Kevin Grain

This website completely fails in its primary purpose, to allow parents to pay for school meals and trips. For the second week running, the payments system is not working. Also, they have introduced more and more complexity to the system, you now need umpteen clicks to get to where you need to be, even when it is working. I guess the money still keeps rolling in for the owners though, so why would they care?

I haven't used this compnay for over 3 years but someone hacked my account and made a booking in Brazil, somewhere I have never been and never want to. I cancelled the booking in time, changed my password and closed my account. Despite all this someone made another booking in a similar name (not mine), this time in Mexico. How do you make a booking using a closed account? I reinstated my account, they still had the details despite asking for all data to be deleted, signed in and cancelled the new booking, but this time they want a cancellation fee. Obvioulsy I will not be paying it. This could all be resolved instantly if the company took fraud seriously but despite me saying both bookings were fraudulent, there has been no contact, and there is no way of contacting customer service, no phone number, nothing. Terrible company, there are far better booking sites out there.

Given unannounced roadworks roads blocking the road I was just glad to see the delivery arrive on time. The app keeps you well informed too.

I was impressed that we were expected and didn't have do anything, we just turned up with the right registration number and got shown to the spot. The only downside was the cost.

I bought a Tassimo My Way 2 coffee machine from their website which has a water jug with a Brita filter, with an LCD indicator to show how much use it has left. The indicator was not working. My wife phoned up customer service to tell them and they agreed on a full refund. However, afterwards I received an email promising a replacement jug instead. When we asked when, we got no reply, they ghost you and have no culture of trying to help. Further phone calls resulted in further promises for a manager to call back. Initially we were told that would be within 48 hours, which we already found unreasonable. The next person we spoke to said it would be a week. Managers are very thin on the ground, it seems

Why a manager anyway, can't normal staff process a refund? Maybe they don't actually give refunds, I see no evidence that they do.

But they have to, that's basic UK consumer law and distance selling regulations, your choice of refund or replacement and the sooner you report the issue the more weight your request has.

Now they will not respond to email. I sent them a final email setting out what I expect from them and if that is ignored I will ask my card issuer for a chargeback.

I would advise people to shop in the real world where you can take things back. The guarantee here is no use if you can't communicate with them.

Trying to check in online for flights 2 days and 9 days out, I was told I couldn't check in online and would have to do so at the airport. Fair enough, but the seats they allocated outward were fine only I couldn't save them without the return seats. Even if I paid for return seats that was impossible because the only seats available were not allowable for children. So, how will turning up at the airport help that situation?

I tried live chat but that was down so I phoned the customer service number and got 3x30 mins wait without an answer.

Is this the level of service we now have to tolerate as the 'new normal'?

I stayed at London City Travelodge in October and found it to be very good, clean, convenient and with spacious rooms. So I tried to book again for February, online.

To cut a long story short, the transactions kept failing even though the authorisation of my credit card went through. I now have 5 payments sitting in a pending state. I didn't imagine that when the website messaged that the booking couldn't be completed, they would still take my money.

I phoned TL (in the morning as they have no customer service whatsoever except in the daytime), I was told the pending transactions would not go through. Fine for me as I'm nowhere near my limit, not so good if you can't afford to have all your spare credit tied up.

But the point that really shocked me is that TL already know there is a problem with certain browsers. Now I use Firefox, along with 4% of Internet users worldwide. Surely the website should work with a common browser like that and be tested against it? Every other webiste I use manages fine with FF.

It's like going back to year 2000, when websites would say 'best used with Internet Explorer' or even 'best used with Netscape' which really meant they just hadn't tested their service properly across all platforms.

My conclusion is, whilst TL have really upped their game in terms of their hotel offering, the technology behind it is still out-of-date. And the solution is to use Microsoft Edge to be on the safe side for now. That's how I finally got the booking through.

Since the introduction of a bot to customer service requests, their service has gone down massively. In early Novemeber I was told that a claim I made had been successful and the cash was 'on its way'. Despite serveral attempts to raise this issue with customer service, firstly via the bot, which is next to useless, and then online chat which never appeared even after an hour's wait, I am still waiting for my payment. Where is it? Does Quidco have it somewhere? Can they not chase the company who supposedly confirmed the cashback? I am tired of this now and very reluctant to use Quido again.

I bought tickets for a show under the Kids Week promotion which was advertised as Les Miserables but turned out to be the concert version, which was unsuitable for my daughter. I asked if a refund was possible, but they said all they could do is change the dates. Fair enough but given it was 3 weeks away we thought we could maybe upgrade to another perfomance with the same threatre group and pay the extra for the new show. We have proposed that but have had no response to our emails, and also, the customer service phone line is out of service. 3 weeks are now 2, so we contacted the threatre who thought it was a reasonable request but said we had to go though See Tickets, as they did the sale transaction. Again, they are uncontactable so we registered at their site to resell the tickets, and option they do offer, but this time the system would not accept our (valid) reference number. At this point we give up but so much for Kids Week encouraging children to go to the threate, the experience has been horrible.

Contrary to the reply below, I was not offered a refund on the tickets by See Tickets and I can provide email evidence of this if necessary. I only obtained a refund in the end by contacting the Kids Week organisation, not though See Tickets who were of no help whatsoever.

