I should be enjoying my holiday in Southern France courtesy of RCI (Thanks to Jeff Cummings for amortising an Extra holiday into Points).

However, I am here under the cloud of my father’s unexpected death, arising from a massive heart attack on 8th August whilst in hospital to have a second knee replacement.

The truth is that I feel guilty … but Why?

My father had been severely disabled for several years .. unable to walk for more than a few metres before grumbling of his extremely sore knees. The surgeon had advised him that it was a relatively risk free operation with a 95% success rate …. yet father remained frightened of that 5% .. the 1 in 20 risk that things could go wrong. Was he right?

All the family remained convinced that the better odds lay in the 19/20 chance that things would go swimmingly and it was true for knee #1. Dad was a perfect patient … no history of medication and a textbook recovery leading to an early return to knee #2.

Again surgery went perfectly, but father went downhill in hospital, feeling unwell almost from the outset.

On Sunday 8th August, my father succumbed to a massive heart attack and died although there had been no earlier indicators of problems.

Now I am on holiday (a late start after the funeral), but it doesn’t feel like a holiday. I remain guilty for persuading him that he was daft to focus on the negative. Was I wrong to do so … would he lived otherwise? I don’t know.

What I do know is that the family persuaded my father that he would enjoy a better quality of life with surgery. That was certainly true after knee#1 when he walked more in 6 weeks than he had done in 6 years … and relished the experience.

Needless to say that knee#2 was a different experience which I can’t help feeling led to his death. Until that operation my father had been extremely fit with no medication and only the wonky knees giving him the problem. Did the extra surgery introduce the stress that led to a heart attack?

Now I am left with the eternal conundrum … did I hasten my dad’s death by persuading him that surgery was the right answer?

I can’t help feeling that I did. Would you have done differently in my circumstances?

… Well, who would have thought it?

There was a whole host of speculation that any thoughts of coalition or side arrangements would have been completed ahead of the markets opening today, but still we wait to hear who will form the next government.

It is an intriguing time because the Lib-Dems are unlikely to wish to move forward without some form of Proportional Representation being on the table and neither Labour nor the Tories would appear to favour that as the traditional first past the post has tended to work in both parties favour.

But now, we see that Gordon Brown has signalled his intention to resign. That seems to signal that the talks between the Lib-Dems and the Tories have broken down given that Nick Clegg has made no secret of the fact that he does not see Gordon Brown as a political partner. Gordon Brown’s willingness to flag his resignation at this time appears to support a likely repeat of the Lib-Lab pact of the 1970s.

With the cabinet meeting at 18.00 this evening, it seems likely that both ledership contention and briefings on Lib-Lab discussions will take place that could lead to a Prime Minister and a party that didn’t get first past the post.

What does that mean for the ehectorate? Whilst there is certainly an argument that says that when you stack seats from Labour, Lib Dem, National parties etc, then the amalgam represents the majority of the British people’s view. But is that a vapid argument? Somehow one gets the feeling that it pleases no-one.

Ironically, the biggest obstacle to the Labour Party winning a General Election might actually be Gordon Brown himself  – who can forget the bogot faux pas? With a new  statesman like leader and a further General Election, the tide could turn quickly back to Labour favour.

We are now faced with an intriguing situation where we expect Gordon Brown to carry on until the Labour Party conference  in September. Could we expect a General Election shortly thereafter to properly endorse a new leadership and Government? That seems likely to me and the only way to see the electorate fully endorse (or reject) the Labour leadership should the Lib-Lab pact hold Labour in power through the Queen’s speech next week.

David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Gordon Brown … do you vote based upon leader?

I have a hunch that most people do and my 8 and 10 year old kids are certainly focused on one person in particular.

Of course, when we all go to the polling station to vote in the General Election, we are not voting for whom we would like to lead the country, but voting to help select our own local MP.  Who leads the country usually drops out from the party with the overall majority,but this year a hung parliament seems to be the likely but unpopular choice.

It is poignant that Britain is set to move into a larger budget deficit than Greece in the coming year (according to the Daily Mail front page today) and the austerity measures proposed to deal with Greece’s situation have provoked riots leading to deaths. Britain is not Greece however and from all reports there was a certain level of corruption which also corroded Greece’s core economic footing. Britain should be better placed to recover from a short term deficit which has been introduced to stimulate our economy … something used in other countries too, without placing their credit ratings at risk.

