Virgin Media retention deals (post your haggling successes)

Stingy_Samson

FreeBear said:

Stingy_Samson said:

Ninj4 said:

Stingy_Samson said:

Stingy_Samson said:

My current VM discounts expire on the 11th Oct (so just shy of 2 months away). 

I’m currently paying £51 per month (was £48 before April) for the following…

250Mb BB
Maxit TV (so I can get the TNT Sports channels)
Kids channels (because I was told it was cheaper with rather than without)
Talk Weekends.

So nothing particularly fancy, and I was happy with the £48 deal I haggled for last time around.

I just made the call to explain how I was asked last time to ring about now to arrange a new deal, and I’m seeing if I can get the Sky Sports HD channels on top of my current package.

The “inbound” retentions team told me just now on the phone I could have the same package as I have now (minus the kids channels), but also including the Sky Sports SD & HD channels for a new total price of £69 per month.

This isn’t a particularly high price, but I was wondering whether an “outbound” retention call would lower it much more. So I asked whether I could speak to someone about cancelling my services on the 11th Oct. But I couldn’t go any further. They said I couldn’t speak to anyone about cancelling until 30 days before the end date.

A couple of questions for anyone who may know. Can we not cancel (or give 50 days notice for example to cancel on our end of contract date?)
And secondly, what kind of price could I realistically be offered for the above services? I know I couldn’t get that even as a new customer with Sky, so am I just being greedy? :-)

So, I’m hindsight I think I should have agreed to the Sky Sports HD addition last month when I first enquired about it on the phone. 

To confirm what others have said, I think there will be a lot of unhappy customers when the time comes to renew the contracts.

I rang them again tonight, on hold for just over an hour, then asked what was on offer and whether my original offer from last month was still available (which included TNT sports). Sadly no. So the £69 deal for 250Mb, talk weekends, the package formerly known as Maxit, and Sky Sports HD was gone, and it would cost £87 now to include all of the above and keep TNT Sports. So £18 for that. 

I said sadly that was a deal breaker now, and they went to put me through to Retentions. 5 minutes later, got cut off.

Tried waiting in the original queue again but another hour goes by and no answer. Sounds like I’ll have to try to put my cancellation in tomorrow now instead.

That's ridiculous. They will lose a lot of customers, including myself. My contract is up for renewal in a couple of weeks. I've already served my 30 days notice but waiting till Friday this week for a call from outbound retentions team. If they don't offer anything decent, I'm moving to Community fibre who have recently cabled our street. 

Unfortunately my BB options are limited, and without VM, I’d have to drop to 61mb at best on my street. I certainly can’t justify Virgin’s TV prices now though barring an exceptional keep/win back offer. 

Unless there are multiple occupants streaming HD video, you could probably get away with 30-60M and not notice the difference.

Over the years, I've had various speed "upgrades" starting at 10M, then 30M, 100M, and now 125M, and to be honest, I don't see any real improvement.

Totally agree. I started out with Telewest before Virgin Media took over and I’m sure i was on 50mb. Over the years it slowly kept jumping up (75, 100 and have been at 250mb for a while). 

These days I do indeed live on my own, so I don’t need anything more than 50 (even though I do like to stream Amazon Prime). I’ve never had a different broadband provider, but I assume a switch to Sky Superfast (61mb) can all be installed and activated within 4 weeks. 

Stingy_Samson

Stingy_Samson said:

Stingy_Samson said:

My current VM discounts expire on the 11th Oct (so just shy of 2 months away). 

I’m currently paying £51 per month (was £48 before April) for the following…

250Mb BB
Maxit TV (so I can get the TNT Sports channels)
Kids channels (because I was told it was cheaper with rather than without)
Talk Weekends.

So nothing particularly fancy, and I was happy with the £48 deal I haggled for last time around.

I just made the call to explain how I was asked last time to ring about now to arrange a new deal, and I’m seeing if I can get the Sky Sports HD channels on top of my current package.

The “inbound” retentions team told me just now on the phone I could have the same package as I have now (minus the kids channels), but also including the Sky Sports SD & HD channels for a new total price of £69 per month.

This isn’t a particularly high price, but I was wondering whether an “outbound” retention call would lower it much more. So I asked whether I could speak to someone about cancelling my services on the 11th Oct. But I couldn’t go any further. They said I couldn’t speak to anyone about cancelling until 30 days before the end date.

A couple of questions for anyone who may know. Can we not cancel (or give 50 days notice for example to cancel on our end of contract date?)
And secondly, what kind of price could I realistically be offered for the above services? I know I couldn’t get that even as a new customer with Sky, so am I just being greedy? :-)

So, I’m hindsight I think I should have agreed to the Sky Sports HD addition last month when I first enquired about it on the phone. 

To confirm what others have said, I think there will be a lot of unhappy customers when the time comes to renew the contracts.

I rang them again tonight, on hold for just over an hour, then asked what was on offer and whether my original offer from last month was still available (which included TNT sports). Sadly no. So the £69 deal for 250Mb, talk weekends, the package formerly known as Maxit, and Sky Sports HD was gone, and it would cost £87 now to include all of the above and keep TNT Sports. So £18 for that. 

I said sadly that was a deal breaker now, and they went to put me through to Retentions. 5 minutes later, got cut off.

Tried waiting in the original queue again but another hour goes by and no answer. Sounds like I’ll have to try to put my cancellation in tomorrow now instead.

So, final update.

Was put through to retentions this morning to cancel and after very pleasant discussions, mainly talking about the removal of TNT sports, I’ve agreed another 18 months without losing out.

