Virgin Media are out of their minds on pricing

I got an email from VM last month about renewal.

I pay for M500 with volt boost to 1gig £45 (Now £48) then £62 after 18 months

Last month they wanted:

£52 then £69 after 18 months.

They just sent me another email and now they want:

£56 then £73 after 18 months.


I can get 1Gig via City Fibre for around £35-£45 depending on provider or I can go 2gig up and down for £50 with Yayzi..

VM are DELUSIONAL with their pricing. In places where other services are being sold and provide the same or faster speeds they cant charge those mad prices.

The thing that makes it even more nuts is as a new customer M500 is £35!!

Madness!

I will lose my double data on O2 but my plan is 150gb anyway and I only use around 70gb a month so not getting the 300gb I am now is no real loss to me.

So come July I will order with Yayzi or Zen before my contract is up in August.

By by VM. It was nice knowing you. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!

Edited by Seansmit17 (Sat 27-Apr-24 00:31:51)

Yep, send the message with your feet, you in a CF area, so go ahead with it.

The crazy thing is we know they can afford to do better as some customers do get much better offers, VM have a really wide variance on their pricing from one customer to the next.

Yes, I agree, it's the worst part about VM for me. I had M500 on Volt (so boosted to 1gig) for £37/month, contract expired and they wanted £70-80 (can't remember the exact number).

Managed to haggle it down to £40/month again after a bunch of calls.

The ironic thing is if they'd had it go from £37 to say £47 after the term ended I probably wouldn't have bothered haggling, but as you say at £70+/month it's a terrible deal esp when I have multiple other providers available now.

I was on M350 at the start of the month for £34 which is prior to April price increase, got a phone call trying to sell my a better package for £43 with phone and TV, but I didn't want that.

Went online and had an offer shown for M500 for £36.24 with no price increase until April 2025, so I took that.

Two nights ago I went on my account to turn off marketing as I'm getting calls every other day, and there was an offer for 1 Gig at £40, so I took it - no haggling for 18 months

I know £40 is expensive compared to some, but my only other options are 50/6 VDSL or 4G

They can do better pricing when they want to, and all the haggling every so often annoys me, but its not been quite as bad the last few years as it was when I first joined.

Edited by R0NSKI (Sat 27-Apr-24 17:18:19)

Yeah, you have CityFibre like you mentioned in a previous thread on Zen or Yayzi.

I'm pretty certain that if you were to switch and inform VM to cancel their service they'll immediately offer you a cheaper deal!

This happened with me 2 years ago on FTTC. I was with TalkTalk and the price was originally £19.75 a month and slowly it crept up and eventually jumped to £40 a month for 80/20 after the 2 year contract!

I then joined BT Home Essentials 2 in July 2022 for £20 a month! I simply entered my landline number and I instantly transferred to the new service while the old TalkTalk service was auto-cancelled that was under my dad's name.

Guess what? Within a few days of this transfer I received a physical letter by post from TalkTalk offering me the same service for £20 a month! They could've offered me this in the first place. But they don't, until you genuinely migrate. If you haggle while you're with your existing provider then often they pretend to be strict. But as soon as you migrate then the old provider start begging you to stay.

I had this very same experience with Sky once 6 years ago when I switched to Plusnet ADSL. They called us and someone from customer service tried to keep us as an existing Sky customer.

Of-course I wasn't going to cancel the migration and stick to TalkTalk. Because even if they did offer me the £20 a month contract, I know they will price hike again after a few months mid-contract!

In your case it is an absolute no-brainer to join CityFibre as you'll get symmetrical gigabit speeds, which VM doesn't offer it unless it upgrades to Gig2.

What makes no sense in these scenarios is once you actually leave you’re in contract with another provider and can’t come back for 18-25 months.

It’s like they don’t understand the concept of a minimum term.

If you are in the 14 day cooling off period, then you can, but would many bother.

Interesting, an employee has started telling people to not take volt packages, apparently they very rarely get good offers available to give out for volt customers, and non volt deals wont be offered as they want to keep them on the O2 sim, second hand info, so dont blame the messenger if its all rubbish lol.

VM know I was considering CF, I quoted price to them, and actually did cancel, this was now weeks ago and no attempt has been made to keep me. So sadly there is little certainty and its very much a lottery.

Also I have never had an offer under the my deals section.

For science I do plan to ring them within 7 days of termination date, just to see if anything better gets offered.

When I was last on them years ago it was far easier, just rang saying thinking of leaving and would give you a nice deal. They seem far worse now. But maybe back then I was just one of the lucky ones.

Edited by Chrysalis (Sun 28-Apr-24 02:35:15)

VM could not offer me anything to stay.. unless it was free 1gig

I am not going to stay now, not with the other providers giving a much better deal.

If VM was still my only option for anything faster than VDSL2 (70 ish mb here) then I would fight for a better deal. M500 for £45 again or there abouts would suit me fine. It's a little pricy mind.

But yes, It will be interesting to see if VM will fight to keep me or not or just say ok, cya