Trading Standards - corrections not welcome

If you are trying to find out about Trading Standards, it seems that all roads lead to www.tradingstandards.gov.uk - a site that has quite a lot of useful information, but which seems to offer absolutely no way in which the user can feedback on errors.

If you search for information on the law regarding "Hotels" (using the Site Search - which doesn't work with Firefox browsers) the results include a document mis-labelled as applying to England, Wales and Northern Ireland - when a small note at the bottom of the document actually reveals that it applies to Scotland only. I wanted to report this, and to suggest that the geographical scope of each document would best be put at the top so that the user could spot any other errors before wasting time reading the whole document.

How does the public-spirited person tell "Trading Standards Central" this?

It seems that you don't. Their website offers no contact details, and its Site Search offers no hits for "Webmaster" or anything else I could think might help. The authors of the site appear to be a company that doesn't bother to have its own website - attempts to find them lead back to ... the same website that has the problems.

There is no fax number offered, and no phone number.

I can forgive people making mistakes, but what sort of organisation is it that is so reluctant to hear about problems that they make it impossible to tell them?

No cheap train trips for the young or the poor?

Under-18s (and some people on low incomes) are being prevented from buying lower-priced rail tickets

If it's not easy to get to a staffed railway station (and from where I live the nearest is a 30-mile round trip), then travelling any distance by train affordably means that you are going to have to book in advance, online - it can cost nine times as much if you just show up at the station and buy a "walk-up" ticket.

But if you are under 18, you can't. Nor can you if you are a migrant worker who can't yet open a proper bank or credit card account. Or just someone who doesn't feel they want to risk running up a debt.

Why, because Trainline (the quasi-monopolist who run the largest online website, and provide the engine for every other service, as far as I can see) won't accept Maestro Solo or Visa Electron cards online. And those are the only cards that an under-18 (or someone without a credit history) is likely to be offered by a bank.

Why? Trainline only reveal "This is due to the nature of these cards, which are issued under different agreements." - not exactly illuminating.

My guess is that the acceptance procedure is more complicated: these cards don't allow you to overdraw, so authorisation requires a realtime check with the issuing bank - they need to confirm that there is enough in the account to pay for the transaction. And that seems to be more effort than Trainline can be bothered with.

It is clearly possible to manage online purchases with these cards - teenagers are happily buying lots of online stuff with these cards.

If Trainline were one of several alternative online booking systems, it might be OK to let market economics persuade them that they would lose business to a competitor that was willing to take the trouble to get their systems working with these cards.

But as a quasi-monopolist, Trainline's laziness is more of a worry.

Banks spend a small fortune subsidising children's accounts - to get them settled as customers at a young age. The BBC used to give out free "Radio 4 sampler" tapes to new students for the same purpose.

We need to encourage youngsters to get familiar with booking a train trip when they want to travel.

So shouldn't someone be kicking bottoms at Trainline to stop them actively preventing youngsters from using our trains?

eBay doesn't do Zero

Once a child has learnt to count to ten, they are introduced to the concept of "Place Value" and the concept of Zero as a placeholder - that a "2" in the "tens" column means 20 - and that we use the zero to fill the columns that don't have a value.

Most kids get this by the time they are seven or eight.

eBay doesn't understand Zero or "Place Value". Look down a list of items for auction - in "finishes soonest" order to see when the auction ends and you see something like this:

At a first glance, the "7d 49m" and "9d 34m" look as if they are out of order, but in fact, this list is in strict time order. It seems that eBay just don't do zero. A simple fix to their software could change "7d 49m" to "7d 00h 49m" and the user could run their eye down the column of figures with much greater ease. I've written to eBay(tricky if you are trying to tell them something they don't explicitly expect you to be saying to them, but I persevered) and they have acknowledged my response - and done nothing. How wonderful it must be to work for a company that is so affluent and powerful that it can afford to be so lazy.

How can Government Departments be so dim?