I was originally offered 250, talk weekends, Sky Sports bundle in HD, & importantly keeping the TNT channels but dropping my main TV down to the lower tier, all for £53/£54 a month.
Call me snobby, but I would have missed lots of the other channels, especially the HD ones like Sky News, Eurosport, Sky Max etc..

So they then offered me the old legacy deal of Mix TV (not be to confused with Mixit) bringing the total to £64 a month.

Ultimately, I wouldn’t have been able to get all the Sports & TNT channels in HD elsewhere any cheaper than about £45/£50 (new Sky customer or streaming options), so happily agreed to the £64 deal for 18 months, keeping all channels, good broadband & all the HD TV channels I set out to try to get. Maybe win back calls after cancellation could have been even more fruitful, but it all depends on what you want and the price you are happy to pay. 

Good luck everyone who finds themselves in similar bargaining calls when the time comes. 

PS - I get the feeling the reps aren’t that happy about the change to packages now dropping TNT sports by default, because they seem to be inundated by disgruntled, contract renegotiating customers. VM’s reasoning is “well not everyone wanted TNT sports!!” Quite a laughable explanation when it just means that the majority are losing those channels at contract expiry and are defaulted into being expected to pay £18 to re-add them.  

screid67

Hi, Currently paying 78.05 with Virgin for M125 Fibre Broadband, Virgin TV 360, TV Essentials, Phone Line Rental and Weekend chatter. Can upgrade to the same package for 70.00 but can add M250 broadband for an extra 5.00. What do you think I can haggle this down/up to or should I just switch to Sky? They are offering: 9 months free ultrafast broadband with SKY TV and Netflix, 26.00 for 9 months and then 74.00 for 9 months. What would you do? Haggle or leave? Thanks, Shaun

mits999

screid67 said:

Hi, Currently paying 78.05 with Virgin for M125 Fibre Broadband, Virgin TV 360, TV Essentials, Phone Line Rental and Weekend chatter. Can upgrade to the same package for 70.00 but can add M250 broadband for an extra 5.00. What do you think I can haggle this down/up to or should I just switch to Sky? They are offering: 9 months free ultrafast broadband with SKY TV and Netflix, 26.00 for 9 months and then 74.00 for 9 months. What would you do? Haggle or leave? Thanks, Shaun

If you cancel virgin they will call you bk they should do 250mb broadband basic tv and weekend calls for approx £25 a month 

Ninj4

Just spoke to retentions team and the best he could offer me was £40/month for 1gig broadband only. I'm currently paying £32/month for 1gig broadband and unlimited anytime calls. Community fibre it is then I suppose. 

MuckChucker

So email received yesterday informing of the annual April price rises. The crux of the email is leave now or you can't complain in April. Increases will be RPI + 3.9% - anyone got a ballpark for what RPI will be? It feels like it'll be big going by price growth over the last year.

Anyway, if I don't leave I'm stuck until Sept 2024 and will absorb the rise in April 2024 so right now I'm genuinely considering ditching TV and going broadband only. There are plenty of 1gig (currently have 250mbps) offers that would match my current bundle cost (minus some nice cash back deals).

jb66

MuckChucker said:

So email received yesterday informing of the annual April price rises. The crux of the email is leave now or you can't complain in April. Increases will be RPI + 3.9% - anyone got a ballpark for what RPI will be? It feels like it'll be big going by price growth over the last year.

Anyway, if I don't leave I'm stuck until Sept 2024 and will absorb the rise in April 2024 so right now I'm genuinely considering ditching TV and going broadband only. There are plenty of 1gig (currently have 250mbps) offers that would match my current bundle cost (minus some nice cash back deals).

Hope i get this email, just renewed 3months ago but YouFibre is in my area now and can get 4x the speed of VM for the same price 

FreeBear

MuckChucker said:

So email received yesterday informing of the annual April price rises. The crux of the email is leave now or you can't complain in April. Increases will be RPI + 3.9% - anyone got a ballpark for what RPI will be? It feels like it'll be big going by price growth over the last year.

RPI is currently at 9% (give or take a bit), and the government is forecasting to drop to 1.8% in 2024. But we all know how much trust we can put in the government.. Other pundits are saying RPI is likely to be around 8% for much of next year.

What ever the final RPI figure is come April, Virgin will be applying their RPI+3.9% rise to the base price of your package before any "discounts". So if you took on a 125M connection at £26/mo, and normal price outside of contract is £34/mo, you'd end up paying £30/mo - A 15.4% rise assuming RPI is 8%.

I for one, am not prepared to take on a contract with that sort of mid-term price rise. So middle finger to Virgin, and off to a provider that doesn't stitch their customers with dubious calculations and mid-term price hikes.

MuckChucker

I for one, am not prepared to take on a contract with that sort of mid-term price rise. So middle finger to Virgin, and off to a provider that doesn't stitch their customers with dubious calculations and mid-term price hikes.

Yeah I'll talk to them tomorrow. Unless they'll reduce my existing by £10 (Bigger Bundle @ £45 currently) without losing TNT I'm gone. . .which I definitely doubt they will.

If you know anyone who doesn't apply such periodic price rises, I'm all ears

kipsterno1

FreeBear said:

What ever the final RPI figure is come April, Virgin will be applying their RPI+3.9% rise to the base price of your package before any "discounts". So if you took on a 125M connection at £26/mo, and normal price outside of contract is £34/mo, you'd end up paying £30/mo - A 15.4% rise assuming RPI is 8%.

Unless I have read the T&C's wrong the increase is applied to the actual price you are paying.