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DennisN
Tired Old Man
Joined: Feb 27, 2006
Posts: 14893
Location: Keynsham
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 Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 12:48 am Post subject: |
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| Orac1 wrote: | | 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. |
Which is exactly what I noticed - you see? I did read all your nearly 2,000 words. They've bought the Road Angel database, not the company.
Anyway, let's drop the raging against TomTom in this thread now, please. We've all known it since long before you started contributing nothing new.
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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 1:22 am Post subject: |
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| DennisN wrote: | | Anyway, let's drop the raging against TomTom in this thread now, please. We've all known it since long before you started contributing nothing new. |
I think my new take is to suggest that its ridiculous that TomTom need to be offered more evidence that their Live petrol prices are useless when anyone with the most basic understanding of databases could just take a simple look at the more impossible prices at the top and bottom of the list to know that they could not be correct. Also rather than improving the situation with many weeks out of date prices for small independent petrol stations Tom is now just -- pricing more of them to cover up the failure to provide us the prices we are contracted to get (i.e. no more than 5 days old).
Therefore the energy of members of this forum should be going in to high level complaints to the TomTom Chief Executive that customers are not getting the services they are paying TomTom for and not in to providing more evidence to TomTom customer services of a problem that they cannot be unaware of but are simply currently failing to do anything about.
I rather doubt that your own views on this matter can be very objective since my reading of this forum suggests that you personally do not use many of TomTom's more sophisticated Live services such as TomTom provided MapShare corrections or TomTom Fuel Prices. So we can therefore presumably take it as read that you will not see why anyone else should need to use a service that you are not yourself using.
Perhaps you therefore simply need to accept that TomTom is currently charging for and advertising that it offers a real time live fuel price service and that its current offering does not currently comply with many of the most obvious requirements of the Sale of Goods Acts. |
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spook51
Lifetime Member
Joined: Mar 26, 2004
Posts: 548
Location: East Midlands
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| Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 6:54 am Post subject: |
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| In a nutshell: TomTom's fuel prices aren't very good, you may wish to complain. |
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M8TJT
The Other Tired Old Man
Joined: Apr 04, 2006
Posts: 10118
Location: Bexhill, South Sussex, UK
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| Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 7:38 am Post subject: |
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| spook51 wrote: | | In a nutshell: TomTom's fuel prices aren't very good, you may wish to complain. |
Now THAT is cutting a long story short  |
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spook51
Lifetime Member
Joined: Mar 26, 2004
Posts: 548
Location: East Midlands
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| Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 9:48 am Post subject: |
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"Brevity is the soul of wit."
Wiliam Shakespeare |
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Orac1
Banned
Joined: Apr 02, 2010
Posts: 38
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| Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 9:57 am Post subject: |
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| spook51 wrote: | "Brevity is the soul of wit."
Wiliam Shakespeare |
Odd then that he inflicted so many long and complicated plays upon us. |
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Orac1
Banned
Joined: Apr 02, 2010
Posts: 38
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| Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 2:23 pm Post subject: |
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I have now logged this with TomTom as a formal support issue listing examples of petrol stations that have never ever existed and of petrol stations that closed several years ago and then finally several petrol stations showing prices that are a long way below the actual current selling price of Unleaded fuel.
I have indicated that I require this issue to be escalated to Second Line Support and that I expect action by Second Line Support to fix the numerous glaring errors in their database rather than the usual misleading excuses.
If they only fix the 10 problem examples I have sent them I will then send them another 10 problem examples they have not fixed.
Then eventually someone there may finally start to get the message.  |
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IanS100
Frequent Visitor
Joined: May 05, 2008
Posts: 870
Location: Southport
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| Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 3:31 pm Post subject: |
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Thank goodness I got mine in first  |
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Orac1
Banned
Joined: Apr 02, 2010
Posts: 38
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| Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 3:52 pm Post subject: |
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| IanS100 wrote: | | Thank goodness I got mine in first |
How long ago? Any sign of a response from them on the matter so far? |
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spook51
Lifetime Member
Joined: Mar 26, 2004
Posts: 548
Location: East Midlands
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| Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 4:10 pm Post subject: |
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| IanS100 wrote: | | Thank goodness I got mine in first |
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IanS100
Frequent Visitor
Joined: May 05, 2008
Posts: 870
Location: Southport
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| Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 4:23 pm Post subject: |
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| Orac1 wrote: |
If they only fix the 10 problem examples I have sent them I will then send them another 10 problem examples they have not fixed.
