Our new Sky Haggling guide - please share your feedback

samuelg89

We joined Sky for the first time last month. Last week they raised our bill by £4pm (14%) within 2 hours of us having the dish installed (and drilling a chunky hole 3ft up our living room wall..)! I’m fuming!

We did get a reasonable deal I thought - it was supposed to be £30 a month through Blue Light Card (for NHS / services) for the Entertainment package and Ultimate On Demand. So we stop having to pay for our existing Netflix, and I do like the Sky Q box, but really and truly for me it is not much difference to Freeview. Partner of course disagrees.

Its not the best welcome as brand new customers and has left a bad taste in my mouth personally about staying with them.

Partner - whose name it is in - went to online chat straight away. They said he has to call them because the deal was through Blue Light. On calling, spoke to retentions and they are refusing to budge on price. They basically said “if you want to cancel I can put through the cancellation right now and you’ll lose your service straight away”

Any tips? Is it truly impossible for them to better this? Do they not have a retentions target if people want to cancel within the cooling off period (as opposed to cancellations at contract renewal)?

I will try to call them myself next week. We have 1mth cooling off, give or take.

[Deleted User]

@samuelg89, the price should not be affected by this rise if you've signed up or re-contracted up to 6(?) weeks before it comes in. If it's an 18 month contract then you will be affected by the one in 12 months. This is presuming there's not some special T&C's for this Blue Light Card deal for which I have no knowledge.

but really and truly for me it is not much difference to Freeview

That's not even close to being true.

DonnySaver

samuelg89 wrote: »

We joined Sky for the first time last month. Last week they raised our bill by £4pm (14%) within 2 hours of us having the dish installed (and drilling a chunky hole 3ft up our living room wall..)! I’m fuming!

We did get a reasonable deal I thought - it was supposed to be £30 a month through Blue Light Card (for NHS / services) for the Entertainment package and Ultimate On Demand. So we stop having to pay for our existing Netflix, and I do like the Sky Q box, but really and truly for me it is not much difference to Freeview. Partner of course disagrees.

Its not the best welcome as brand new customers and has left a bad taste in my mouth personally about staying with them.

Partner - whose name it is in - went to online chat straight away. They said he has to call them because the deal was through Blue Light. On calling, spoke to retentions and they are refusing to budge on price. They basically said “if you want to cancel I can put through the cancellation right now and you’ll lose your service straight away”

Any tips? Is it truly impossible for them to better this? Do they not have a retentions target if people want to cancel within the cooling off period (as opposed to cancellations at contract renewal)?

I will try to call them myself next week. We have 1mth cooling off, give or take.

You should not be subject to any price rise if you have only just signed up. If you are unhappy and are still within your 14 day cooling-off period then I suggest to ring them up can cancel it. Only once your cancellation has gone in do you truly get offered the 'deals'.

Toughy92

Not sure if this has been covered already, but I know plenty have struggled getting out of Sky contracts, especially TV.

With me and my partner about to move house and both our TV and Broadband prices going up totalling £56 for the most basic TV package and Sky Fibre Max Broadband (60mbps we’ve found), we wanted to leave Sky behind as we were moving to house that was eligible for Virgin.

We got an incredible offer from Virgin:

- Full House TV package including Sky Sports and BT Sport 4K HD
- 200mbps internet
- Free PS4 & FIFA19

I then bartered a bit and and said Sky might hit us with penalties and got £50 bill credit to soften the blow. Upon accepting the offer, they also said to expect a mystery ‘gift’ should we complete our cooling off period. Not sure what that will be yet! All of the above for £65 per month on a minimum term 12 month contract. £9 more per month than we were paying for 60mbps internet (at best) and a very basic TV package.

And then we just needed to cancel Sky. Broadband was no problem - exempt from charges because of the price increase. As expected, no such luck for the TV. As it was that good a deal from Virgin, we were happy to pay the expected £70 or so early exit fees. However, Sky said we could not leave early even by paying charges. We had to fulfil the minimum term before we cancel - very strange as we were happy to pay out the contract. Either way I did some digging and found out that if your Landlord refuses to allow you a Sky dish, you can leave any Sky TV contract penalty-free. I got email proof from my new Landlord to say they didn’t want a Sky dish installed. Any Landlord would probably rather you didn’t if it could be avoided - so tell them they’re not obliged to give permission, and that you can just inform Sky it’s not an option and exit penalty-free with their email. I then spoke to Sky who didn’t even ask for my email proof - they just agreed to terminate. I’m assuming it would class as a “frustrated” contract. Not only that, but we’ll get some money back for the days we’re not using the service when we move out!

All in all, useful for anyone getting nowhere with Sky - TV especially. Had they not been so painful to deal with Id have just paid out my contract. Hope this helps someone out!

