Anna Tims’ dishonours list: the not-so good, the bad and the ugly customer service awards 2025 | Consumer affairs

When the year began, I was listening to Your Problems, my column for the Observer. Now I’m a Guardian Consumer Champion. Reinvention is always invigorating. My former life was dedicated to fighting against airlines, insurance companies and energy suppliers bent on pillaging readers’ piggy banks. My new life? Airlines, insurance companies and energy providers are vying to plunder readers’ piggy banks.

It’s a comfort in this age of seismic change to know that some things remain constant. You can count on energy companies to cool your marrow by charging psychodramas and phantom accounts. Meanwhile, certainty remains the business model for insurers: many would say you can be certain that if you damage your car, or yourself, your insurer will look for a reason to delay your claim.

It’s a time-honored tradition for airlines and accommodation providers to accept your money for a reservation, but flights and actual beds sometimes seem to be considered an optional extra.

This year I discovered where you can buy a takeaway coffee for £100; the mysterious reasons why Travelodge guests can be sent back to motorway service stations at night; and what “forever” means in banking (about two decades in the Santander lexicon, apparently).

I investigated how long the Department of Finance and Customs estimates it takes to make an agreed bank transfer – 33 weeks – and why some retired teachers have to prove every year that they are not dead.

At this time of year, I like to recognize the organizations that have worked so hard to keep their customers remote and to keep me working.

Please clap for the winners of the 2025 Anna Honor Awards.

Sensitivity ambassador Dead customers are much easier to deal with than living customers. Perhaps that’s why Three (tagline: “Live your best life on the phone”) suggested that CF “kill” her ailing father when she wanted to change ownership of her cell phone contract. CF’s account had been opened with him as the primary account holder because she was a teenager at the time. Three’s customer service team doesn’t have a process for this, but its bereavement service does. Luckily, he suggested she mark her father as deceased so he could force his request to make her the primary account holder for his own cell phone. This could, Three warned, affect his credit rating, but he promised to tell the credit agencies he was still alive after the deed was done. Three later said they would review their processes in exchange for a goodwill payment.

GOOD hygiene Sex has tormented holidaymakers who read the Guardian. An elderly couple discovered strangers engaged in it in their hotel room while they attended a Christmas party. The proof? Condoms, panties and paper party hat in the bedroom. Premier Inn (tagline: “Force for Good”) apologized for “any inconvenience” and declared the matter closed, before tricky questions from the Guardian prompted a refund. Then there’s Vrbo (“Where Families Travel Better Together”), which told a young family who discovered their vacation rental was a blood-stained sex den that their complaint was “minor” and refused compensation until the Guardian intervened.

Good Samaritan Everyone knows that Ryanair has a heart… of solid granite. FB, a doctor, arrived late at her gate because she had stopped to help an injured passenger. Ryanair (“Great Care”) refused to let her board the waiting plane and charged her a £100 administration fee to rebook. Could he not waive these fees as a gesture of goodwill, given the circumstances? No, that’s not possible, he insisted, because it’s his passengers’ responsibility to be punctual (even if that means not helping bleeding pensioners, it seems).

Education Prize A close race, this one. London’s Southwark Council (“United to Serve”) deserves credit for leaving a 91-year-old cancer patient with damp, mold and insects for a year while it considered how to fix a leak elsewhere in the area. But housing association L&Q (“Our vision is that everyone deserves quality housing that gives them the chance to live a better life”) went even further when, without warning, it left residents without running water for 12 days while it belatedly repaired a leak.

Philosopher price Airbnb (“Belong Anywhere”) must share this with one of its hosts. When a century-old oak tree fell on a French B&B, narrowly missing the occupants (who were having breakfast on the terrace a few minutes earlier), damaging the property’s roof and shattering the windshield of their rental car, the host refused to reimburse their aborted stay. “You chose to remember the worry and the trauma instead of celebrating a single memory,” she told them. Airbnb was equally optimistic. “We understand this may have caused you inconvenience,” he said, before closing his complaint – minus the refund – and telling her: “Stay safe. Stay healthy.” (He eventually issued a full refund and a £500 voucher after we intervened).

Social justice warrior Where might you face court for confusing an “O” with a zero? The London borough of Ealing, which protects its residents from evil forces without fear or favor. When a visiting driver mistook an O on his number plate for a zero and entered the wrong number into a parking app, the council gave him the choice of an £80 fine or legal action. The Os and 0s are identical on the car license plates and the driver had paid for his parking. This did not convince Ealing, nor did the government’s guidance on enforcing parking penalties, which requires councils to exercise their discretion “in a reasonable and reasonable manner”. He insisted he spat out of “fair consideration…to motorists who obey all parking rules”.

Business contrition No one feels your pain like big business. In fact, he’s adopted a platitude to sum up his empathy when he realizes he’s let you down. “We’re sorry for any inconvenience” can be deployed when the civil service pension scheme run by outsourcing company Capita demands repayment to retirees worth £25,000 of overpayments it accidentally made over 11 years, or when Virgin Atlantic fails to refund the cost of a honeymoon it canceled. It fills a need when the TSB mistakes a victim of identity fraud for the fraudster, applies fraud markers to their name and causes their bank accounts to be closed. It is indeed embarrassing when Airbnb bans you because it has apparently decided that you are associated with the underworld; or when Sky fails to cancel the package of a family whose house was destroyed by a gas explosion next door.

AA intrepid journey

This award is given to AA itself. “Join us on our journey,” he invites. But a woman’s car made the journey without it for six months after the AA towed it to an approved garage for repairs. It was returned – only after she reported it as stolen – with a coating of bird dirt, a £70 penalty for a parking offense and an extra 15,000 miles on the clock. To reassure other AA members, the association told me that its relationship with the garage in question was now “under review”.

Grief support

Insurers collectively deserved this award. Their response, when informed of the death of a policyholder, may be to impose a huge increase in home and car insurance premiums on the bereaved partner. For what? A service provider was disarmingly frank with a new widow: now that she lives alone, he explains, her house is more exposed to the risk of break-ins.