Airtricity - rip off (€5 fee) for using your Credit Card

prech101

I recently attempted to pay a bill over the phone with airtricity and was informed that they will charge €5 for the privilege of paying them. I obviously asked “why” and was told this is a standard processing fee they are charged by the company who takes there payments.

I work in this industry and have dealing with the company who does there processing and there is no way it cost €5 per transaction. If they are being charged that per transactions, well quite simply they are doing it wrong.
Airtricity call this an admin charge, what it really is,,, a bad debt provision for cc’s which come back unpaid. Why are customers who pay with cc being charged a bad debt provision for other cc holders,, usually this is spread out across the customer base and worked into total costs of goods/services.

To make matters worse I was treated with contempt on the phone for raising the issue and then told to go online and pay as there is no charge paying via this channel,,,, guess what,,, there is, same €5 charge. I took the time to have a look at their set up, they have no real security measures in place (on the face of it) they do not use Verified by visa or MasterCode, ways of ensuring you are paid in a CNP space. Any company serious about taking payments securely should be using this.
So watch out they may talk about saving but the little extras they throw in will dig into any potential saving you might be hoping for.

Airtricity must be working of the same business plan as Ticketmaster.

So when it comes down to it, they are misinforming their customers, begs the question what other fibs they are telling.

I recently moved back to my original supplier as I found them repulsive to deal with.

91011

prech101 wrote: »

Airtricity call this an admin charge, what it really is,,, a bad debt provision for cc’s which come back unpaid. Why are customers who pay with cc being charged a bad debt provision for other cc holders,, usually this is spread out across the customer base and worked into total costs of goods/services.

Its not a charge for unpaid cc's as this would show up in an instant.

Its purely a extra profit making excercise started by ryanair and now spread into many many companies.

prech101

Depending on what bank you are dealing with, banks can take anywhere between 10 - 120 days to return a unpaid cc, and by unpaid I mean the cc holder is questioning the payment.

Cashless society ,, charged for having a cc and now extra charges for using it,,,

ScouseMouse

Assuming they are charged 2% by the credit card company (like I am) - which is two euro per hundred, they look like they are passing the bank charge onto you.

How much was your bill ?

91011

superscouse wrote: »

Assuming they are charged 2% by the credit card company (like I am) - which is two euro per hundred, they look like they are passing the bank charge onto you.

How much was your bill ?

you should negotiate harder!! - I get 1.25%:D and I wouldn't have huge turnover. - Though I think you're in newsagent / convienence store area? so maybe the lower average value has a bearing.

But you can be guaranteed airtricity pay less than 1%

prech101

H,

These are card not present payments so differs from Retail stores and should actually be cheaper.

Their charge is €5 per trans no matter what the amount is.

Might send it to Eddie hobbs and see what he thinks!!!!


i also agree with last poster 2% is pretty steep, might be worth looking around or striking a better deal with your processor.

ScouseMouse

Will do, thanks very much.

saltie

well well well i went to make a payment today and yep i got asked for this €5 payment. This is ridiculous and I didnt get told by the guy selling me this great deal. He jsut said you can make payments whenever you want online towards your next bill.
I find this ludicrous that we get charged for making a pre payment to this company.
Seriously pissed

Cabaal

Its a charge to discourage any other payment method other then direct debit, standard enough for alot of companys to do this these days and most certainly not just in Ireland

booboo88

its more than likely charged as airtricity are charged by the bank a higher percentage of the sum of money, than if you paid by laser or dd

Pablo Sanchez

Its not just the fee that Airtricity are charge for the CC payment, its also to pay for the extra admin costs but mainly to discourage any payments other then Direct Debit.

When you would have signed up with them, their ads said save X% on your gas, save X+1% if you sign up for gas and leccy and save X+2% if you agree to sign up to DD payments.

Lisa2011

That is utterly shocking what they are doing. Ryanair set that example and everyone seems to be doling it now. Ryanair made €252m in cc charges last year. I wonder what airtricity are making.

vibe666

I had a similar dealing with airtricity on friday and they decided that I needed to pay them a €300 security deposit unless i agreed to pay by DD going forward. :mad:

when we first switched, we'd been thinking about moving to them for a while to save a few quid and there just happened to be someone knocking on doors selling it, so we invited him in and after he answered a few questions we signed up.

at the time we explained that we didn't want to set up a DD, so he said that the application wouldn't go through without the DD info filled out, so he would have to put them on the form, but that he would put a note on the account not to actually set up the DD when the forms were processed.

you can imagine how that turned out.

a few months ago they quite severely overcharged us due to their estimated billing being severely out of whack, so we cancelled the direct debit via our online banking so we could just pay manually.

we still had a question about being overcharged and were waiting for someone to call back so we had held off paying the bill until we knew what we'd actually have to pay, but in the meantime i got an automated call from them as they had issued another bill, so the old one was now overdue and they were looking for payment.

i had actually already paid the overdue amount via their website the day before as i'd gotten an email to say they'd issued a new bill, but seemingly the part of their system that lets you pay the bills and the part that says you are overdue aren't connected.

anyway, the call gets transferred to a phone monkey who i tell that i've already paid and he says okay, but that my direct debit had been cancelled.

i then proceeded to tell him it was cancelled because they had abused the DD system by overcharging us and taking more than was actually owed to them, which is why we cancelled. his reply was that unless we were going to pay by DD that they would require a €300 security deposit. i could tell from his tone that i wasn't going to get anywhere with him and experience has taught me to just avoid them as they just end up winding you up, so i asked to speak to his manager. apparently his manager was off until today, so i'm waiting for a callback now at some stage today to give out to him and they are either going to sort themselves out, or lose a customer.

freeworld777

Not really sure why anyone would want to pay bills by credit card anyway when there are so many other options these days.

vibe666

freeworld777 wrote: »

Not really sure why anyone would want to pay bills by credit card anyway when there are so many other options these days.

mine isn't, it's a visa debit card, given to me by my bank to replace my laser card and as far as i know, it's supposed to be treated exactly the same as a laser card, except i can use it online too.

Gamesnash.ie: Pat

prech101 wrote: »

H,

These are card not present payments so differs from Retail stores and should actually be cheaper.

Their charge is €5 per trans no matter what the amount is.

Might send it to Eddie hobbs and see what he thinks!!!!


i also agree with last poster 2% is pretty steep, might be worth looking around or striking a better deal with your processor.

Have to say from our experience across multiple processors quotations it is dearer for card not present transactions than retail outlets. Quite simply there is a lot less chance of fraud / stolen cards being accepted at a chip and pin terminal in a store versus online retail. The processors factor in bad debt provision for chargebacks etc in their quotations for online stores. When we started for example our charge was 4%

Dynch

freeworld777 wrote: »

Not really sure why anyone would want to pay bills by credit card anyway when there are so many other options these days.

One reason might be so that you can use the cash to clear your credit card balance figure and avoid paying interest, instead of using it to pay your Airtricity bill - but you're hit with this penalty, which they just described to me today as "a €5.00 charge imposed by the banks" saying there is nothing Airtricity can do about it. I didn't believe the explanation, which is wny I find myself here.
Is there nothing we as a nation can do about this sort of callous & profiteering treatment? Do we just lie down and take it? I'm getting thoroughly fed up of it. It is not enough for us to pay our bills anymore, we also have to pay for the privelige of pay them to the company, and also, of course, a fee to the bank as well, and also to cover people who don't pay their bills and I assume, reimburse the company for the loss of the charges those people don't pay for paying their bills. It's all getting a bit much.