1 Year VM discount contract coming to an end soon

Hi friendly folks,
I signed up to Virgin Media on their M350 package. I have been getting charged £45 for 1 year but supposedly, I will start getting charged £67 from 9 October.

On their site they're offering £40 per month and then £56 .

I have a couple of questions....
1) Why the hell would I pay £67 when they're currently offering £56 as standard fee after the minimum period. Hell, even on a rolling 30 day contract they're charging £63 p/m. Surely this is taking the p!ss?

2) So for my final question, is it possible to move to a new contract.Has anyone managed to do this? Ideally I would like to stay with VM as the speeds are pretty amazing but am not scared to move back to 80 MB DSL if need be.

This is the page for their deals:
https://www.virginmedia.com/shop/broadband/broadband...

and the page to their 30 day rolling contracts:
https://www.virginmedia.com/shop/broadband/30-day-ro...

Many thanks for any help
Regards,
Imran

I was a VM customer for a number of years and my experience was that they simply don't have standard prices but charge as much as the customer will bear. Prices will rise, often twice a year, until the customer snaps, calls them and threatens to leave, when they will offer a much reduced price on a new contract.

Eventually, I found the whole renegotiation-every-year process just too tedious and went elsewhere. Technically, the service was absolutely fine but I really disliked their pricing strategy.

So, to answer your Q2, I'd wait until the minimum contracted period is almost up, then call them to negotiate. If necessary, give them notice to terminate. They will then call you back a couple of days later with a new offer.

Edited by ashdown (Tue 28-Jul-20 21:21:32)

Thank-you for your feedback. I figured that was the case as a friend who had cable TV with them had exactly the same issue - that they'd increase their prices after the contract period and then offer discount and additional bundles to keep her on! I wasnt sure if the same happened with the broadband as well.

If you read the postings on the VM Community Forum I think you will find that they are slowly moving away form the "threaten to leave and they will call you back with a better offer strategy". So if you give notice to leave then make sure you are prepared to leave. I live some distance from my OR FTTC cabinet and struggled to get 20Mbps down. So FTTH from VM (via Project Lightning) was way beyond anything an OR based ISP could offer me. So I do negotiate each year, but I will not be threatening to leave.

I had to threaten to leave last year, even gave 30 days notice, got Vivid 350 for £37 a month in the end.

Someone mentioned that you need to allow marketing calls for them to call you back recently though.

We should get FTTP soon, so that will allow me to leave if the deal is not good enough next time I need to negotiate.

You can negotiate a new contract, I called up for my MIL.
when I called up I got through to an offshore team who offer basically no discount.
I said we'll just cancel then and got put through to the cancellations team in the UK who beat the offer price on the website at the time.

mine is too,but had an email from them saying no price rises would be applied and things would be same price once my offer period ended,thought all customers in same position would have received this?

Got this:-
We want to let you know that, even though your minimum term or introductory discount is coming to an end, you won’t see any other price rise in 2020. You don’t need to do anything, and we’ll be in touch about your contract or introductory offer soon.

We'd like to stay in touch about all the great Virgin Media stuff we have on offer for you. You have currently said no to receiving marketing messages from us, which means we are not able to keep you up to date with our latest TV, broadband, phone and mobile news, competitions, product and bundle offers via online, email, post, SMS, phone.

You can change your preferences by simply registering or signing in to virginmedia.com/optin. Click ‘My Profile’, then ‘My Preferences’.

Thank you for being with us.
The Virgin Media team

Edited by steve195527 (Thu 13-Aug-20 10:53:41)

In reply to a post by steve195527:

mine is too,but had an email from them saying no price rises would be applied and things would be same price once my offer period ended,thought all customers in same position would have received this?

Got this:-
We want to let you know that, even though your minimum term or introductory discount is coming to an end, you won’t see any other price rise in 2020. You don’t need to do anything, and we’ll be in touch about your contract or introductory offer soon.

We'd like to stay in touch about all the great Virgin Media stuff we have on offer for you. You have currently said no to receiving marketing messages from us, which means we are not able to keep you up to date with our latest TV, broadband, phone and mobile news, competitions, product and bundle offers via online, email, post, SMS, phone.

You can change your preferences by simply registering or signing in to virginmedia.com/optin. Click ‘My Profile’, then ‘My Preferences’.

Thank you for being with us.
The Virgin Media team

I read the above that Virgin Media will still revert you back to the packages original price. What they won't do is increase the original package price by their RPI / finger in the air uplift they like to apply each x amount of months.

I had an email today from Virgin saying my contract ends in September, but my discount will run through to March and my price remains the same, which is what it said in previous emails, so I'm glad I don't need to phone them.

I have just left VM over the increasing costs. Even with the call back they did not offer anything cheaper!!

So I left and at the moment I am on 40/10 FTTC and finding that it is working better than the M350 service I had from VM. It's nice not to have packet loss, make such a difference.

As long as nothing else goes wrong with 2020, I only have till Christmas to wait for, as then I should be able to order FTTP!

Edited by DrPepper (Fri 14-Aug-20 09:48:18)