But I said earlier, you are not voting for a leader, you are voting for a new local MP, but how many of you actually know your existing local MP? I am sure that most of the electorate would walk past their presiding MP in the street without even noticing. Not here, as ours could be the spitting image of ex England football manager – Sven Goran Ericsson.

How many candidates actually live in the electoral zone? I am amazed by how many actually live outside the area that they want to represent. Politics in the past used to be about passion and representing your neighbours and friends. Today, it appears that the job matters more to many who are indifferent as to whom they actually represent .. how can they understand local issues and hit any job running.

Is there even the same passion? This has been the quietest doorstep campaign in my living memory, to the extent that I don’t even know what the majority of the candidates consider to be the priority issues that they should address. I haven’t seen anyone going round doors and election literature has been thin on the ground.

There has been a great deal of talk about tactical voting, but judging from the dearth of information in my area, it seems clear that either there has been no campaigning for my Member of Parliament or there has been tactical campaigning by the parties to focus their attention on potential switchers … by using housing demographics to determine the likely way that people would vote and to target waverers.

What has all that meant for me in my voting choice?

You may think that sharing the name of ‘David Cameron’ makes it all a bit of a laugh and I would vote Conservative just for the fun of it all and potential attention should he win the overall majority and occupy the Prime Minister role.  But no! This is a serious time for Great Britain and the United Kingdom and there was a serious decision to make at the Polling Station this morning. Therefore I stood in front of my ballot paper and gave all the candidates some serious scrutiny (hence my question about how many are actually residents in your area) and took so long to decide that I was half expecting a tap on my shoulder to ask whether I knew what I was doing and whether I needed any help.

And do you know what? With an absence of information, my head just couldn’t separate the candidates (except for some ‘extreme’ parties that I would never support) and for a minute, I really did think about deliberately spoiling my paper in protest.

But what would that protest actually achieve? The papers would go into a discarded pile and would be ignored with priority given to the papers with a clear voting intent. Therefore, I did select one candidate and voted properly for them.

Maybe more so than ever because of the global economy, but local Politics has been dominated by National and International  issues such as World Recession, fears around the Euro Zone collapse arising from the Greece bailout proposals, Global Warming and of course more recently climate and the environment with Volcanoes and deep water oil leaks causing considerable inconvenience and potential environmental impact. Therefore, despite my earlier comments about voting for the candidate on the basis of best local representation, I did end up voting based upon wider politics.

The General Election is the time for you to have your say .. and whilst it may be tempting to stay at home or to vote for ‘none of the above’, I fear that is in every sense a wasted vote.

I am thankful that we do live in a demographic society with a free vote rather than e.g.  an oppressive Zimbabwean regime where you must vote and risk being shot if you don’t vote as expected. Having the vote in unquestionably one of the basic human rights that we enjoy to determine as a democracy just whom and how our country should be led … and that democracy gives us the opportunity to change it on a regular basis should we as a democracy also determine that to be necessary.

Whatever your views on the various political parties, do take the time to make your vote and have your opinion at least considered. If you and others like you decide not to cast a vote, then you are not really in a position to complain of you don’t like the ruling party after the votes are counted.

But … If David Cameron does actually win, I just know that the number of jokes and comments I get about my name are going to be of an order of magnitude larger and wearying. Maybe I should just get on with it and capitalise on it by opening a trinket shop or seeing if I can get a newspaper column?  ….. anyone want a David Cameron mug?

In my last post which was a bigtime complaint about RCI, I wrote about frustrations with the RCI Holiday Exchange search functionality when a promised ‘search .. had never been easier’ was completely unfulfilled.

I was so frustrated that I had felt the need to write to Jeff Cummings - VP for European Operations, but my letter was filtered and sent to Customer Sevices – that is the same Customer Services team that have never been able to answer my questions to tell me exactly when my issues would be addressed.

More recently, questions that I asked were simply ignored with inadequate responses and my last three emails had simply gone unanswered … and no obvious point of escalation and definitely an unwillingness to disclose exactly to whom I should address complaints if they were just going to be passed back to the team with which I had the issues.

