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IanS100
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Joined: May 05, 2008
Posts: 870
Location: Southport
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 Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 12:32 pm Post subject: Live Services Fuel Price Inaccuracies |
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These posts onwards were separated out from HERE, which was a thread about TT LIve Fuel prices service not working. That issue was resolved by help from members by the end of one page and all the following posts went off topic into this accuracy debate. I have split the posts off in order to leave the original topic unsullied by five pages which don't have any bearing on the original problem. Dividing the topic at this particular point is no reflection on IanS100, whose posts are completely innocent of causing me offence. It's simply that this post was the first point at which I could split off the surplus without taking away the last useful bit from the original thread.
DennisN
According to PetrolPrices.com the cheapest diesel within 20 miles is £1.179 yet live services inform me that one garage 28 miles away has diesel at £1.00 & a further 13 garages charge between £1.03p & £1.14 - I don't think I'll be driving 28 miles to find out though[/b] |
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IanS100
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Joined: May 05, 2008
Posts: 870
Location: Southport
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| Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 1:01 pm Post subject: |
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| I've just taken a load of screen grabs showing TomTom Live crazy & worse than useless petrol prices which I'd like to send to TomTom complete with letter of complaint - is there an email address that I can use rather than their online support ticket to which I won't be able to attach the zip file? |
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mikealder
Pocket GPS Moderator
Joined: Jan 14, 2005
Posts: 19638
Location: Blackpool , Lancs
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| Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 1:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Why not add them to this thread then send TT the URL to the thread via their support submission ticket, at least doing this also lets others see how good/ bad/ useless the system currently is - Mike |
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IanS100
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Joined: May 05, 2008
Posts: 870
Location: Southport
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| Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 2:19 pm Post subject: |
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Excellent Idea, thanks Mike
All the screen grabs can be found at:- http://tinyurl.com/y4z9jjp
They have all been taken today (17 April) & demonstrate the accuracy of TomTom Live Services Petrol Prices information - considering Live Services was the main reason I upgraded from the 520 it's been a big disappointment 
PS. All distances given are from PR8 (Southport)
Edit once to add some picture link codes - Mike Alder |
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mikealder
Pocket GPS Moderator
Joined: Jan 14, 2005
Posts: 19638
Location: Blackpool , Lancs
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| Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 2:39 pm Post subject: |
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Ian, Never realised you were a local!
If you click the edit button on your post above you will see the image codes I have added in to your post, you can get these text strings from the Photobucket site by simply putting your mouse over the picture and a "pop up" will appear, simply click in the IMG Code text, right click and select "copy", then in your thread on PGPSW right click in the area you want the picture and select "Paste" use the "Preview" button to double check its as you want it then hit the "Submit" button - Mike |
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IanS100
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Joined: May 05, 2008
Posts: 870
Location: Southport
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| Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 3:05 pm Post subject: |
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Cheers & thanks again, I'll remember for next time. I think those 5 pics are enough to give the general idea, even I got bored snipping all 17 screen grabs & I'll write to TomTom this evening including the link, although they didn't respond to my last complaint so I'm not overly confident they will this.
I didn't realise you were local either, my parents come from your side of the water & I'm there most weeks on business - it's a small world |
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PaulB2005
Pocket GPS Moderator
Joined: Jan 04, 2006
Posts: 9323
Location: Durham, UK
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| Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 3:32 pm Post subject: |
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When i pushed TT, last year, for a comment on the usefulness of data where "Prices may be up to 5 days old" their response was that the service was to give drivers an indication of which locations may be the cheapest in the area.
I'm not sure that's how it's advertised mind...  |
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Andy_P
Pocket GPS Moderator
Joined: Jun 04, 2005
Posts: 19991
Location: West and Southwest London
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| Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 10:36 pm Post subject: |
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I've got an ongoing complaint in with TomTom about this...
When I said there were dozens of stupid prices, they insisted on exact details of specific locations.
Twice now I have given them a stack of details and photographs of specific petrol stations, and to their credit, they have passed them on to their 'data suppliers' (I wonder who that is?) and those particular examples have nbeen removed.
But they never seemed to grasp that it was a much wider problem.
My last email to them was this:
| Quote: | I'm glad to hear that the examples I gave have now been corrected, but they STILL haven't grasped the idea that there are LOADS more examples of the same problem.
I cannot go and visit every one of them and give the detailed reports I did before, there are just too many of them.
Petrol in the UK is currently around £1.19p/litre to £1.20 p/litre and the VERY cheapest is around £1.175p/litre. These prices have been steady or rising for months.
But when I ask the TomTom to give me the latest fuel prices, if I look at "Cheapest nearby" I STILL have one station within 2.2 miles of me quoted as 1.07p/litre
and if I look in "Cheapest in area", the first 22 places listed are all quoted at £1.16 or less with the cheapest being £1.00.
