Reader's Forum: Have Your Say

Tesco computer says no: Fiona Cooke checked her bank account lastweek and had around [euro]80 in it, so she took herself off to Tescoin the Merrion Centre in Dublin to do her shopping.

She spent [euro]70.85, gave them her card and entered her pin.The keypad read "transaction aborted".

She was told that the store had had problems with the card systemand the staff member tried again. "No joy. Bewildered, I gave him[euro]15 cash from my wallet and tried yet again. It still wouldn'tgo through so he directed me to an ATM opposite the juice bar." Sheput her details in and got the message we all dread: "insufficientfunds".

She went back to the till and said she'd leave it, but since he'dput the [euro]15 through, he apparently couldn't do that. "Heprinted off my receipt and directed me to the customer service desk,telling me that they'd had better luck with other customers' cards."At customer service, the card was tried again with the same result.She logged on to her bank account from a public internet accesspoint - only to see that her account balance had reduced by [euro]70and some cents. She phoned her bank and was told that the "Tescotransaction for [euro]70.85 was somewhere in the electronic etherand the funds were unavailable to me." Tesco didn't have the cashbut the bank could not return it to her until Tesco's system voidedor returned the transaction.

"I was very annoyed with my bank, but in fairness they did offerme an immediate overdraft which was not an option I was prepared totake. I've been very careful not to go into the red." She went backto the customer service desk and was told they could keep the goodsovernight if she wanted to come back the following day and pay forthem (again). "That wasn't about to happen either. I needed thegroceries and by making the funds unavailable to me I couldn't evenpurchase them elsewhere. I eventually asked my father for his creditcard details and paid the balance of [euro]55 with that." The dutymanager contacted Tesco's IT support and was told there was no issuewith their machines.

"I'd just like to offer my experience to any other Tescocustomers out there. Unless you have access to significant funds anddon't mind Tesco holding on to multiple amounts of your bill, payingby cash is a sensible option. Shopping elsewhere is another."

We contacted Tesco and a spokesman said that having investigatedthe matter "it would appear that when trying to process thecustomer's card at the checkout, a security blocking mechanism wasactivated. This resulted in the cost of the shopping beingtemporarily frozen by the bank. We would like to apologise to thecustomer for the inconvenience caused and will be contacting herdirectly. There are no indications of any problems with our systemin the Merrion store last Wednesday."

Not a case of vive la difference

Seamus Walsh came across a small but peculiar pricing anomaly onthe Al Italia website. Flights booked through the French languageversion of the site cost [euro]5 less than those booked through theIrish region part of the site. Recently he was booking a flight fromCDG (Paris) to FCO (Rome) on alitalia.com. "The homepage asks,through a drop-down menu, your country of residence. I chooseFrance, seeing as I'm currently living in Paris. I filled out thetravel dates and number of passengers and was presented with a costof [euro]121.41." He then stopped and decided to go through the sameprocess but with the English language version.

"I use a service called tripit.com to scan my inbox. Itautomatically scrapes any flight/hotel/train confirmation e-mailsand auto-imports them into their site, it's a very handy travelorganisation tool. The tripit website seems to support only English,so I assumed it wouldn't be able to handle a flight confirmation e-mail in French and would throw a wobbler." He went back toalitalia.com and choose Ireland as his country of residence. "Thealitalia website doesn't give an option to change language as thisseems contingent on your place of residence, so in order to get anEnglish language version with euro as the currency, you need tochoose Ireland. I entered the same flight details and behold, allthe flight prices were exactly [euro]5 extra ([euro]126.41 for myparticular one)."

We decided to give it a whirl. We went to the site and said wewere resident in France and wanted to fly to Rome from Paris inJune. We were given a price of [euro]121.40. We then said we livedin Ireland and wanted to fly to Rome from Paris on the same datesand, sure enough, we were asked to pay another fiver.