[Deleted User]

Toughy92 wrote: »

Not sure if this has been covered already, but I know plenty have struggled getting out of Sky contracts, especially TV...

So all you have to do to get out of your Sky contract is to move house, that'll save a fortune.

inklove

I’ve just got off a very frustrating live chat when a sky agent.

Full price my bill should be £70
He offered me a discount to £42

I rejected it and he offered me a new 500gb sky+HD box, I pointe out I have a 2TB box that’s still under warranty but he just kept saying, but this is a brand new one. 🤔

Oh well, I’ll try again in a few days.

supremetwo

inklove wrote: »

I’ve just got off a very frustrating live chat when a sky agent.

Full price my bill should be £70
He offered me a discount to £42

I rejected it and he offered me a new 500gb sky+HD box, I pointe out I have a 2TB box that’s still under warranty but he just kept saying, but this is a brand new one. ��

Oh well, I’ll try again in a few days.

Is your broadband the ordinary fibre (40Mbps) or the Fibre Max package?

inklove

supremetwo wrote: »

Is your broadband the ordinary fibre (40Mbps) or the Fibre Max package?

Neither, it’s just the standard broadband.

gadgetman2000

Been with Sky for 18 years and have not done a lot of haggling with them until today. I have Q with two mini boxes and pretty much a full package - entertainment, cinema, sports, HD, multi room.

My next bill was due to be £100.50. Phoned this morning to discuss and got offered the same package for £73.00 with a £15 admin fee. I turned it down and requested cancellation.

Once I had the cancellation email confirmation I waited until late this afternoon then logged in to My Sky via a link on this forum and there was an offer there reducing the phone offer even further, getting it down to £56.00 if I added back multiroom which wasnt showing for some reason.

Phoned them to check and they actually rounded it down to £50.00 per month with a £10 one off admin charge.

Two phone calls and my monthly bill is halved. £600 a year saved. Also managed to reduce my monthly BT Broadband/mobile pack by £50 a month today with one phone call.

Happy days!

inklove

I finally negotiated a deal I was happy with.... but it took a lot of stress to do it.

The products I have are,
The entertainment pack (£25)
HD (£5)
Kids (£5)
Boxsets (£5)
Line rental (£18.99)
Broadband (£12.01)

So my bill full price should have been £70, rising to £73 soon.

For the last year I’ve been on a deal having it all for £33

The first time I chatted with them after cancellation they offered me a discount to £58 which I rejected.

I spoke to them several times more and was offered the same deal every time of £42, I was repeatedly told that was the best I would get.

Then I chatted to someone who offered me a great deal of £29, I accepted and he cancelled the cancellation.... and then told me that actually the deal he quoted was wrong and it’s actually £49. 🤔
There was a lot of back and forth and he kept trying to tell me it was a mistake and he miss spelled it and it was an accident.... he even tried to blame the fact that he is not English.

So I decided just to call them and spoke to a lovely Geordie man called Scott, he was bloody fantastic and sorted everything out for me, he found me a deal that was £36 which was pretty much exactly what I wanted.

The breakdown is,
Sky entertainment £15
HD £1
Kids £1
Boxsets £1
Line rental 18
Broadband free

Admin fee (halved at £5)

For 18 months.

Because of all the hassle he even offered me a deal of a sky mobile sim, which I had expressed an interest in before.
He offered me a 12 month sim only deal, with the first two months free and then 25% off for the rest of the contract.
It’s got unlimited calls and texts and 6gb of data, although you can upgrade or down the data at any point, do the bill can go from £5-£9-£20 depending what I want.

The monthy sim deal I have at the moment is good but definitely not that good.
So I took that offer, it’s good for Scott because he gets an extra sale but he also did me a great deal on something I was seriously contemplating buying anyway.

All it’s all I think it worked out pretty well.


*additional information*
Something interesting Scott told me was they have completely changed the way deals are done, in previous years you could negotiate and the agents could offer you any deal as long as their manager signed off on it, that’s now been scrapped completely as too many people were abusing it, now they can only offer set deals on the system, BUT every department has different deals available so sometimes it’s worth speaking to different departments not just retentions.
He also said the option to give cash back/credit on account has also been completely scrapped, they can credit X months free but it’s rarely aproved and pretty much only to counteract a mistake made by sky.
He said that they were told the ‘best’ deals they would ever get for people would be 40% off, (which is how the deal I keep being offered was £42) the system would not offer anything less.

The only loophole is if you can apply a different discount like I did on top of the 40% off deal.
so on my online MySky home page there was a link to a ‘stay with sky’ deal of £15 for entertainment and £3.50 for add ons.
When I previously mentioned it to agents they said they couldn’t mix it, so I could rather take their offer of £20+£1 for each or that offer of £15+£3.50 for each, Scott was able to just apply the discount for the entertainment pack.

I hope that information helps someone trying to negotiate they best deal.