Getting people to make enquiries by email, rather than phone, can save a lot of resources. But people aren't going to use email unless you offer a sensible turn-around time for replies.

If you had lots of enquiries coming at you, how would you rather they arrived:

As email, which:

• obliges the author to think about exactly what they are asking (without taking your time while they do it)
• can be queued up so that the enquiry handlers' time can be used efficiently
• may be readily dealt with by sending a ready-made reply, so saving lots of effort

OR

as a Phone call, which:

• may involve the caller rambling before you can find out what they really want
• which requires you to deal with it in "real time" - you can only queue it up for a few minutes
• cannot really be offered a "recorded announcement" even if the question they ask is one that you often encounter

But try being a good cost-concerned citizen, and what do you find? Whilst standards for answering the phone are measured in minutes, or even seconds, the target for responding to emails is rather more leisurely.

The last time I needed to contact DCMS - Department of Culture, Media and Sport - a couple of weeks ago, they promised of a response "within 20 working days" if I chose to use email.

So I phoned instead - and got a same-day answer, but probably used up considerably more Civil Servant time than if I had used email.

# posted by John Geddes @ 11:26 AM 0 comments links to this post

Ryanair: institutional contempt for passengers?

Buy a Ryanair ticket, and you get told very firmly: Check in at least 40 minutes before you fly, or you don't go. Firm, but at least clear from the outset.

But when you do check in, you discover an extra rule - be at the Departure Gate by the time written on your Boarding Pass or you don't fly. It says this in big red letters on the back of the Boarding Pass.

On the surface, that seems fair enough too. But wait. The time they are demanding you get to the gate is (from two recent experiences) 40 minutes before takeoff. So if you check in close to the deadline there is no possible way that you are going to meet this rule. And whilst they clearly do need you to be at the gate in time to load the plane, when did you ever see the doors of a Ryanair flight closed at even 25 minutes before takeoff?

Example from Liverpool Airport:

• Departure at 06.30
• Check-in deadline 05.50
• Gate deadline 05.50
  

So if you check in at 05.40 (10 minutes clear of the deadline that you were given when booking) you find that you have just 10 minutes to get through security, and walk to the gate. At larger airports the walking alone could take more than that. And queues for security can take far, far longer at any airport.

Ryanair know this, but they still tell passengers that 40-minute checkin is acceptable, and then issue an impossible-to-appease threat to the passenger who has met their rule.

Experienced travellers know when they can get away with 40-minute checkin and when that is dangerous. And they know that as long as you have managed to check in a bag, then being late at the gate is the airline's problem rather than yours - if they did want to fly without you, security rules require that they would have to leave your checked-in bag behind too, and currently that involves going through the bags in the hold, one by one to find yours (RFID may change this, I guess). And that is not a five-minute task.

But less-experienced passengers won't know that this an empty threat. And these people will suffer a lot of extra - and quite unnecessary - stress from reaching the 40-minute "gate deadline" time when they are still stuck in a queue for security.

At the very least this extra stress makes flying less pleasant, and reduces passengers' propensity to travel in future. At worst, the passengers' extra stress adds to the general stress in the queues, and makes life more miserable for even the experienced travellers. One might expect this to excite Ryanair as important, but seemingly not.

And (although I am sure that this doesn't excite Rynaiar at all) I guess that airport security staff would preferred dealing with less-stressed passengers.

Why do Ryanair do it?

When it comes to earning money, Ryanair don't miss a trick. But one occasionally one wonders whether their approach to Customer Care is a little warped. In choosing a low-frills airline, the customer should understand that some of the missing "frills" will be in Customer Service. But at Ryanair, one sometimes senses that they have developed an institutional indifference to the customer's sensibilities - and some of what they do makes you wonder if they are getting close to downright contempt for their passengers.

Once upon a time, I used to write directly to companies about this sort of idiocy, but the rarity of a sensible reply led me to give that up as a waste of time. But if anyone from Ryanair does happen upon this item, I would be pleased to add your comments to this posting.