NONE of those is remotely beleavable.
I can repeat the experiment anywhere in the country with similar results.
There's still a very big unsolved problem. |
and I'm glad to say, they might have got the idea now, as I got this reply only a couple of days ago:
| Quote: | Thank you for your email update. If the problem with the fuel stations is that widespread then I will have to escalate the case again to see if they have any information on how the fuel prices work, and why the prices are very incorrect for many petrol stations. Please bear with me again, and I'm very sorry for the inconvenience this is causing.
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IanS100
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Joined: May 05, 2008
Posts: 870
Location: Southport
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| Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 12:51 am Post subject: |
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| Complaint sent to TomTom complete with links - watch this space |
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Andy_P
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Joined: Jun 04, 2005
Posts: 19991
Location: West and Southwest London
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| Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 2:02 am Post subject: |
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You may well find, Ian, that most of your places with VERY low prices actually don't exist
Some of my examples included:
1. a Shell service station on the North Circular Road which turned out to be a Tyre yard and HSS Hire shop
2. another Shell service station in Stonebridge Park which was a Mechanical engineers and auto electricians.
3. an Asda superstore that sold petrol in Barnet, which was a private house in a completely residential area
4. a BP station in Yeading which was another private house BUT only 200yds from a real BP station, ALSO on their list (showing no prices currently) but with the same phone number (confusing eh?)
5. another BP station in Wandsworth, that WAS a petrol station about two years ago, but I remember it being bulldozed to make way for a block of new flats. (it was on my route from work to my mother's house so I remember it well).
All of which makes a mockery of their claim that he prices may be "up to 5 days old"!
You might like to point them at THIS TOPIC too. |
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IanS100
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Joined: May 05, 2008
Posts: 870
Location: Southport
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| Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 8:23 am Post subject: |
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Hi Andy, I am sure that you're right & how TomTom can get this so wrong in a subscription based service when PetrolPrices.com can get in so right with a completely FREE service escapes me. I certainly wouldn't find much consolation in finding that I'd just driven miles out of my way only to find that the £1.00 per litre indicated by TomTom actually turns out to be the price for a loaf of bread at the local Spar!!
As I pointed out to TomTom in my complaint, my upgrade from 520 to 550 Live Services was greatly influenced by their much vaunted Live Services with the promise of HD Traffic & the prospect of saving money with the latest Petrol Prices. Unfortunately the reality has not lived up to the promise & my 12 month subscription to Live Services is not looking such good value for money, particularly as some 3 weeks later I could've had it FOC |
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Orac1
Banned
Joined: Apr 02, 2010
Posts: 38
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| Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2010 7:39 pm Post subject: |
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| IanS100 wrote: | Hi Andy, I am sure that you're right & how TomTom can get this so wrong in a subscription based service when PetrolPrices.com can get in so right with a completely FREE service escapes me. I certainly wouldn't find much consolation in finding that I'd just driven miles out of my way only to find that the £1.00 per litre indicated by TomTom actually turns out to be the price for a loaf of bread at the local Spar!!
As I pointed out to TomTom in my complaint, my upgrade from 520 to 550 Live Services was greatly influenced by their much vaunted Live Services with the promise of HD Traffic & the prospect of saving money with the latest Petrol Prices. Unfortunately the reality has not lived up to the promise & my 12 month subscription to Live Services is not looking such good value for money, particularly as some 3 weeks later I could've had it FOC |
This isn't rocket science. I used to work for a data collection company. Some data collection companies put quality at the forefront of what they do. Other data collection companies are led by starry eyed marketing led hype merchants who have no idea at all of the difficulty of providing the next data feature properly in terms of the resources and other commitments of the company but they sell the product anyway because they think the data grunts will always miraculously deliver for them. If the data grunts have no one who is well paid and well motivated directly in charge of maintenance then basic weeding out of dead records and removal of records outside the plausible ranges (basic safeguards that all databases should have to remain credible) goes to hell.
In all of my dealings with both TomTom and their equally devious and now wholly owned map maintaining sidekick called Teleatlas I have never found that actually fixing problems mattered to them and instead their approach has always been the worst sort of large company nonsense that pretends the problem does not actually exist and/or that they are working on the problem when they are actually in reality consigning it to an ever growing electronic mountain of discontented individual customer reports that will not be individually actioned.
The only way that a company like TomTom thinks a problem needs taking seriously is if there are enough complaints in total under a particular complaint heading and not because any of the individual complaints are totally valid and show massive deficiencies in particular areas of service. I suppose this may be like the old idea in air safety that only enough body bags cause an expensive to address but serious safety problem to finally be properly addressed.
The bottom line is that collection of current fuel prices is not TomTom's core business and they have proven over many months that they are clearly not capable of doing it properly in the UK so why on earth do they not outsource the task to petrolprices.com who can do it very well indeed and I am sure would not want a very large payment per TomTom Live unit serviced. To me the non existent petrol stations when I am in an area I don't know and its late at night are even more of a worry than the stations with prices too high.
