Subscribtion is a fraudulent scheme
My feedback is only based on The Times subscription service (making me sorry for the hard work of the journalists & editors).
Using an offer, I subscribed for 3 months to the digital (web) edition of The Times. Although I can't complaint about the quality of the publication, I soon realised I wasn't reading enough of The Times to justify the subscription.
So in January 2019 (about 6 weeks before the end of my 3-month subscription), I started what was going to be a long & painful process to terminate my subscription.
In short :
- you can't manage your account online (all you can do is to change your payment details) and therefore you can't end your subscription on your account page online
- you can't serve notice by email (if ever you manage to find The Times email address)
- you can't serve notice by live chat either
- and therefore the only way to end your subscription is by phone, which is obviously a method to refrain customers to terminate their subscriptions
- I am not even sure this is actually legally compliant to ignore emails and chat messages from the customers stating they want to end their subscription
- so on the day where I managed to speak to The Times contact centre by phone (27 days before the end of my subscription), I had to queue for a long time, I had to listen & decline several amazing offers, I had to repeat quite strongly & clearly my intent to end my subscription
- the most annoying was the fact I asked several times to receive a written confirmation from The Times to acknowledge our conversation, and guess what ... never received any confirmation email ...
- at that point, I thought I was done and I was not going to be charged £26 per month (the full cost of the monthly digital subscription at The Times)
- but obviously, on February 25th, I saw on my credit card account a £26 charge from The Times ! Not a message or an email from The Times, simply £26 deducted from my credit card (and I'm lucky enough I was checking my account on that day, else it could have missed it for several days / weeks)
- that meant yet another email to complaint at The Times, who took 72 hours to reply to me and their answer was so unfriendly and so not customer centric : The Times would need 14 working days to listen and assess the phone discussion I had a few weeks before when I asked for my subscription to be stopped !!
- a week later I fortunately receive a message confirming my subscription would be ended and my £26 would be charged back. I haven't seen the money yet, but the conclusion is that everything is designed to retain customers as subscribers against their will and to charge them a lot of money (£26 per month for the digital edition) against their awareness
So my advice to future unhappy subscribers to The Times :
- record your phone discussion or at the minimum note the day & time of your phone discussion, when you unsuscribe
- be ready to use the new GDPR rules and ask for a SAR (Subject Access Request)
Or more wisely, don't subscribe to The Times !!
March 5, 2019
Unprompted review