16 May 2008

When a 20 visit pass isn't - When it's at CISAC

| Special G
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We recently purchased 20 visit swim passes at CISAC (Canberra International Sports and Aquatic Centre) for myself and Mrs G so we could take baby G swimming. We had planned to take her swimming once a fortnight and have been doing this for some time so purchased the 20 visit pass to save us some cash.

In signing up for said pass there is nothing on either the pricing documentation or in the small print (terms and conditions) on the back of the membership application form that indicates the 20 pass has an expiry date. When speaking with the girl at the counter she didn’t mention an expiry date either.

We heard from a friend that the 20 swim passes have a 3 month expiry and she had to forfeit 15 visits on her pass. On checking with CISAC we were told they have a 4 month expiry, which on our swimming timetable would leave us 12 visits to forfeit. We would not have bought the passes if we had this information. I know we are not talking sheep stations as far as cash goes and I intend to get my 20 visits.

Has anyone else been caught out by this? As far as I can see CISAC doesn’t have a leg to stand on and has to honour the 20 visit pass.

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Danman said :

Very diplomatic HarryK – its good to see a propieter in here tryin gtheir best to move to remedy.

som epeople accept that, others just rant here because they feel the need.

I for one am always willing to take both sides of teh situation in to account.

thanks for your support. we are proud of what we have achieved, and will always do our best to support our members and customers.

Danman said :

I for one will continue using your services at Club Lime

Cheers, thanks again!

Harry

Very diplomatic HarryK – its good to see a propieter in here tryin gtheir best to move to remedy.

som epeople accept that, others just rant here because they feel the need.

I for one am always willing to take both sides of teh situation in to account.

It is important that businesses have the chance to remedy, and usually its on a not so public scale. I always suggest that people bring it up in person before ranting on the internet, but most people who rant are just a bowl of jelly and could not stand up for themselves in person hence the easy route via blogs.

I for one will continue using your services at Club Lime – oh and whoever said banning public breast feeding is a dullard – you obviously have neither a)lactated or b)had to live with someone lactating.

Suck it up fool, its a way of life…

Mælinar said :

@HarryK – Mrs Mælinar reliably informs me the reason you have so many problems is because of the monkeys you are employing at the front desk. Whether or not this is a business decision you have made (pay peanuts, get monkeys), it has directly affected your customer base by several dozen that we are aware of.

If their intellectual capacity were higher, at least to the ability to answer genuine questions sensibly, your customer base will increase.

i don’t think it appropriate to have a go at the “intellectual capacity” of the reception staff. Most of the staff at reception are university students who are doing the best they can, and in my opinion are doing a fantastic job.

The suggestion of paying peanuts and getting monkeys is again incorrect (ie: get your facts straight).

And finally i don’t know what you mean by “having so many problems”…. 20,000 people a week visit the facility, i’m sure i would know about it if there was “so many problems”.

anyway, thanks for your feedback, always welcome!

Harry

turbodewd1 said :

The customer is always right.

CISAC should actively educate the customer on the T&Cs of their 20-visit deal. All they have done is alienate some customers.
There will always be customers that skim or dont read the fine print or make seemingly valid assumptions.

CISAC should honor the 20 visits and amend their T&Cs so as not to alienate customers.

Why win an argument with a customer and lose their business???

the membership form in question HAD THE START AND EXPIRY DATE (4 MONTHS FROM START DATE) shown/written on it.

Its not a matter of not reading the T&C’s.. its right there on the front page of the form!

thanks for your feedback nontheless.

Harry

^^ #18 Troll alert. Pandy, pull your head in, at least, put your eyes back in their sockets you pervert. I care not whether you were breastfed or not as an infant, but at least have the decency to accept that it is a natural function.

@HarryK – Mrs Mælinar reliably informs me the reason you have so many problems is because of the monkeys you are employing at the front desk. Whether or not this is a business decision you have made (pay peanuts, get monkeys), it has directly affected your customer base by several dozen that we are aware of.

If their intellectual capacity were higher, at least to the ability to answer genuine questions sensibly, your customer base will increase.

Frack any one who says CISAC are wrong.

Anyone who bans engorded tits from being displayed in the lunch room feeding their rug rats get a feather in the cap from me.

The customer is always right.

CISAC should actively educate the customer on the T&Cs of their 20-visit deal. All they have done is alienate some customers.
There will always be customers that skim or dont read the fine print or make seemingly valid assumptions.

CISAC should honor the 20 visits and amend their T&Cs so as not to alienate customers.

Why win an argument with a customer and lose their business???

Thanks to Harry K for sorting this one out in short time. Have made suggestions to him to add to his advertising material for the 20 visit pass.

I received a bit of a fon off from the staff on the counter although I am happy with the way this has turned out,

Harry, RiotACTers tend to get a bit enthuastic.

