Our new Sky Haggling guide - please share your feedback

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  • streethack
    streethack Posts: 155
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    edited 29 August 2015 at 5:14PM
    Great advice on here as always, Just got off the phone from Sky after reading this article. Bill down to £16 a month from £30 for ten months. As my bills just been paid only need to pay around a fiver next month. Whoo Hoo!
    Original mortgage £158,000 over 25 years, end date 2036 :eek:
    Predicted utopia date 2021 15 years early :beer:
    Current mortgage £52,928

    2016 Over-payments to date: £5000 :j
    Total OPs since starting £79,806
  • mije1983
    mije1983 Posts: 3,665
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    brewerdave wrote: »
    Sky are getting increasingly desperate -yet ANOTHER email with another expiry date,imploring me to renew my contract for 12 months.....with 10% off for 10 months:rotfl:

    Desperate? I'd say it was the opposite. Very shrewd from Sky. The more people they lock in with just a 10% discount, the less people they have to deal with getting a higher discount and they have your money for another 12 months.

    The email won't have been designed specifically for you. It will be a mailshot to thousands of their customers who are coming up to the end of their minimum term.
  • Nebulous2
    Nebulous2 Posts: 5,072
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    The best offers seem to be kept for people who have already left. I had given notice for TV when Sky made me an offer I was prepared to accept by letter. I phoned up to accept it and found it didn't actually exist. I then went to BT to get fibre and gave notice for my phone and broadband as well.

    Two months on, I'm very happy with BT. Fibre is really fast and using the sky box to get the free channels only.

    I've just had a letter from Sky though, offering; 60% off family bundle for 12 months, free fibre for a year and £100 credit applied to my account if I sign up through their website.

    So I would need to pay the line rental and 40% of the TV package cost for a year and they would throw in £100.
  • FutureGirl
    FutureGirl Posts: 1,252
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    I only have broadband, which was £5 pm + £16.40 line rental. When my 12 months ended they were going to up it to £10pm, said I wanted to cancel and they gave me free broadband for the year. I only have to pay line rental.

    Not a huge saving, but still saving on what we were going to have to pay :)
  • brewerdave
    brewerdave Posts: 8,499
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    mije1983 wrote: »
    Desperate? I'd say it was the opposite. Very shrewd from Sky. The more people they lock in with just a 10% discount, the less people they have to deal with getting a higher discount and they have your money for another 12 months.

    The email won't have been designed specifically for you. It will be a mailshot to thousands of their customers who are coming up to the end of their minimum term.


    You may well be right about the nos. involved -but it gives me a good giggle -another email today saying effectively "your last chance":rotfl:
    Not along ago, they were offering a 5 year tie in for 33% off -has that "offer" vanished with this 10% deal ,I wonder ???
  • LearnedTheHardWay
    LearnedTheHardWay Posts: 5 Forumite
    edited 9 September 2015 at 12:06PM
    First of all, a tip of my hat to youravinalarrrf for their post #4 which mentions a very useful link! I only saw that when I came here to report my success, but might have saved more going that route!

    I've been with Sky 1 year 11 months. Over that time, my invoices went from under £50 (the intro deal) to about £77 per month.

    What did I get for that? Variety Pack TV (£30), Fibre broadband (£20), line connection ($16.40), and international phone package (£10) - my wife is American and phones the US a LOT and this little extra saves us a fortune!

    I had phoned Sky about 9 months ago as I was eyeing a deal to switch to TalkTalk - Sky flat out told me there were no offers available to me, and called my bluff. I never switched as I couldn't be bothered with the hassle due to TalkTalk wanting to install a new line - I work from home, the internet is my life, and any amount of downtime would be a major headache...

    Meanwhile, I also subscribe to NetFlix (£5.99) and recently discovered NOW.TV has all the premium channels we watch for just £6.99 (I guess I've been living under a rock!), so called Sky and told them I no longer want the Variety Package.

    They sold me on the Original Pack (£21.50) with a 10% discount for 10 months, £9.99 line rental for 10 months, and half-price fibre for 6 months (£10). Including the International call package, my total would have been just under £50 for 6 months, and risen to just over £60 by the end of 12 months. I accepted (doh!)

    Slept on it, and realized that was not the deal I wanted, so called them back - I figured, hey, I have a 14 day cooling off period, right?! ;)

    So I called Sky again, and this time told them, no, I do NOT want ANY TV package! Freeview is sufficient, given that I could get all the Premium TV we need from NetFlix and NOW.TV (not to mention, I'm also an Amazon Prime subscriber - we only recently started looking at their TV/movie offerings, and although there is some overlap, we do use the free next-day shipping enough that it saves us a small fortune even if we didn't watch the shows!)

    So to make a long story short, they now offered me:
    Half-price fibre (£10)
    £10 off my line connection (£6.40)
    Free Sky+ (so I can still pause, rewind and record Freeview on my Sky box)

    Total is £26.40 per month, for a full 12 months.

    Of course, once you add in the £10 per month for international call package, that's really £36.40 per month - I'd use a Skype subscription to make calls even cheaper, but the wife prefers a regular handset and I don't see the point in paying for a Skype-enabled handset at this time.

    The moral of the story? See if you can get the premium channels you watch via some other source (check NOW.TV!) and go Freeview only for your TV (note they did tell me they usually charge £10 per month for Sky+ feature, so I may have lucked out getting it for free!) It will make giving up your TV package a lot less painful!

    It also proves that just because you accept a deal, it doesn't mean you can't call back and re-negotiate (providing the original deal didn't start yet).

    All in all, I'm very happy with the outcome! I'm saving £33 per month (when you factor in the NOW.TV subscription), or £396 per year.
  • mije1983
    mije1983 Posts: 3,665
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    brewerdave wrote: »
    Not along ago, they were offering a 5 year tie in for 33% off -has that "offer" vanished with this 10% deal ,I wonder ???

    I haven't seen anything about it recently. I was on the 33% deal last year (it was for a 5 year period but only a 1 year contract) as it was the best I could get as I needed a new box.

    This year I was offered 60% off and £50 credit on a 30 day rolling contract, without any negotiation.

    Haggled £12.50 for line rental and unlimited fibre, but turned it down.
  • thanks martin after reading this weeks email i had a live chat with sky and got 35% off my bill saving £185 keep up the good work
  • Just been on the sky website and started a webchat to try and reduce my bill. The sky advisor was very helpful, he asked if he could ring me as it would be easier than typing back and forth.
    We had a good chat very friendly. I explained that I was a long standing customer (15 years) and felt I was paying too much for my package compared to the offers they have to attract new customers, also my sky box is 4 years old and I am having to reboot it at least once a week as it just freezes and the remote does nothing and I have to unplug the box then plug it in again.
    In the end I got £21 a month off my bill for the next ten months and a free engineer visit (normally £60) to look at my box. If it can't be fixed it will be replaced with a like for like replacement
  • Just spoken to Sky and, using the link from MSE, got 35% off my bill for 12 months.

    I've had a series of ongoing discounted rates for a couple of years but each took a long time to negotiate and they were only ever for a max of 8 months. Plus they were never as good as the rate I got today.

    It seems the "exclusive offer for staying with Sky" is aimed at customers who have recently left (at least that's what the person I dealt with suggested) but they were happy to arrange something anyway.

    Just made a note in the diary to do it all again in a year's time!
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