You've been warned! (Royal Bank of Scotland)

Member Name: Mr. Davis

Product:	Royal Bank of Scotland
Date:	18/12/03 (627 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: staff sound nice but over stretched, none, none

Disadvantages: slow to answer the phone, when they do, they can't help you, systems being "down"

Proof Bank of Scotland card services are hopeless. They can send you bills for less than £10 but you can only pay them £10 or more, and if you don't, you get fined £20. I can't think of anything they've done right.

I'll keep this as brief as I can. The day before I was supposed to be going abroad, a Lloyds TSB ATM witholds my BoS Midas Gold MasterCard for no reason. Miles away from credit limit, don't owe anyone any money .... everything fine ...... later turns out to be a faulty ATM.

Note: The manageress of the bank "hosting" the ATM claimed she couldn't get access to the card until the bank had closed and the card would have been destroyed and unusable anyway.

Calls to BoS card services customer help resulted in the usual routine of waiting, being transferred, being cut off without acheiving anything, dialling again, waiting, being transf .... you get the idea. Not until I managed to get transffered to MasterCard did anyone ask me for MY phone number so they could call me back if my mobile's calling credit run out (as it had done twice already). Unfortunately, the lady at MasterCard, who seemed professional and courteous AND concerned didn't understand that I was in Hull, UK .... not one of the other Hull's somewhere else on the planet and not only did she not know where my nearest "Western Union"(?) bank was, but neither did I? BoS card services has managed to waste the last 40 minutes of bank opening times in the UK so the option for MasterCard to arrange a cash advance for me to pick up (even at the Lloyds TSB branch who's ATM had eaten my card) had passed and my destination, Norway was "one of the very few places where they didn't have much of a presence".

I don't know if this suggests Lloyds TSB don't maintain their ATMs or their manageresses are unhelpful "jobsworths" but Bank of Scotland card services were useless in helping out AN
D, on a slightly different matter, even when I'd p
aid everything off my card (and asked them to take into account any pending interest charges) they still sent me a bill for about £1.12. Now if I had ignored this, I'd have got a £20 "late payment" fine so, I called them, from abroad and told them I wasn't supposed to have this bill and was told "the minimum payment is £10!" ........ so there you have it.

Their voice mail is badly thought out .... you can get to the end of whole sequences before you find you should never have been set on that particular route to "service" in the first place and you have to re-dial.

Before you sign up for a card, phone their card services number and see how long it takes for you to speak to someone. Can be 14 minutes and more in my experience.

On top of that, thei call centre staff don't always know the difference between when a month's statement is being closed and another one started and payment is due. Wanting to give myself plenty of time to clear my bill, I asked when the next month's statement would START and was given the wrong date ending up with £2,000 worth of purchases going on to the bill that should have been blank that arrived when I was out of the UK.

I've just signed up for a Ryanair card!

Summary: