Shamelessly posting to help people!

[Quveas]

I will be honest, I thought about putting this in Money, but a lot of them don't have much traffic, and I thought this may help some people struggling for money right now.

I'm with Virgin media - TV and fibre broadband, 12 months into an 18 month package with Sky TV included. Yesterday I got a (tone deaf) letter from them saying that they were struggling to pay their bills due to the enregy crisis and cost of living etc (how sad) so they were increasing my monthly bill by 27.7% !!!!! And that is before they attempted to increase the cost in September at the end of the contract (which wouldn't have happened as I'd have walked first).

Anyway, the moral of this story is do your research and then phone them to cancel. I costed every alternative package that was similar / met what I needed - INCLUDING the one that they offer new customers (same package as mine) - and they ALL came in cheaper than what I was currently paying. So I phoned to cancel. First they offered me £7.50 pm off before I even got through (no thanks). Then customer services, after some discussion, offered me no price rise at all. I continued to point out that this was still more expensive than they charged new customers and than competitors charged for similar. I rattled on nicely about loyalty and how they treated new customers better than us etc. And two interesting things happened.

One - the offered me a new 18 month contract at £11 lower than I currently pay to match the new customer package. Result!
Two - the very nice advisor pointed out that from 1st April, due to new legislation, they are not supposed to charge existing customers more than new customers anyway! Pretty sure he wasn't supposed to tell me that.

So they are rushing through price rises now in the hope that you'll be grateful and grab the £7.50 offer everyone is getting instead, or take whatever the first or second offer this week is so they don't have to offer you whatever next weeks new customer offers are (which he said will be higher than they are this week).

So if you are affected by the price rise, arm yourself with some facts and don't take any offers until you see the whites of their eyes 😁

Thanks for the reminder, just made the call and sorted mine out - no rise.

To be fair I do have a huge discount already so happy with that. He advised me to call 2 months before contract ends to secure the best discount next time around, so have popped that date in my diary.

Yes I had a discounted package already too, which I was happy with until they decided to increase it so much. But happy my pacakge has actually now gone down without losing anything on the service. Definitely less than a couple of hours of research paid off well. I am just amazed how many people continue to pay what they are told to pay instead of pushing back.