Ebay will do nothing to stop shill bidding. I bought an item which had a shill bid and ebay themselves even noticed and deleted the shill account. I complained on the basis the shill bid made me pay more than I should have. Their resposnse was to arrange a return which I did not want and the seller then sent me abusive text messages. When I failed to return the itemsthey deleted my feedback which warned that the seller was a shill bidder, which was absolutely obvious anyway. So I was defrauded and abused but ebay sided with the seller. I then closed my (20 years) account because no-one from customer services would talk to me.

I have no choice but to buy overpriced uniform from this shop. They were once reasonable, fulfilling orders quite quickly even though their shops were rarely open. Now, they are saying they can only deliver (at cost by Hermes!) because the government has ordered them to close their shops. This is utter nonsense as all shops can open even under Tier 3. All orders are responded to by an email warning of delays because of 'unprecedented numbers of late orders'. Come on, it's December now, please stop using that excuse. There is an appalling lack of communication and orders are posted without warning. I just received a half fulfilled order a day later than the courier advised, with no warning at all from the supplier it had even been dispatched. If I could persuade the school to use a different supplier then I would.

Eurocamp have cancelled my holdiay and point blank refused to refund. They have had my money for 12 weeks, earning interest on it, and will not refund, as they have to under UK law. Do not even consider using this company. I have been a customer for 22 years and ignored falling standards, but never again.

I subscribed to Nespresso beause I do actually like their coffee and wanted the option for free delivery on just 50 pods, and everything went well until I placed my first order. It was initially confirmed and then put on hold by their finance department because I chose to have it delivered to one of their nominated delivery centres. Now, if this is a problem, why do they offer it as an option? I spoke to an incredibly rude customer service member who told me 'finance wanted to speak to me' as if I had committed some offence. To make matters worse, my whole account was locked so I couldn't even get in to review my order. So I cancelled my order, closed my subscription and asked for a refund. Well done Nespresso, customer service at its finest.

Parent pay is unable to process card payments this morning, so my daughter is unable to eat. This is a regular occurrence but ParentPay say they are great. Here is my last response:

'ParentPay has excellent performance levels but as with any high volume website, there will be occasional issues and we apologise for any impact these inevitably have on parents.'

Yes, these occasional issues happen nearly every Monday morning. But never mind, the system works at 5am on Wednesday. That's a comfort. Complacent doesn't even begin to describe it.

I have used Quidco for years now and generally got a good service, with transactions tracking and being paid out eventually in nearly every case. However, it seems to me that something is going wrong recently.

My last two transactions for larger ticket services have failed to track. I have raised claims, but even the Quidco advice (that you might want to cancel and start again) doesn't give you much hope. So I though it would be fair to review the service for one of the providers to warn other users but, my review was rejected and I got a stern email telling me off. One of the rules says you can't leave a review just about the feedback yet the last available review for the service provider does exactly that - presumably it wasn't banned because it was positive.

Overall the impression I get is that Quidco want to suppress criticism rather than respond positively to it and try to resolve issues with their service. I will not be using them in future.

It seems like there is another 'isolated' issue with ParentPay today.

We’re Fixing It
We have identified a technical issue with the ParentPay service
Parents will not be able to log in right now
We’re working to bring all services back online as soon as we can

I have come to expect the system not to work on a Monday, but a Thursday outage is a new one. My daughter has no money for lunch. Thanks, ParentPay.

I have just left BT and all I feel is a sense of relief. I had an 18 month contract following on from an initial year. and in that time, the price went up twice. Never mind, I was offered a new deal for the old price with the added bonus of doubling my data allowance for the 3 mobile accounts I have with them. So I tried to take it up online, and after proceeding, any mention of this data allowance disappeared. So I phoned the number given instead to check the terms. After waiting 30 minutes without reply on two occasions I thought to myself, if I were running a business where I actually cared about my customers, I think I might man the phones, especially on a dedicated line for contract renewals.

Anyway, I left a month early and had to pay a small goodbye payment, which was well worth it given the incentives I was given to move (reduced payments, bill credits and separate cashback) and now have a better service which was installed without any fuss. The weird thing was, every time I've left a contract before, I've had calls offering me a better deal, but not this time. There was a message displayed on My BT saying that I could get a better deal, but I had to phone them. How lazy is that? Anyway, given that they never answer their phone, I didn't waste my time.

My daughter will not eat today, and not for the first time due to Parent Pay. Why schools use this, I do not know. There must be better systems.

It must be Monday.

Seriously, when are you going to invest in new servers to sort this out? Your service is a disgrace, and no, I don't need a bland message telling me to contact your customer service department, who aren't allowed telephones.

I am forced to use ParentPay for my daughter's school meals. This normally works well enough, even if navigating the system is clunky and clumsy and response times are slow despite me having a very fast Internet connection.

Today, two transactions have failed with a 'fatal error'. There is no guidance as to what that error might be or any indication of what stage the transaction reached. Worse still, there is no telephone customer service system, so now I am unable to add funds for my daughter's lunch today. I have used the email system and await their response but past experience of this type of customer service has not been good.

I have worked in IT for financial systems and everything has to be secure, safe an reliable. I see no evidence of this in the ParentPay system, it's hit and miss. Not good enough, I'm afraid.

Finally got a payment through after a 90 second wait. Halfway through a bank authorisation screen popped up and then a 'nearly there' comfort message. This clearly shows the issue is their server response times. So why not fix that instead of telling us we are 'nearly there'? It's just not good enough.