TomTom Support's responses on this subject are deliberately deceitful. When I pressed one of their operators that she knew the data was obviously rubbish and that TomTom were just too lazy to do anything about it she deliberately cut me off (it was just before their closing time at 6.30pm and I knew it would be hopeless to try and call back at that time). This is sadly all too often the way that customer services staff at companies who are told to spout corporate lies in response to frequently mentioned customer discontents usually tend to behave.
There are so many glaring errors with their petrol prices database that one just cannot take seriously their indications that they need specific satellite co-ordinates in order to locate the garage. They have these GPS co-ordinates themselves anyway to show you the garage on the Satnav unit and navigate you to it and you should be able to track a garage location to give to TomTom (not GPS coordinates but an old fashioned road name and number and town or village) from the address given by the Go unit on the individual information screen of the unit for that petrol station if you touch the petrol price and brand in the list shown on screen.
Just looking at my home address my Go Live lists a so called Waitrose petrol station is shown as only 1.1 miles from me. Well Waitrose do not actually have petrol stations of their own in either of my two nearest towns (both do have a Waitrose) and both those towns are over 7 miles away and the nearest garage to me is a Murco and the only other brand it has ever been in the last 100 years before that was Shell. Then they also list a former BP station 3.4 miles north of me on the dual carriageway that was redeveloped in to a small housing estate at least 6 to 7 years ago. This is long before the Live services were ever created. Now admittedly neither of these stations have prices but just a -- and one is always well advised if low on fuel never to navigate to a station in TomTom's list with -- pricing. Unfortunately TomTom also then has plenty of stations with nice cheap looking prices that do not exist either.
The Live petrol prices function usually yielding the greatest hit of incorrect petrol prices in Live Services is Cheapest In Area where a list of around 10 stations with the cheapest prices that don't exist or haven't supplied a new price to Tom in many weeks is always guaranteed.
Just looking at my unit now. The cheapest price in Area shown is 1.07 at Miscellaneous in Bangor Close, Northolt. When I telephone them they told me the only fuel they stocked was Calor Gas and they had never kept petrol. The next cheapest is a Sainsburys on the Whitechapel Road in Mile End that does do fuel but when I have rung them before have always agreed the current price is far higher than the one TomTom is showing. They seem to have no explanation as to why the fuel price for their site is not being updated properly in the TomTom database. They certainly are not doing Unleaded for the 1.09p per litre shown by TomTom. Then next we have a Total garage on the A321 in Sandhurst showing a price of 1.10p per litre but it has no phone number. My previous checking indicated that all the large brand name garages in TomTom's list with no phone number shown and an implausibly low price usually do not actually exist. Then we have Miscellaneous at 1.11 with no phone number in Four Elms on the B2027 but no phone number. This would be an independent if it existed but I'm pretty sure it has closed down (as so many independents in small villages have) and if it has not then the petrol price is simply at least two months old. Then at 1.11 per litre for Unleaded there is a Shell station at Arthur Road in Windsor. When I last went past this station it was fenced off and closed down. My experience of using the Live petrol prices feature shows that this TomTom data supplier frequently fails to stop supplying prices for stations that close down for many months for rebuilding projects.
To cut a long story short as someone with 18 years experience of collecting regularly maintained data feeds before I entered my current resting from the labour market state it is obvious to me that TomTom have stupidly agreed to buy their UK petrol price data from some party of other who don't know what are they doing because it is cheap. They are not buying it from petrolprices.com because presumably they are too tight fisted to pay what petrolprices.com would like them to pay. I suppose some unrealistic TomTom excecutive far away in Holand could even just have issued instructions for prices to be fed in to the existing petrol station POI database that could only be downloaded to your units and maintained by PC, this of course again has not been maintained properly by the company. The disgraceful out of dateness of this petrol price database shows its head almost everywhere as for instance a large Texaco site near my mother's house near Slough that was traded to Texaco several years ago by Shell (at least five years ago and more like ten years ago) under some EU wide competition deal where Shell got rid of a load of UK major sites. But this site is still shown in the Live petrol prices list of Cheapest in Area under Shell with no current petrol price as well as again under Texaco but with a petrol price.
In short no one here should have to be proving to TomTom that their Live petrol price data is mainly not worth the paper its printed on (especially as TomTom also uselessly rounds down all .9 prices to .0 instead of rounding them up to the nearest whole penny if they are 0.5 as above as it should do if it really can't manage to provide us accurate prices correct to the last decimal instead) and our effort should instead be expended on communicating to TomTom our legitimate discontent that the price for petrol station A at location B as indicated on TomTom's own information screen for the station is not currently correct. If they ask for GPS Co-ordinates tell them to take a running jump and that this data cannot be provided due to the fact the the TomTom Live petrol prices feature will not itself release this data to end users.