And so, after very fair warning that I would do it if they wouldn’t answer my questions, I made my earlier public blog disclosure of my dismay at RCI as an organisation .. and suggested that Jeff Cummings was disinterested.

Well, maybe I am about to do a u-turn, at least in respect of Jeff. Perhaps it was because my despair became public, but I was shocked but extremely happy to receive a voicemail and a followup email from Jeff indicating his absolute willingness to talk. Therefore with the assistance of his PA, we set up a meeting by phone which we held on Friday.

We spoke for around 45 minutes and whilst it could be a bit of corporate flannel and giving a bit of hand-holding, I genuinely felt that Jeff was stepping up to the plate and discussing the matters frankly .. warts and all.

Jeff has given me a timetable for some improvements for points members that will encompass weeks and points searches that are planned between now and 2011. I will not share those here as it might lead to some missed expectations as I had when I originally heard back in January 2010  that the ‘Points search … had never been easier’ and found no material difference. What I will say is that RCI do plan to allow Points based members to book weeks holidays online ahead of a major points web revamp to allow holiday searches in the same way that one can search for Extra Holidays today. I have a question outstanding as to whether the weeks and points searches can be merged.

 It appears that all marketing materials in Europe are sent out in Jeff’s name irrespective of whether he has seen the correspondence. Personally, I think that practice needs reviewing and Jeff needs to see those materials and challenge/test what is said before it goes out to customers. A sense check of the new (I prefer to call it face-lifted) web search functionality would have revealed that it made little or no intrinsic benefit.  

So is Jeff just giving me a little bit of charm and chatted with me by phone to appease an upset customer hoping that I will then go away? Maybe, but I think that the fact that we already have another call scheduled and a plan to meet face to face (at his invitation) next time he is in the UK sugegstes that he is fully engaged and keen to hear what can be done better, not just in terms of web search (which is the same as the operator search), but also with staff behaviours.

In summary, I felt much more re-assured following my call with Jeff, but of course we need to see real improvements in the RCI systems before I will be fully happy. At least there is some promise now …. shame that someone jumped the gun and spoke in giushing terms about the feeble improvements made without realising what customers actually needed in order for any search to be effective.

Jeff did promise to help me to try to secure a suitable holiday and today, I am happy to confirm that a summer vacation is now booked in (hopefully) sunny France.

There is now no other way to express this – RCI have shown incredible incompetence.

To clarify, RCI customer service and Management behaviours suck. I am not knocking either the timeshare resorts themselves or the idea of exchange. When it works it works fantastically.

To put it into context, RCI (should) provide a service to timeshare owners like me to help facilitate exchanges by accepting deposits from those who don’t want to use their accommodation one year and making them available to people looking to exchange to a different location. In the past that was performed only by phone, but with the advent of the web, they also introduced a web facilitya few years ago that should be much better to browse at leisure and confirm an exchange online.

I say should be better by web but I had to write to RCI Customer Service department several years ago pointing out major failings in their web search engine in trying to locate a suitable exchange holiday, principally that they are unable to pinpoint Global availability of units on a given date. Instead, they require that you pick a specific area to check. That means checking one by one to see whether anything might be available, but still I saw no signs of web improvements.

Since then, I have had occasion to write a couple of times about some issues, but those were sorted out fairly quickly.

Then in Jan this year Jeff Cummings (VP European Operations) put his name to a letter distributed to all Points based members telling us that our ‘Points Holiday search .. had never been easier’. Great I thought as I still had my 2010 vacation to book and want to be flexible and choose from the widest possible range of accommodation. I thought that I would now be able to see what availability there was worldwide with one click.

Now I should make you aware that this a membership based service that means that I pay an annual membership whether or not I make any exchange or deposit. If I don’t use my full exchange allowance in any year, then I must also pay additional fees to carry forward my allowance. Not unreasonably, if I do make an exchange then I also pay on a per exchange completed basis.

But here is the rub ..

Despite the VPs letter saying that the ‘Points Holiday search .. had never been easier’, the truth is that there has been no material enhancement at all. If I want to do a web search to find Global availability, then I must devote half an evening searching Region by Region and that sucks, especially as the regions make no geographic sense and are done at a very granular level. Not only that, but the second group of Units available under a straight Weeks search need the same stupid region by region search.

