Customer Service

So, i've never really gone on holiday since I was a kid, never been overly bothered, or had lots of cash (mostly since Cash goes on stuff and drinking). But on friday i'm off to Orlando, and there's something I couldn't help but notice something that kept repeating.

First off, my girlfriend is a Vegatarian, so wanted to make sure the meal she'd get wasn't meat. The travel agents said we needed to talk to the airline direct (can do it online, doesn't have to be phone) to sort that out. Next cos i'm like 6 foot 5, wanted to see about getting a good seat, possibly with more leg room, possibly an aisle seat or something; need to talk to the airline direct... Wanted to see about booking a lounge, and you guessed it, the travel agency couldn't sort that out either.

I've found over the years, that it's cheaper to be on Contract, not just cos I want a nice phone rather than a cheap one, but not living with my girlfriend can mean alot of text messages, it's also nice to have the option of using my phone whenever I want, instead of worrying if i've got any cash on it. Especially when you consider these numbers where you can reverse charges or whatever and you're talking like £4 for the initial connection...

Anyway, with being on contract I find the best thing to do is cancel the contract when it's up, and move to another company. For example my last phone was a Nokia N73 (or something like that...) with Vodafone, the Nokia N95 8gig came out, and I wanted to get one and thankfully my Vodafone contract was up. Vodafone said I'd need to pay over £200 to get the N95 on a new contract, 3 on the other hand gave me the phone for free for a £33 a month contract. Why stay with the current company of offers to entice new customers are better? And that's for every company, I moved to Vodafone cos their new offer was better than renewing at whatever company I was with before.

Anyway, when I tried to cancel my contract with Vodafone I was told I needed to phone a number, and they even said I needed to send in written notification, signed. Today I went into the 3 shop to ask how my phone would be in America, they've given me a number to phone...

The point obviously it seems is that these places are shops, once they've sold me their phones or holidays they couldn't care less. Sure there might be a call centre somewhere that could care, but I hate talking on the phone, especially when I might get someone with an accent I don't understand.

When I've bought some clothes, further customer service probably doesn't need to be given, unless I need to take it back or something, and that's fine. But it's especially annoying with say a phone where i've signed up to an 18 month contract and 5 minutes later my only help with any problems is a machine on the phone where i've got to guess which button to press in many cases where the last option isn't a "Talk to someone" one.

How hard would it be to have some people available who know what's going on?