I think the TomTom management tree needs shaking pretty hard here to get anything done on this issue and only emails to directors of the main Management Board of the company may perhaps elicit any action. Attempts to log the matter with customer services in Amsterdam will I am sure continue to be resoundingly fobbed off by the company with the usual meaningless platitudes that your complaint has been appropriately escalated to second line support (usually this seems to mean that your complaint will soon be electronically erased so that does not mess up TomTom's complaint stats).
If you feel strongly on this issue and do want to complain to the TomTom top brass you can find the current members of the Management Board of TomTom at http://investors.tomtom.com/management.cfm Their email addresses are all of the firstname.lastname@ variety although you will need to put the Alain in De Taeye before the . and the DeTaeye together as one word after the dot. Both Harold Goddijn and Marina Wyatt are @tomtom.com while Alian de Taeye has an @teleatlas.com email address (confirming that TomTom and Teleatlas are in fact merely different operational subdivisions of the same company.) It should be noted that Ms Wyatt is a British citizen and therefore may have the greatest personal experience of this issue (since she presumably at least returns here occasionally from Holland to visit relatives etc), if that is the bad petrol price data problem only exists within the UK?
The Supervisory Board of TomTom can be found at http://investors.tomtom.com/supboard.cfm but these people are more concerned with share price than with managing the actual day to day operations of the business. This task falls to the three members of the Management Board listed above.
For all I know petrol prices may only be hopelessly wrong in the UK due to whatever chronic data supplier TomTom is using and they may be perfectly fine in other parts of Europe. As I sadly haven't been overseas now since last October and did not take the kind of holiday then when I needed to check petrol prices (very little driving involved and only one choice of local petrol station) other members who travel in Europe as freight drivers etc would be in a better position to comment on the accuracy of petrol prices in other Live services countries where they can now use their units. |
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dhn
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Joined: Oct 08, 2007
Posts: 2544
Location: Toronto CANADA
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| Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2010 9:43 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | To cut a long story short |
I never realized you had a sense of humour ........ 
_________________
David |
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DennisN
Tired Old Man
Joined: Feb 27, 2006
Posts: 14892
Location: Keynsham
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| Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2010 11:09 pm Post subject: |
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| dhn wrote: | | Quote: | | To cut a long story short |
I never realized you had a sense of humour ........ |
He hasn't. And in this circumstance, neither have I! Orac1 you've just bored us with close to 2,000 words, which I suspect very few of our members will have the urge, or stamina to read. If I find you doing this sort of post again, I shall spend a whole evening editing it down to something which can be read in less than 200 words.
Oh and your suggestion to TomTom to buy and publish the petrolprices.com database is to invite them to do with fuel prices what they've done with Road Angel speed cameras.
_________________
Dennis
If it tastes good - it's fattening.
Two of them are obesiting!! |
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Orac1
Banned
Joined: Apr 02, 2010
Posts: 38
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| Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 12:28 am Post subject: |
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| DennisN wrote: | | Oh and your suggestion to TomTom to buy and publish the petrolprices.com database is to invite them to do with fuel prices what they've done with Road Angel speed cameras. |
I think I suggested that they source their data from petrolprices.com and not that they buy the company.
I would actively recommend that they do not buy them since TomTom's own endemic culture of commercial cynicism and complacency about adequate data maintenance renders them incapable of properly maintaining any truly dynamic database (as petrol prices clearly are) even vaguely properly. I just tried using my Live Services for Calais and found that far more of the garages there have no price at all and just -- instead. Only in Germany do they seem to have prices for a fair number of the stations listed and there are no prices at all for Switzerland or Portugal.
The main basic steps TomTom or their current petrol price data collector should be taking but aren't are to have a weekly program to investigate and update or delete or -- the price of any garage with a price so low or so high that it is outside the known possible current selling price range for that fuel in the UK and they equally also need to review and update or -- any garage for which the price shown is more than x days old.
But of course letting everything go to a -- price would be the easy way out for a lazy data manager so they need to pay their petrol price supplier by results with pay reducing for any garages where the price supplied is outside the possible legitimate range or any petrol station where the price is more than the required number of days old for that station type. For large head office owned sites where the price is supplied electronically this should be no more than 1 day old and for small independents where the data is got on the phone no more than 1 week old. They claim to not have any prices more than 5 days old but this is a lie and many of their prices for small independent garages that telephone are currently up to 2 months out of date. An 8 week old price is far worse than showing no price at all for a garage because it is actively misleading. 
By the way I assume that if my previous post had exceeded a forum character or word count maximum limit that this would automatically have prevented its appearance in the forum. Since it didn't I would tend to assume the forum owner is content with posts of this length. |
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