How do I... cancel a Tiscali subscription?

[zeltus]

How do I cancel a (steam-powered) Tiscali dial-up subscription?

I can find nothing on their oh-so-not-helpful web pages - all it wants from me is the details of my new bank card and/or change of address details.

I have really had enough of them and want to cancel (it runs out at the end of the month as the card number they have expires then) - but I'm afraid they'll somehow keep racking up the charges unless I formally cancel.

 

Any help gratefully received etc. etc. etc.

 

Bill

[LesLauriers]

I  could only cancel my Tiscali contract by registered letter  "accuse de réception" . I then had to wait until the 12 month contract was up before they would stop charging. The contract is self renewing for 12 months every 366th day.

[Richardk]

You'll need to look at the original documentation you got (or printed off?) when you signed up, however, the norm is that you need to give either 30 or 60 days notice by a recorded delivery letter. As someone else said it is auto-renewing otherwise and you are then tied in for another year. If you have a UK address you can always tell them you are moving house (we did this to get out of a Tiscali contract and it worked) at which point they may ask for proof of residency at the UK address (e.g. utility bill).

Otherwise, how about seeing if they offer a different but better product?

Good luck.

Richard

[Leschenauds]

We have been down the Tiscali con route for over two years and we tried to stop payment when the dial up was too awful for words. Eventually we changed both our credit cards, told the bank we had lost them, and received a couple of letters from Tiscali which we ignored. They then telephoned threatening court action and I told them to go ahead and do it and I would make sure that their way of working was well publicised.

Yes ,you are supposed to register a letter cancelling BUT,1 They don't have an address on their website or even a telephone number and their help naturally does not mention cancellation HOWEVER, they do have a website and they ignore emails about cancelling contract. I do wish they had carried out their threat as I would loved to have dragged them through the courts even as far as the European court if necessary but then, of course everyone else like me and you would put in their own twopennworth (two cents worth?).

[zeltus]

Thanks for all the suggestions.

 

Tiscali can't collect any money automatically form me, as the card has run out. But I suspect they will try and continue to mount up the debt each month.

 

So I will telephone them to say "I AM cancelling" and leave it at that. I don't see why I should have to give them a reason why, just a statement that I want it cancelled. Sometimes, the way individuals get treated in France does get me down a bit - Customer Service? What that?

I signed up online using a computer with no printer. I can't remember any of the passwords, they won't respond to my requests to reset them, I can't therefore pick up e-mails using web2mail or similar and I have never been able to respond to e-maisl from AOL addresses (that might well be AOL being, shall we say, a bit zealous, but I'd still expect tiscali.fr to fight their corner on behalf of their subscribers) - so time to get on to a service that does work.

 

Shame really, tiscali had a good reputation for a long time...

Cheers

 

Bill

[zeltus]

An update...

To cancel a Tiscali subscription (should anyone do a search for this in the near future)

It is necessary to send a letter (Registered Post [Recommande]) to the following address...

----------

Tiscali Service

Dept. Resiliation

33070 Bordeaux

CEDEX

---------------

It is necessary that this letter be written in French and that it contains your username and customer number... In our case, they're demanding 30 days notice.

If you don't have a customer number to hand, you'll have to undergo the pain of telephoning Tiscali on 0892 95500 and getting your details from whoever answers. And we were on hold for ages.

Still, we got there in the end - I dunno why this is all double-spaced - I can't see any means of changing the line spacing.

Bill

[Will]

What Penumbra says is perfectly correct. If you have a 'forfait' contract you will normally need to keep that going for the minimum 12 months period.

If you need confirmation you can go to the 'mon compte' pages at http://www.tiscali.fr, the under the 'mon abonnement' section you can choose 'consulter mes CGU' which will alllow you to download the terms and conditions (which is about 1.5MB so will take some time on a dialup connection).

People (in UK) have indeed taken Tiscali to court over similar problems, but without much success. You can read the stories at http://www.the-scream.co.uk - go to the forum section, then Tiscali. That's an interesting site - it started in the pre-Tiscali days when a lot of users were having these troubles with a company called Localtel, which launched a product called screaming.net, the first truly unmetered internet service in Britain. Localtel became World Online, which was absorbed by Tiscali, and The Scream expanded to cover all ISPs. I was on the site's admin team in the early days, and (am rather ashamed to say) took part in a BBC Watchdog 'exposé' of Localtel's billling methods.

If you want single line spacing
(like this)
when composing a message,
just hold down the shift key when pressing the carriage return key
(sorry, I remember typewriters).

For what it's worth, I found cancelling a Wanadoo contract even harder. In addition to the standard Tiscali hassles they demanded a letter giving valid reasons why you wanted to cancel; if they didn't consider the reasons were good enough they would ignore the letter. In the end we stopped the payment (itself rather difficult) and every time they sent a bill we phoned and said we had cancelled, which initiated the whole process over again until one day we actually got a helpful customer services lady who cancelled our account - and wiped out what was owing (actually a very small amount).