Some are bluffing, some are just lunatics, but other rarer people are actually using what is referred to as “a sense of humour”.
We get the occasional person who wants to get money back for things, others write bizarre restaurant reviews, but when the business owners show up here they tend to back off.

(Check out the old Grazing restaurant review)

Whatsup said :

There are plenty of good suggestions here… without this rule being explained to you and / or it being in writing anywhere you have a strong argument. Go for it !

without getting into too many details, i have retrieved “Mr G’s” form, and the expiry date is clearly shown. For some reason Mrs G’s form had that section blanked out.

Notwithstanding the above, we have extended the expiry dates to fit in with their usage patterns.

But as stated, the rules are explained (in normal procedure), and also listed on the membership form that people sign.

thank you for all the great suggestions in this post… sometimes though its best to contact the company your dealing with directly as they (like us) are often sympathetic to certain circumstances and can fix things better than “using battering rams to get through the doors” as suggested by one poster.

Harry
The Club Group – CISAC

if it’s allegedley not advertised and noone tells one, how come i knew about it? i always 20 pass it, and i always know i’ve got 3 months……it was told to me. they have been kind to me and have twice let me extend due to a reoccuring illness (tonsils and ear infection) so, yeah, go cisac (i am not in anyway related or work for CISAC)

There are plenty of good suggestions here… without this rule being explained to you and / or it being in writing anywhere you have a strong argument. Go for it !

Special G, if they deny you, the lovely Mrs G and the cute Baby G entry you have a wide selection of people on this site that you could employ as battering rams to get through the doors…….Ant……Unknown………Nyssa………Maelinar………..

There ya go – a win win situation…. case closed.

Special G – what does the membership form you have say the expiry date is. The expiry date should be shown about 3/4 of the page down (there is a section that says start date/expiry date)

Alternatively, shoot me over an email (harry@clubgroup-dot-com-dot-au) with your membership number and i’ll look it up for you.

As mentioned early, we do regularly extend visit passes, however the whole point of them is for frequent users, hence the discount. If the receptionist didn’t explain this to you at the time of signup i apologise.

Happy to help out if you contact us.

Cheers.

Harry
The Club Group – CISAC.

Sounds like the pool at the AIS just obtained some new customers!

It’s nicer there, and IIRC, a little bit cheaper, too. Good luck with it.

I’ve heard of people getting an extension pretty easily, and it was for another 3 months. Might be different with who you talk too.

I’ve had a similar dodgy experience with CISAC lately.

I wanted to take my 7 year old in for an hour or so of swimming – just her, I was rugged up and only wanted to sit on benches to supervise. When I got to counter I was informed there was a fee to enter even if you weren’t swimming (from memory it was a couple of dollars).

I don’t know about you but I found it quite offensive that they’d charge me just to walk in the door and sit on the bench when I clearly wasn’t going to be swimming.

In my opinion CISAC management are too interested in meeting their budget targets and as a result not paying attention what it will do to their patronage – neither my wife or I will be returning there with the kidlings as long as CISAC are being greedy.

Jonathon Reynolds4:23 pm 16 May 08

My suggestion is write to the General Manager of CISAC and outline your position, most businesses tend to be reasonable. Senior management may not be aware of the issues being experienced by the purchasers of the pass and your letter may prompt to change their procedures so that the expiry date is clearly outlined. If you have no success Graham Downey at the Canberra Times generally champions these issues.

I think it would be worth chasing up with the office of fair trading. The common law around this sort of thing is pretty comprehensive and the option of a time based ticket vs a specified number of uses ticket is usually a mutually exclusive thing. That is you can offer a time based ticket, or you can offer a number of uses ticket, not both (regardless of any fine print). So take it up with Fair Trading, it won’t leave you any worse off, and you may well get somewhere.

Yeah it sucks. This was ages ago, but from memory, we knew at the time of signing (the CISAC girl told us, and she wrote the expiry date on the form we signed). We thought we would get the 20 visits done before expiry, so signed up…but we didn’t swim nearly as much as we thought so lost quite a few visits.

We did ring and ask whether the expiry could be extended – we were told if it was getting close to the date and we wouldn’t be able to use all the visits, to ring them – something along the lines of if we were sick and couldn’t go, they might use their discretion to extend…we never bothered in the end (we would have had to lie, basically).

We won’t be signing up with them again, although if it was a ‘real’ 20 visit pass, we probably would!

My layman understanding is that you are only held to a contract/conditions if you are given the opportunity to read them before you accept.

A famous example are the conditions on the back of the parking voucher. You don’t have the opportunity to read the conditions until you have already accepted the offer so aren’t held by them. (case related to a disclaimer of liablilty of damage to property written on the back of an automated parking ticket and not displayed).

It all comes down to what was displayed. Is there a little “conditions apply” asterix on any promotional stuff you were shown or provided? That can be an out for CISAC too.

Sounds like a case of buyer beware to me.

Good luck in fighting the good fight.

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