Under a decision made by APCOA and sanctioned separately by Network Rail and the First Great Western Railway, the RingGo phone parking service is scheduled to be withdrawn from the car parks of each later this month.
We deeply regret this decision and would like to take this opportunity to express our pleasure in having supported the customers of both rail organisations and indeed the organisations themselves.
We have been made aware that the reasons for this change have been discussed by First Great Western in customer communications. The following words have been used in emails from the customer relations team of the First Group
"The change is being made because of a significant increase in call charges proposed by Cobalt, (the provider of RingGo). We supported APCOA (who have the car park contract) when they decided not to accept these increases."
It had been our intention not to comment on the background to the withdrawal, but we feel compelled to respond and state that this iscategorically not true. We do not however allege any intent by First Great Western or the First Group to make a false statement. We have formally sought clarification from them but fully understand that they may have been misled.
Since its launch on 12th June 2006, and as a founding principle of the service, access to RingGo has always been through ordinary geographic telephone numbers. This has meant that our customers are never in doubt as to how much their call costs. In the case of contract customers, they enjoy the extra benefit of their call charges being included in their allocation of airtime minutes. We therefore take particular offence at this allegation and refute it utterly.
For the additional avoidance of doubt RingGo's unit charges to APCOA have been held static for the last 5 years, despite inflation. In addition, within the last year, proposals have been tabled to APCOA to reduce those unit charges further still.