So … as a Points member, I have to search region by region TWICE to get a full view of global availability for any given date to see what is available via Weeks and Points banks.

Now here is what REALLY STINKS!! Remember that I told you that RCI is a membership based programme where we are paying for a service? You now know that I told them three years ago or more what was wrong with their system and how it could be made better. Well GREAT that they built that system, but oh no, not for the core member service to help facilitate exchanges that we pay them for. They selfishly built it for their own retail purposes to sell extra inventory that they purchased. So .. if I want to buy an Extra holiday, then I have all the tools I need to drill down and gradually filter the accommodation requirements until I find the perfect holiday. The tool is brilliant, but no use to me in facilitating an exchange .. which is what I pay RCI for.

I wrote to Jeff Cummings asking him to justify his statement that the search was made easier. I apologised for writing to him directly, but pointed out that prior requests and enquiries relating to web site strategy had led to nothing. In any event he made a statement and signed it .. he should justifyputting his name to it.

So what was Mr Cummings response? I can only tell you that as far as I am concerned, he couldn’t be bothered. That is the only inference I could make as I received no response from him or his office. Instead, I got a message from the Customer Services Team (Nora H……) that essentially said that Mr Cummings was too busy to deal with this and that was the job of Customer Services.

Now in my experience, when a customer feels the need to write to an Executive Office, then most reputable organisations feel the need to sit up and listen at the Executive level.

I entered into a long correspondence with that RCI Customer Service representative over the course of days and never getting answers to the most direct and pointed of questions. I keep being asked for patience, but patience is exhausted when I have waited in excess of three years and I get a slap in the face by seeing the ideas applied to systems that are secondary to members interests and were self-serving to RCI.

Interestingly, when I first started corresponding with customer services, I asked that if Mr Cummings was so busy and routinely referred customer correspondence to Customer Services to deal with, then ‘Who within RCI deals with complaints about the Customer Service itself?’

Now this is at an impasse. Yet I still don’t have answers to my questions and RCI have refused to answer the critical question about whom I can escalate my complaint to .. and recent emails have simply been ignored that ask that one simple question.

I must also assume that the RCI Management are incompetentand have no concept of customer service as they decided that the priorities to upgrade search in the following perverted order :

1. Extra holidays (doesn’t serve any member core objective to facilitate exchanges at all)
2. Weeks Members search – who only needed to perform one round the region search to get a global view of availability – yet didn’t release this to Points Members
3. Points Member Search – we are still waiting for upgrades on both the Points and Weeks searches.

It is a doubly incompetent solution for Points Members because we are also disadvantaged when wishing to book from the weeks bank. Points members are not allowed to reserve Weeks based accommodation out of hours and must (Why?) phone during office hours to book through an operator, meaning that a Weeks based member can pinch a booking ahead of me. 

Now we have an organisation that apparently has an arrogant VP who can’t be bothered to look at seriously aggrieved customers complaints and a rude customer services department who refuse to answer questions. To cap it all there is no way to apparently escalate the complaint because the VP refers it back to the department that you have a complaint about in the first place .. and apparently, they can just decide not to answer your questions .. they often also answer things that you didn’t ask as if that provides a solution .. huh!!.

Exchange availability is a constant issue and the search system is geared up for helping when you know precisely where you want to exchange into, whereas in practice the constraint is about where you can exchange into which is subject to the limited availability you find when you want to travel – and that is a question that you cannot get an answer to quickly for all the years that RCI has been in business – incredibly incompetent systems development.

I now have holiday points to use this year but no easy way to convert them because of RCI getting their priorities wrong and looking after themselves by building a system to sell rather than serve the exchange members who pay for the service … and yet, they will charge me for rolling over the points balance to next year … that’s another huh!! from me. There appears to be no incentive upon RCI to make exchanges happen easier.

I am convinced that the Customer Services team have not an ounce of sensibility (at least the ones that I have dealt with), because they continually trumpet that the web site is not contractually a part of the service. That may be so, but in their rush to trumpet that excuse, they forget that the RCI Exchange Coordinators use exactly the self same search mechanism in-house if I phone up, meaning that they still can’t provide the expected levels of service by phone. It is also insulting my intelligence as a customer as I know that if members were to boycott the web service from tomorrow and insist on using the phone, then RCI would need to greatly increase the number of telephone operators. The introduction of the website was not primarily for the customers convenience, but as a way of RCI managing costs.

