Beware auto-renewal!

Long post! This is aimed at newbies like myself, people who have joined THS within the last year and have not yet had their subscription renewed.

I received two renewal notices this week.

  • One was from my motor insurance company telling me how much it was going to cost me to keep my van on the road, and inviting me to make payment and confirm that I want to continue with them. Car insurance is a legal requirement, but they allowed me to make my own decisions and didn’t try to take any money from me without my explicit consent.

  • The other was from THS and informed me that they were going to charge my credit card for my renewal, and if I wanted to stop them I had to go to the website myself and try to find the right place to do that.

Before I continue, let me just advise any Americans reading this that a) I’m in Europe and my contract with THS is bound by European law, and b) THS is based in the UK and also has to comply with UK regulations.

Our consumer protection laws are stronger than in the US. For example we have something called GDPR which prohibits businesses from automatically adding people to mailing lists and requires that any marketing emails include an “unsubscribe” link. You can only be added to a mailing list if you tick the box saying you want to be added, it’s not even permitted for the box to be pre-ticked by the company. You have to explicitly opt in, and be given the opportunity to opt out every time they contact you.

As I have a strict rule that I never allow any website to store my credit card details, and never sign up for any kind of auto renewal, I was pretty annoyed to find that THS has taken the liberty of storing my financial information and signing me up to an indefinite contract without my explicit permission.

It’s pretty easy to guess that I have somewhere given them permission to do this in the terms and conditions that I had to accept when I joined the site. And this was confirmed by the customer service rep I spoke to via online chat.

So here’s a quote from a UK legal site:

"the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) core principles say choice on contract entry should be the default position. This means on contract entry the consumer should be able to choose whether to agree:

  • a fixed term contract, or
  • a contract with automatic renewal. "

Clearly, THS is in breach of the guidelines laid down by the government of the country where they are based. They should have given me an explicit choice to either accept auto-renewal or just pay one time. It doesn’t matter what they said in the contract, they were supposed to give me the choice. But they didn’t.

On the positive side, at least they warned me 30 days in advance that my subscription was auto renewing, and I did manage to cancel the renewal. Eventually. But that’s the only positive thing I can say about this.

The cancellation process required me to navigate through multiple pages, where they tried to get me to change my mind. Their first ploy was to offer me a discount - so bear that in mind if you do want to renew with THS and don’t want to pay full price!

But then they continued to ask questions, and at each screen I had to ask myself “if I don’t answer this question does that mean that I haven’t completed the unsubscribe process and I’m going to get charged for another year?”

Maybe THS should adopt a GDPR-style policy whereby when you first sign up you get the option of

  • whether or not to auto-renew, in line with what the authorities want them to,
  • or whether to let them store your credit card details - and offering you the option of an easy renewal (“click here to make payment”) in a year,
  • or just make one payment and review the situation later.

And then when they send you the reminder email, put a nice clear button on it saying “click here to confirm / renew / unsubscribe” which takes you to a simple confirmation screen with no additional hoops to jump through.

For those who are interested, my van is off the road and I can’t travel. I don’t need motor insurance or THS for a while. I called my insurance company and it’s no problem at all to stop my insurance temporarily.

And I don’t want to stop using THS forever, I just don’t want to pay for something that I can’t use so I went to the customer service online chat, and (after arguing with a bot for a while) I managed to speak to a human. My first question was what happens to my profile if I don’t pay? Does it get immediately deleted? I don’t want to start again from zero, if they want me to do that then I just won’t renew at all. I just need to suspend my account for a while.

The answers I got were a bit vague, and apparently there is no official policy on this - at least nothing is published where users can see it. So they don’t make it easy for you to put your profile on hold for a while, and I guess that’s because they don’t want people to do this. They just want you to keep paying the full price every year, even if you can’t use the service and never signed up to keep paying for it anyway.

This is quite unethical and not acceptable.

So then I asked the rep why I had been signed up for auto-renewal without my permission in the first place. I got a very unsympathetic “you accepted the terms and conditions” which quite annoyed me, so I decided I’m going to make an issue of this.

I have some experience dealing with consumer protection, contract law, and other compliance issues. My first step whenever I decide to step things up is always to gather as much information as possible. And in the EU or UK, GDPR also enables you to do just that.

I informed the rep that I was making a Subject Access Request under GDPR, and that THS’s Data Protection Officer was required to provide a copy to me of all information the organisation holds about me. This includes any personally identifiable information, financial records, details of sits that I have been on, internal records, any communication that may mention me, etc. The time limit for compliance is 1 month.

And the rep responded that THS doesn’t store any information about anybody, that I could just go to my dashboard and take screenshots. Up to this point I was of the opinion that the problem lay with company policy, not the individual I was dealing with. It’s unfair to blame frontline workers for decisions made by management, so I try not to be mean. But I do push for answers, and had been quite dissatisfied by what I had already been told.

This response to my SAR was absolutely a step too far. When somebody makes a legally binding request, the person answering it is liable for any repercussions if the company doesn’t comply. The rep should have just said “I will pass your request on to our data protection officer,” not tried to fob me off with uninformed and incorrect answers.

This person was clearly very badly trained. So it’s still not really their fault, it’s a training problem, but they were in the front line and making excuses instead of trying to solve a problem or bring it to the attention of the appropriate person. And that’s why I’m posting this.

