Priority Booker Omdömen 352

Svar från Priority Booker

22 apr. 2023

Hi Tracey. Sorry to hear you were unhappy with the membership. For absolute clarity, Priority Booker does not see a penny of the money taken by Groupon, or any other voucher type website.

Furthermore, we do not advertise our VIP service as a discount club, quite the opposite in fact. Our strap line reads, “price isn’t everything, service matters”, and we say this specifically because the travel ancillary industry is littered with rogue traders who advertise rock bottom prices but ultimately deliver less than sub-standard services often resulting in loss or damage, and the customer is the one who pays the price.

So, rather than compete with the bottom of the pile, we went the other way and launched a VIP service for quality and service minded travellers, that A) offers ‘OUR’ best rates (not ‘THE’ best rates necessarily, but often this is the case) so, you will never find Priority Booker pricing for less than you can in the VIP club through any other channel, ever, and B) offers priority customer service on top of free luggage tagging and reduced booking fees.

In addition we took it upon ourselves to become Trading Standards Approved, and we are now the ONLY agent in the UK to carry this accolade, along with the Buy With Confidence accreditation.

We have thousands of VIP customers who have been with us for several years and return to us time and again for our service, value, and quality.

Please contact us via our support email and we will happily refund all membership fees you have paid to us, if any. All the best.

Svar från Priority Booker

Uppdaterad 13 apr. 2023

Thank you for your feedback. Our VIP service is not a discount club, though we always aim to offer our best rates which may or may not be best in market at any given time (because obviously we cannot control the promotions of other companies). We are the only 'Trading Standards Approved' parking agent in the UK and carry the 'Buy With Confidence' accreditation, which means we have been independently vetted by an external party who has also completed in-depth checks on our service with our customers, taken at random. VIP customers also benefit from priority customer service, reduced booking fees, free cover, and free luggage tag options as standard, on top of the best prices we are able to offer for the actual product itself. We set up our service because there are, in our opinion, too many rogue traders in the market who are not vetted or regulated in any way. The number of parking scams that occur each year is on the rise (as a result of airport parking being an unregulated industry) and too often we are saddened by horror-story news articles, where a travellers vehicle has been lost, damaged, fouled, driven without consent, parked illegally, or left unlocked or with windows open, so we set up our business to give travellers peace of mind. We feel that is worth more than the few pounds extra you may pay in order to have that confidence that you are using a professional service who takes pride in advertising it's credentials. Furthermore, the 1 month access is the most expensive option for VIP access, there are better options available from annual access to a range of promotional partners who we advertise. We'd be happy to manage your query directly if you would like to speak to us via our customer service portal by emailing support@prioritybooker.com.

Svar från Priority Booker

Uppdaterad 18 jan. 2023

Dear Courtney,

You contacted customer support on Saturday evening to inform us that you had paid twice for a lounge and had not received a booking confirmation. The only way our payment system would take a payment twice is if a payment was submitted twice and, as I explained, no money was taken from your account - your transaction was put on hold pending authorisation that for some reason, failed. What you didn’t tell us is that you were actually at the airport at the time you tried to book the lounge. Lounges require a minimum 24 hours pre-booking notice in any case.

Priority Booker contacted you back the next morning, approximately 14 hours after your initial enquiry - this was well within our stated response support time. We contacted you on a Sunday morning to try and assist even though this was outside our normal operating hours. We informed you that your payment method had failed twice and so no booking was ever made, and no money was ever taken either, so we released the hold on the payment which simply disappears after a few days (bank dependent); we advised you to use a different payment method to secure your booking as at this point we did not know that you were trying to book from the airport and had already travelled. Had we known that at the time we would not have advised this as you cannot prebook a lounge for the same day.

You state in your review that we never made contact with you and our customer service is “terrible”, yet in subsequent conversations through our customer support desk you say you did receive our reply (but it was obviously too late to assist you as you were trying to book the lounge from the airport).

Priority Booker responded to your enquiry well within our published response time and on a Sunday (outside our customer support hours). We therefore respectfully refute this inaccurate and misleading review.

Regards,

Priority Booker

Svar från Priority Booker

18 jan. 2023

Elise, we are having this review investigated as it doesn't constitute a review of our service. We do not advertise the 'cheapest prices' anywhere in our material, in fact, we do the exact opposite. Our marketing reads, "price isn't everything, service matters". And we do this because we prioritise service over price. It is well documented in the airport parking sector that hundreds of agents/suppliers offer very cheap rates only to provide a diabolical service. Google 'airport parking complaint/disaster/scam' or similar and you will find no shortage of these news articles; people using their backyards as car parks, parking cars on residential roads, leaving windows open, speeding up and down motorways, and worse. The unfortunate and paradoxical reality of this is that airport parking has A) a very poor reputation in general and B) is an almost exclusively price-driven market. It is also entirely unregulated. We at Priority Booker often wonder why a customer with a £150,000 luxury vehicle would choose to go with an obscure airport car park over a verified and approved car park just to save all of £5-10 over a 2 week holiday. But it happens every day. Of course, when it comes to two agents selling the same product, price can also vary depending on several factors. Pricing on parking and lounges is not centrally controlled ie the owner of the car park or lounge can amend their pricing whenever they see fit, with no notice to their agents. In this case, the owner will always be able to instantly undercut their agents, resulting in all agents having a higher price than the product owner. The owner of the product does have the ability to remotely alter the agent pricing but that would defeat the point of their price drop - to channel sales directly to them and not through the agents. Typically a supplier would do this when availability is low, as suppliers tend to use agents to 'back fill' their space when the direct sales are not plentiful. So, it is entirely possible that we will not have the lowest prices at all times, though our VIP members do get the lowest prices *we* can offer (not lowest in *market*, just lowest *we* can offer, meaning we make no profit on the sale). This is the trade off for our membership service which is paid annually, to get a pricing model that passes our profit to you. We do also state in our material that this membership service is ideal for frequent travellers, as candidly it is possible to buy an annual membership, but only use it once and not save money. However this all talks about price, not service. As an agent we are the ONLY one in the UK that is Trading Standards Approved and holds the BUY WITH CONFIDENCE badge, meaning we have been independently vetted and reviewed by multiple people over a period of time in order to gain the accreditation and this is something we must do annually in order to retain it. No agent in the country other than Priority Booker holds this accreditation. We aim to respond to customers within 72 hours in general, but often do so within an hour. When a customer has an issue like a change of vehicle, getting lost, making last minute alterations etc, we do everything we can in our power to negotiate these changes with the suppliers, and more often than not we are able to accommodate last minute changes that would otherwise come with a fee, or a flat no. Not every time, but most of the time. On top of this, we personally assess every product we sell to ensure they are up to standards of 'would I personally use this service for myself?' and if the answer is no, then you will not find this product in our aggregated list of results. Some agents will simply list ALL products available on the market and claim that it is *your* responsibility for making the right choice on which product you choose, as they are 'only an agent' offering you a list, for comparison. In addition to these benefits of using Priority Booker, our prices are also, very often, the best in the market.