Booking international air fares on-line

There is still a need for travel agents.

I recently tried booking a flight to London on-line. I wanted to come home via Chicago and San Jose. First I went to the Air New Zealand website. I put in my itinerary and the cheapest they could give me was $11,000! This was for economy. I though maybe Air New Zealand just aren't able to do it on-line and so tried the popular Expedia site. I've used this lots for booking accommodation. The same flights on Expedia were US$7,000 - about the same.

So I gave my friendly travel agent, Debra, from House of Travel a call. She was able to give me exactly the flights I wanted, along with a few options all for $3,600. She well and truly earned her commission. She also noticed that my travel insurance was due to expire and organised some more. Now that's what I call service. Why can't the on-line travel service not offer something similar to this?

Air foam wall insulation - our experience

Now this isn't really a complaint. In fact, I recommend the product. When I went to insulate my house with Airfoam I couldn't find any independant accounts of people who had installed it. We did have a couple of problems that I would have like to know about the possibility of before we did this. So if you're contemplating this, then hopefully you'll find this useful.

A cold house
We live in an old, weather board villa. Like a lot of New Zealand houses it had no wall insulation. New Zealands climate is temparate enough that no one is going to die from having a cold house - it's just uncomfortable. This was the case in our house. We already had pink bats in the ceiling. We put insulation under the floor, but our house was still freezing in the winter. Even with a night store heater and a heat pump we struggled to keep the house at a reasonable temperature. So we looked to wall insulation.

The options
Initially the only option I was awar of was, taking the lining off the walls, putting in pink bats and relining the walls. This is a major undertaking to do the whole house and would involve weeks of work and a lot of cost. After ringing around I found out about airfoam. For this they drill holes in your walls from the outside and pump in this liquid foam. The foam sets in about 30s - to something with the consistency of polystyrene. They they bog up whole, sand it and cover the whole with undercoat. Three men were able to do our whole house in a day and we were quoted about $4000.
The problems
The main problems we had were with the moisture from the airfoam. In some rooms our wall paper bubbled. We also had a noticeboard fall off the wall in the kitchen and break some dishes. This happened because the wall had softened from the moisture.

To airfoam's credit, they did accept responsibilty for the problem. The guy running it had only just bought the franchise and said he hadn't seen this happen before. He offered to completely repaint the walls that were affected. We ended up electing to put up with it for a while and took a discount of the quoted price. We weren't prepared to put up with tradesmen in our house for several more days (we have a young family).

An organised person would paint over all the holes on the outside walls. I haven't got round to that yet - so the house will probably stay with these white circles all over it until we next paint it(the house is white so it doesn't look too bad from a distance). It would be nice if part of the service was to paint the holes properly - to match with the existing colour - rather than leaving them with just undercoat.

The positives
Winter hasn't hit yet - but the signs are good. This morning it is cold and rainly outside and we awoke to our living area at 19 degrees - with no heating. We also noticed the house was a lot quieter - we couldn't hear the street noise that we normall could.

I'll keep you posted as winter comes - but so far I would recommend this.

I just want internet

We are lucky enough to own a bach. It's a small place that allows us to get away with the family. Quite naturally, we try to make the place as comfortable as possible. This recently extended to high speed internet - which leads to my complaint - I found it was impossible to get the internet without paying for a phone service as well. The problem was - we don't want the phone.

Now I understand we need the physical phone line - we already had that because the previous owners had had a phone at some stage. But I don't understand why we had to have an active phone. The end result is we have the crazy situation where we have a phone line that we're paying for with no phone attached to it.

I'm sure we're unusual in not wanting a phone - but this will happen more and more - especially as people start using voice over IP more and more. The problem is - the phone companies (in this case Telecom) are, well - phone companies and don't want you having the internet without the phone. So this situation is unlikely to change in the short term. But that doesn't stop me complaining about it.

Gas hot water

We recently had gas hot water installed. I'm a huge fan of this because you get great water pressure and you don't run out of water. We used Plumbing World and had a few problems with the installation...

First, we only found out the date of the installation when the gas company, On Gas rang us to tell us when they would be delivering the bottles. My wife rang the Plumbing World to find out if this was the day they were going to do the installation and they confirmed it was. Surely this is customer service 101 - tell the customer when you're coming around.

Second - they didn't clean up after themselves very well. The installation went fairly smoothly with various tradesmen coming and going - but at the end of the day there were muddy foot prints all over our deck. Now we might have been spoiled by good service in the past ( Hire a hubby are great), but some of the smaller thing such as cleaning up after yourself can make a huge difference to your perception of the work being done.

Third, and this is my biggest gripe, they didn't take our hot water cylinder out. They said it wasn't part of their job. OK. But I'm betting that close to 100% of people who get gas hot water no longer need their hot water cylinders. How hard would it be to have that as an optional part of the service - I wouldn't have minded paying extra for it. As it is, it feels like the job isn't finished and now I've got to try and do it.

Bad service in New Zealand?

Hi,

I created this blog because I needed somewhere to vent my anger at the poor service I get from lots of companies. I'm based in Christchurch, New Zealand - so a lot of this will be focused around there. Let me know if you've come across bad service too and I'll post your stories.