I am sure this post will be seen by somebody who is employed by THS, and I won’t be surprised if it disappears. Companies don’t like it when their paying customers call them out for doing things wrong, behaving unethically, or breaking laws. So of course I will take screenshots and keep a copy of this post, and any replies before it is taken down.

It would be nice if, instead of excuses and obfuscation, THS just apologise for the oversight and confirm that in future auto-renewal will be an opt-in, not a default. If my car insurance people can do it, so can THS.

Finally, the rep confirmed that they would email me a transcript of our chat. I don’t really need it, because of course I made a copy, but promises need to be kept. I would like to receive that transcript without having to ask again.

It’s sad that a company with a great core value proposition ruins it with underhanded money-grabbing tactics, and avoids accountability. There’s a great community here, but it’s being exploited by people who just want to make as much money off us as possible.

It will be interesting to see what response I get from THS but I’m betting at best it’ll be a mealy-mouthed semi-apology, without any acknowledgement of the breach of trust or ethics. And nothing will change.

So if you’re new here, be warned you have been signed up for auto-renewal whether you like it or not. You can cancel it, but they won’t make it easy. You’re just a resource to be exploited.

Edited post in line with our Community Rules; Keep it kind.

2 Likes

I know you are raising a point about GDPR compliance, but for anyone else wishing to switch-off the auto-renewal it’s really simple and straight forward. Go to your own dashboard.
Dashboard / settings / turn off auto-renewal.

To switch off any promo / contact from THS, that’s on your own dashboard too.
Dashboard / settings / contact preferences

Here’s a little more info about THS’s privacy policy:-

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Thanks Deb,.but the point is people being forced into auto-renewal at sign-up. The guidelines are quite clear, people should be given the choice.

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I tried to turn off auto renewal and had a message stating I was cancelling my membership. I thought I’d wait until a week or so before the renewal.

I understand your concern @therealchrisgray. Unfortunately, “should” isn’t “must” and therefore it’s really not binding.

When I joined THS in 2017 I was promised my initial joining price would remain fixed if I let my account autorenew each year. Since my hubby and I use THS extensively we had no problem with that. We saw it as an advantage. Over the years we have received multiple invitations to upgrade to one of the three Tiers but we’ve always resisted. We’ve always been satisfied with our original plan. Now our price is below all three current membership prices and we intend to keep it as long as we still use THS.
From reading other posts I understand that if you stop autorenewal you’ll will receive an option to renew with a discount (once). If you do wish to cancel/suspend your account THS will hold all profile details and reviews for ‘about 2 years’ but precise timings are not given.

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I tried to stop auto renewal recently as I am going to be away for a while and it said I had to cancel any future sits which were later in the year so I didn’t bother. That has changed because I used to always have it turned off and there was a 20% off offer about a week before it was due
Data protection requests should be accepted on the phone I would put the request in writing by email and include it as a complaint because it should have been passed to the company data protection officer and it also needs staff training

Lucky you to be able to keep the old price!

I complained to THS ~2 years ago when the price went up at auto-renewal. I got a few free months for that next year, but couldn’t get anything off the higher price.

Thanks for an interesting post.

I have three things to add, just from a general consumer perspective, on not getting caught out by things.

Firstly, car insurance is the one thing that I now keep on auto-renew, having almost come a cropper. A few years ago mine was set to only renew manually, which would usually have been ok, BUT my account preferences were also set to only receive correspondence via the post (because I wanted paper copies of the documents, rather than email). I was away on a trip for a few weeks, and it was only because my parents checked on my house and opened an envelope marked ‘urgent’ that I realised the insurance was up for renewal. You don’t have to accept the renewal quote, and can still shop around, but at least if you forget to do anything you’ll still be covered.

Secondly, be aware that if you don’t have an active account with THS you will lose access to your inbox and any correspondence you’ve had with other members. This is less of an issue now that THS automatically cancels any sits that are booked beyond the date of your membership expiry. But let’s say a sitter and home owner had made contact, agreed a sit, and then realised that one/both of their memberships were up for renewal. They might be happy for the sit to go ahead, despite the fact that one/both were no longer active members of THS, but would need a means of communicating other than via the THS mail box. So exchange email addresses/phone numbers early on in the process. Also, I’m not sure what sort of message someone would receive if a sit were automatically cancelled, but it would be nice to be able to reach out to the other person and offer an explanation in this situation.

Thirdly, whenever I’m using any sort of online chat to communicate with a company, I now open up a text file or Word document, and copy and paste the transcript as I go along. I know you should be able to click a button at the end of the chat to request a transcript be emailed to you, but during a dispute with a mobile phone company, my screen seemed to ‘freeze’ at exactly that point. It happened twice, which seemed like too much of a coincidence…

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I suggest taking screen shots for this, because companies are more likely to trust those versus a text file or Word doc that you compile. I screen shot anytime I’m on an online chat with customer service, chatbots, etc. It’s just easier to have a reference and it takes next to no effort.

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I believe that the older membership plans have lower functionality, but if it works everything is great.

You are correct.
I was very upset a couple of weeks ago to discover that because I’m still on my basic membership from 12 years ago I only have access to the vet helpline via telephone (to the UK from Ecuador) not via chat.
I can cope with no insurance, that’s my choice, but limiting my ability to get immediate assistance for the animals in our care I find very shocking, and money grabbing!

You’re right, this is a long post.