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You are a little tinker  |
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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: Tue Apr 20, 2010 7:09 pm Post subject: |
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OK, I'm an anorak....
*I* read your whole post Orac1, and I hope you sent the whole thing to TomTom as well.
They need as many complaints about this as possible, to counter their usual instinctive responce that it is a minor/local/rare problem and that "no one else has mentioned it". |
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AndyVaughan
Lifetime Member
Joined: Apr 13, 2006
Posts: 1500
Location: Rossendale
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| Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 7:21 pm Post subject: |
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I would suggest that if they do not fix the issue to your satisfaction that you request a partial refund of your subscription.
It makes it easier if the data is crap and you aren't paying for it.
Thank god you didn't buy a RDS-TMC receiver or are trying to stream mp3s over A2DP Bluetooth as well as make hands free calls and have TTS sw-sw-sw-sw-itched on |
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IanS100
Frequent Visitor
Joined: May 05, 2008
Posts: 870
Location: Southport
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| Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 7:23 pm Post subject: |
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| I sent TomTom the link to this thread & that for the complete collection of 17 screen grabs showing crazy diesel prices, so although they may well claim not to know of other complaints it can only be lack of interest & complete incompetence investigating customer complaints that would support this. |
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Orac1
Banned
Joined: Apr 02, 2010
Posts: 38
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| Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 7:42 pm Post subject: |
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| Andy_P wrote: | OK, I'm an anorak....
*I* read your whole post Orac1, and I hope you sent the whole thing to TomTom as well. |
Thanks Andy for bearing with what one of my old employers (a marketing man of one line emails) used to call my "War and Peace" like missives.
| Quote: | | They need as many complaints about this as possible, to counter their usual instinctive responce that it is a minor/local/rare problem and that "no one else has mentioned it". |
I probably went on at so much length because unlike keeping maps up to date (which I suspect is a horrifically complicated job to do properly although it is meant to be Teleatlas's core business so it beats me why they are no good at it) maintaining a simple list of prices for a few thousand petrol stations ought to be a pretty simple task.
Any manager of this data who even vaguely took a pride in their job would constantly be looking at prices that were getting very out of date and prices that were simply far higher or lower than anyone is charging for unleaded or diesel at the present time. Its easy to spot those errors and either a delete a station that has closed down or at least change an old price to showing -- after it is more than 5 days old and so has no meaning. In fact their database should be programmed not to send out any price more than 5 days old to customers because they actually make a commitment that their petrol prices may only be "up to 5 days old".
I don't know where the phantom petrol stations that never existed like the Waitrose one that TomTom claims is a mile down the road from me (where it could only in fact be there if it was invisible and in somebody's large rural back garden) come from and all of those do seem to be -- in terms of prices as one would expect as where would they ever have got any price from. On the face of it those petrol stations look like a case of serious database corruption on TomTom's part.
if we knew where and how they were getting this rotten data from we might have a better idea where things are going wrong. I did notice when all the prices were racing up very fast to just over 1.20 per litre that at that stage even large Shell or Esso forecourts where TomTom fuel prices are normally roughly right within a penny or two were out by as much as 5p. This rather suggests they don't update data same day or overnight for even the large head office owned sites of the large brands but run 3 or 4 days behind with most of those too. Since I would have thought TomTom ought to have online links from the petrol retailers for those sites this general out of dateness of their data is beyond me. You can imagine how much stick we would be giving them if all their HD traffic jam data related to traffic patterns from 3 days ago.
On www.petrolprices.com they show the 10 cheapest stations nearest to my home address as all having prices today between 117.9 and 118.9 per litre for Unleaded but good old TomTom shows the cheapest 10 as selling Unleaded between 1.07 and 1.14p per litre so even the most expensive of the 10 listed is still out of date and incorrect. Clearly someone at TomTom who must be responsible for these prices isn't doing their job even vaguely competently and heads ought to roll.
To be honest if somebody here had the time they ought to start a small claim against TomTom claiming that not only had they not received the service they are paying for but also that they had incurred significant additional conseqeuential loss in driving a few miles out of their way to a garage they they thought would have cheap fuel to find it didn't and/or perhaps more significantly if they ran out of fuel in a remote area because they were banking on being able to fill up at a filling station in the weekday daytime (when even the most remote filling stations in the UK are normally open so opening hours would not be an issue) only to arrive there and find no petrol station anywhere in sight. I'm not the best person to do this as I don't drive enough miles per year to places I have never been before to pick up enough evidence but I'm sure there are plenty of people on this site who could offer a treasure trove of such stories. |
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