It is also a very poor show by an organisation to try and suggest that the web-site is a value added service in this internet age, considering that we are actually doing the job for RCI that we pay them to do for us when we use the website. RCI can’t have it both ways.

Honestly, I have never encountered a company so disinterested at the top about customer complaints made at an Executive Office level and I have certainly never encountered one who had no advertised process to escalate customer complaints.

If anyone is listening from the Executive offices in either RCI or Cendant (the parent company) and is able to give RCI any credibility in this regard, then please do leave a comment and contact details – I still await proper answers to sensible questions.

UPDATE 23 Apr 2010: Jeff Cummings has been in contact directly with me and left voicemail. We have now set up a meeting to discuss the situation further.

Now that the General Election campaign is well under way, and David Cameron is at the top of the news headlines, being touted as the new Prime Minister, my name is a curse rather than just a talking point.

When my namesake David Cameron first became Conservative Party leader, I was bombarded with emails requesting that I speak at this function or another, which of course I politely declined. It would have been interesting to have accepted and seen the reaction when I turned up rather than the expected David Cameron .. and maybe profitable too if fees were agreed up front ;o).

Now with that novelty worn off, it becomes rather wearisome to be told that I will whip Gordon Brown (for goodness sake, he looks beaten enough already without any more punishment) and I will be Prime Minister in a few more weeks and residing at number 10.

Has anyone else reading this found that they shared their name with a celebrity of some sort … and did it actually ever bring any advantages to you?

I haven’t written on my blog for a while, but I feel personally moved today to write here.

Ivan was only 6 years old when he passed away, dying at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, London earlier today.

As I share the same name as David Cameron, I often hear ‘my’ name being called out on the TV news and the kids taking great delight in telling me that Daddy – David Cameron is on the television again. Perhaps that is why I feel tremendous affinity with for David, Samantha and their children today.

No parent should expect that they outlive their child and my deepest thoughts and sympathy reaches out to the Cameron family today and the coming days as they grieve over the loss of Ivan.

Grrrrrrrr…..

The circumstances over the last few weeks have really annoyed me.

Mugabbe is no better than Saddam Hussain in my view. The world condemns, but sits by and observes and Tut Tuts to the despicable regime.

Short and sweet by my standards, but I can’t help thinking that if Zimbabwe were an oil rich nation then the US and others would be dropping troops in to the country tomorrow proclaiming regime change is necessary.

Aren’t politicians incredibly two-faced?

• benefit 1, hopefully we will now be able to purchase a product armed with the information to determine whether the product will perform for us, and
• benefit 2 … we get the chance to find the best price for the product

theoretically getting the right product for the right price.

The snag which has recently been pointed out and which may be subject to a regulatory review is that many price comparison services (espec. insurance or utility comparison services) are either promoting deals which are not best for the consumer but earn them the highest commission or more questionably simply choosing to ignore and not to feature cheaper deals.

Comparison engines really only work when they present all available data in an unbiased way and allow the consumer to make the right choice for them.

Mobile phones are a case in point … the comparison of the phones themselves is relatively straightforward, but the complicated set of tariffs and array of ‘gift’ offers makes it difficult to compare the deals on offer.

I am personally pleased to be able to promote OneStopCompare – a site dedicated to bring all comparison services to consumers attention such that they get the chance to understand all pricing options available to them rather than seeing a skewed version of the market.

OneStopCompare has to start somewhere and therefore starts dealing with one of the most complex pricing areas with a confusing sets of deals imaginable i.e. Mobile Phone Deals.

My new comparison service is now pulling all known internet available data feeds to give the consumer every chance of picking the right deal across the networks and phone suppliers, providing prices in a comparable way … do you want a free laptop?… then what is the cheapest contract commitment to enable you to get that deal? OneStopCompare aims to provide you with exactly the unbiased data you need to make that choice.

Whilst I will be trying to bring other deals to the table in the same unbiased way (e.g. utility deals), please let me know if I have missed other available datafeeds for Mobile Phone Deals to enable me to keep my promise of unbiased information. If the feed is available, then I will aim to incorporate it too …. customer is king!!