SOUNDING OFF: Ripped off? Stunned by good value? Write, text or blog your experience to us.
A Dublin reader is infuriated at the casual way online music store play.com seems to be taking advantage of Irish customers when it comes to exchange rates.
"For the past six months I have noticed the euro/sterling exchange rate sliding wildly out of kilter with the actual current fx rates," he writes." I doubt Play doesn't notice that they have been holding back the recent strength of the euro against sterling to their benefit," he adds.
Last week, euro customers were paying nearly 12 per cent more than those who paid in sterling and he says he has seen it much worse than that. He wonders "how Play justifies this effective scalping of its euro customers." The site doesn't allow eurozone-based customers pay in sterling and take the credit card company foreign exchange rate which is, he says, pretty bad but a lot better than that offered by Play.
When he sent the company a mail asking for an explanation, he received the following. "Please accept our apologies for any confusion in this matter. Due to a higher processing cost on euro transactions and fluctuations in the exchange rate, there may be a difference in price when ordering in euros. Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you and thank you for your patience and valued custom."
He was furious with what he calls a "lame justification". He says he is "not at all confused about what is going on and wants to know how there are higher costs in transacting in euro as opposed to sterling or dollars? "The exchange rates on the site are now constantly incorrect in favour of the vendor by a good 10 per cent." We got in touch with play.com to find out more about this "higher processing charge" on euro transactions and to ask why it did not allow its eurozone customers pay in sterling. A spokesman for the online retailer said the company prided itself on being "a value online retailer" and said it was "very competitive" in Ireland. He said pricing decisions were "based on a number of issues and in Ireland our prices reflect the costs of operating there. Indeed recently we have reduced our euro prices across the board to reflect the changing exchange rate".
Ryanair Vouchers
Paddy Clarke from Dublin got in touch to complain about Ryanair gift vouchers. He received two with a value of €200 each, but his experience in trying to redeem them has left him "very, very frustrated and indeed poorer." He says there are two phoneline options to redeem vouchers but on the day he tried "and indeed several times since", the cheaper option, which is chargeable at national rate, "was either not working or on the one occasion it was simply of no assistance as the menu options did not cover gift vouchers, nor indeed did it offer general live operator assistance".
So Clarke had to call a premium rate number which costs €1.75 per minute. This number was answered immediately. "Although I had established the relevant flight numbers for my three short holiday flights, the operator persisted in dragging out the call for approximately 30 minutes at a cost to me of €50 plus." He explains that because the expiry date on the vouchers was the end of this month he was in a "catch- 22 position in that to terminate the call would result in even more expense on a necessary repeat call".
Part of the delay was due to the operator requesting a reference number from the gift voucher which unhelpfully was not the printed reference number on the actual voucher. To further complicate matters, "Ryanair chose to convert my two €200 vouchers into eight €50 vouchers, with a consequential phone-time delay in relaying eight alpha/numeric numbers to an already bewildered customer. I presume that this attitude is generated by company policy." He still has some vouchers left and is dismayed that there appears to be no alternative to using the premium number again. "Ryanair will not accept complaints via e-mail yet will reply in this way, if they choose."
