SayNoTo1890.com

Thanks to Annette at Interactions for this tip off - the geographical alternative for the Tesco Personal Finance Loans 1850 520 520 number.

• Tesco Personal Finance Loans 1850 520 520 - Call 01 280 8441

When you get through to the Tesco reception, you’ll have to ask nicely though to be put through to the Personal Finance Loans section though. Check out this post here to see more about the reason for this.

One of the primary reasons for this SayNoTo1890.com website is to help you save money on your mobile phone bill, as well on your landline bill.

The TopTips.ie website has recently published a series of top tips which will help you cut your mobile phone costs by even more.

Click here to find out more about how to save even more money.

Sarah McInerney and Jan Battles
The Sunday Times, September 27th, 2008

ASAI set to call on ComReg to investigate pricing anomoly

“LO-CALL” numbers, set up by state agencies and businesses to save callers money, cost up to 49c a minute when dialled from a mobile phone.

The cost of phoning 1890, 1850 and 0818 numbers is shared by businesses, but only if the caller is on a landline. Because mobile phone operators treat these numbers as “non-standard calls”, consumers are being charged at normal rates and don’t get to use their minute allowance. As a result, it is much cheaper to call a business’s normal landline instead of the supposedly low-cost alternative.

The Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland (ASAI) is to raise the anonmaly with ComReg, the telecommunications regulator. “There is definitely an issue here of consumer knowledge, and we will be having a discussion with ComReg about it,” said Orla Twomey, its assistant chief executive.

In a bid to help mobile phone users circumvent lo-call numbers, Diarmuid MacShane, a consumer watchdog, has established Saynoto1890.com. “The 1890 numbers were set up to allow consumers call national businesses at local rates,” he said. “This works fine if you call from a landline. For example, the Eircom lo-call rate is about 5c per minute. Yet mobile phone companies are charging much more for the same call. It defeats the purpose of having a lo-call number.”

MacShane has found alternative landline numbers for the Financial Regulator, the Data Protection Commissioner and ComReg. “I’ve just managed to get a normal landline number for e-Flow,” he said.

He has also posted a list of prices charged by different mobile companies for phoning to lo-call numbers. Vodafone is the most expensive — its pre-pay customers are charged 49c per minute during peak times for a call to an 1890 number. The cost for “pay monthly” customers ranges from 18-35c.

O2 customers are charged 35c per minute for lo-call numbers, while Meteor’s are levied at 15c per minute.

Dermott Jewell, chief executive of the Consumers’ Association of Ireland, has criticised mobile phone companies’ refusal to include lo-call numbers in minute bundles. “The onus needs to come heavily on mobile providers to change their package deals,” he said. “Now that ComReg is aware of this, I would be surprised if something was not done.”

In its defence Vodafone said that “mobile offers the mobility that landline customers do not benefit from. It is important when considering value to the customer to consider the overall pricing structure rather than one price in particular”.

O2 said it charges a flat rate of 35c per minute to “ensure transparency” and the exclusion of some non-standard calls from bundled minutes on price plans is “standard industry practice”.

Meanwhile the National Consumer Agency has begun an investigation after O2 customers discovered that account upgrades they had earned had been revoked. Dozens of users found that the upgrades had disappeared when they went to use them.

The customers have been told that the eligibility criteria had changed and they need to spend more money on calls if the upgrade is to be reinstated.

One user on Talk2O2, the company’s online forum, said: “If I had been told by the customer service agent who gave me the reference number that the upgrade was only going to be valid for two weeks, I would have upgraded immediately.”

O2 said: “It is standard industry practice to review and update criteria [for mobile phone upgrades] on an ongoing basis. Such reviews result in both increased and decreased entitlements to upgrading customers depending on the time of review.”

The company said anybody who rang customer care, or was called by customer care to advise them they were eligible for an upgrade in the last 90 days, is still entitled to it. Customers entitled to an upgrade but who did nothing about it have lost out.

Following our post earlier in the week, we received a couple of more e-mails from readers of this site with some other alternative numbers for different other Bank of Ireland services and contact phone numbers.

The first of these is for the Bank of Ireland Customer Care Unit. This is where you’d go if you have a complaint about any Bank of Ireland service area.

• Bank Of Ireland Customer Care Unit 1850 753 357 - Call 01 661 5933

Here’s the geographical alternative phone number for the Financial Services Ombudsman if you feel that a complaint about your bank or other financial institution hasn’t been dealt with correctly.

• Financial Services Ombudsman 1890 88 20 90 - Call 01 662 0899

Thanks to the SayNoTo1890.com reader who, after some over and back with Bank Of Ireland customer services, was able to provide us with this alternative number for the Bank Of Ireland Insurance Services department.

Bank of Ireland

• Insurance Services 1890 604 604 - Call 01 462 0222

Based on some research that we did recently, we think that this alternative number should work as well.

• Insurance Services 1890 604 604 - Call 703 9800

If you have any other alternative numbers, e-mail us via the contact page.

Thanks to the NRA, we now have a geographical alternative local number for the eFlow Customer Service centre.

• eFlow Customer Service 1890 50 10 50 - Call 01 6602511 and select the eFlow call centre option

If you have a contract with any of the mobile or landline providers that provides you with bundles of minutes each month, you can now call this number instead of the 1890 number. These calls will then come from your minutes bundle rather than you being charged upwards of 35c per minute.

We all know that 1850 is a CallSave number, and that 1890 is a Locall number and that 0818 is a National Rate number. But do you know how much you’ll pay to call each of these numbers?

Check out our analysis on the Call Costs analysis of the costs of calling these numbers from most of the phone service providers available in Ireland.

Reading all that - the costs don’t really seem all that lo, or that you’re going to save all that much.

As a total aside for this site, I thought I’d mention about the fact that the Cirque Du Soleil show Quidam is coming to Dublin next March/April.

If you’ve never seen a Cirque Du Soleil show, I would highly recommend it. You can check out clips on YouTube but these don’t do the live experience justice.

The tickets go on sale on Friday 19th via TicketMaster. Unless you’re registered on the Cirque Du Soleil site - where you can get a link to buy your tickets now.

Now, the tickets are €69.50 which is pretty steep, and there’s the usual crazy €6.50 per ticket administration charge for Ticketmaster, but the show is most definitely worth the money. Check it out if you can!

There’s been lots of people coming to this site recently looking for the costs of calling various customer service 190* numbers. I wasn’t sure what they all meant, so I did some checking. Here is the listing for the companies to which these numbers are allocated.

The theory behind these numbers is that they’re free for the customers of the networks themselves. So, for me, 1909 is free when I call from my mobile. Unsurprisingly I suppose, there is no information on the O2 website on how much it might cost me to call 1901, 1906 or any of the other numbers above. A quick check of the Vodafone and Eircom websites reveals the same scenario - 1907 is free for Vodafone BillPay customers, and 1901 is free for Eircom customers, but no cost information on calling the other numbers.

You should be aware that in some situations, you actually won’t be able to call some of these numbers if you’re on a different network.