up in Portmarnock is absolutely astronomical.
We contacted the hotel and received the following response: “As we have received correspondence from [our reader, Aoife] we are now in the process of dealing directly with her.”
