Tonight ` He was definitely the silver-tongued devil. the field of broken dreams they just couldn't get rid of... Trucks just started arriving. It was chaos. I was just stunned. Um, scary. (LAUGHS) ...the B-word... I really don't want to hear that name, ever. and... Hi, Pippa. I saw the show last week. ...Mahe Drysdale? I tried your fire method, and it just didn't work. Welcome to Fair Go. Is it 'liar liar, pants on fire', Pippa? I know. Couldn't believe it! There were some doubters after my upside-down fire last week. Olympic gold medallist, no less. Yes, one in particular. We will get to that shortly. First, though, apparently there was a time when a man's word was as good as his bond; when deals were done and honoured on a handshake. But let's be honest. If it was like that, then Fair Go would be out of work, and we've been in the business nearly 40 years now. Here's Mark with a cautionary tale. This is Sarah and Steve Fairley's new home. What do you reckon? It took five years, but they built it themselves on their special pile of dirt. Be nice to sort that colour out, won't it? It will be, yes. Yep, we'll see what we can do. On the very day they moved in back in September, there was a knock on the door. He just came in, and he said, 'Oh, what a beautiful house.' Steve's talking about this man, Dan Blomfield, who said he was doing some earthmoving work at a nearby subdivision. He said, 'I've got a bit of fill from Millwater from some house cuts I'm doing up there, 'and if I could put in around here,' he said, 'I could beautifully landscape it.' No money changed hands, nothing on paper. The whole deal was done on a handshake. We thought it was a good deal for everybody. To many this would just be another paddock in the country, but to Sarah Fairley, it's more than that. Her dad used to own it. We used to ride down the road under the trees together, (LAUGHS) and when I'm here, it reminds me of him, you know, of my father, and he's not here any longer, and it's just so lovely to have that reminder. What was about to happen has literally scarred that memory. Trucks just started arriving, and` and` It was chaos. I was just stunned. The Fairleys reckon around 100 trucks descended on their place over a couple of days. Dan Blomfield suggested to me it was far fewer. He was the silver-tongued devil. Every time you spoke to him, it was going to be perfect. It was going to be right. He` What he wasn't going to do. DIAL TONE Hi, Dan, it's Mark Crysell from Fair Go programme. But Dan Blomfield wasn't quite the silver-tongued devil when we tried to speak to him. OK, I've just off the phone with Dan Blomfield, and he's happy to talk to me, but he says everything he says is off the record. What very much on the record is the state of Sarah and Steve's front paddock. Well, basically, he turned it into a landfill tip. And what's been dumped isn't pretty. So, beautifully landscaped is what he promised us at the outset. How do you beautifully landscape that? Look at that enormous piece of concrete there. It's huge. Dig down and dirty, and you can see the scale of the problem. This is basically, um, our topsoil down below with a layer of grass. You can see down there ` he's just run the clay straight over it. Steve and Sarah had collected and saved topsoil for the gardens of their new house. Over here and around here you can see the beautiful paddocks as they were. They were grass, and lovely, and, um, but what we've got now is` is clay and mess and concrete, and it's just horrible. But what became really horrible was the relationship between Steve and Sarah and Dan Blomfield. Now, remember, we can't really report on exactly what Dan Blomfield said to us, because it was off the record, I do get the impression, however, after talking to him, that he felt Steve and Sarah were demanding and rude to him, so he refused to come back. You were arrogant and you kicked him off the site. Well that's what` that's what he's claiming. But, um, is it arrogant to` to say if you're going to bring contaminated fill to our site and bury top soil, you know, in contradiction of what he promised us in the first place ` if that's arrogant, then yeah. We` We just wanted him to do what he said he'd do in the first place. There were hold-ups with diggers and bulldozers and angry phone calls and texts, but eventually Ban Blomfield did return when the Fairleys gave him two weeks' notice to finish the job. All he was willing to do was bring a bulldozer back and basically push the top soil around here over the top of it so that we could regrass it, and that was it. That was it. That was all he was going to do. That was eight months ago, and that was it. Dan Blomfield never returned. Steve and Sarah endured and stewed through a long hot and dusty summer. < Do you think you were too trusting? Absolutely. < Naive? Yes, absolutely. Things could've been different if Sarah and Steve had signed a contract with Dan Blomfield, which could've been legally enforced. No money changed hands, but names have been dragged through this mud, and Steve and Sarah are left with this sticky mess. Or are they? It's the best ending that we could've hoped for. After Fair Go got involved, a local contractor, JP Excavators, who've worked with Dan Blomfield, came forward to finish the job for free. Beautifully landscaped is what they will get, along with a few lessons learnt along the way. I think I've learnt to be a little bit careful with who I deal with. I've learnt to, um, sort out agreements and make sure we know what the job is, and maybe even go for references if I haven't dealt with the people before. We're pretty trusting, and it didn't work out so well this time. Get it on paper? Yes. Absolutely. We've said this before, but it does bear repeating ` If someone knocks on your door and offers you a fantastic deal, get it in writing. It may be the deal of the century, but it may end up a mess like Sarah and Steve's. Now, we got a fairly serious complaint after last week's show. It's about Pippa and her upside-down fire. GEORGE EZRA'S 'BUDAPEST' Getting hot now! (LAUGHS) So that's the theory, but a certain Olympic gold medallist and multiple world champion found a very different reality. Mahe Drysdale had a go, and he tweeted this... And All Black Sam Cane retweeted that, Pippa, so we felt we had to find out what went wrong for Mahe. Hi, Pippa. I saw the show last week. I'm always keen to try something new, so I tried your fire method, and it just didn't work. Then I'm left with a fire that's not going and all the kindling on top. Not a good look. 'BUDAPEST' CONTINUES Uh-oh. It's not looking good! Well, you've stitched this up, Pippa. It hasn't worked for a second time, so I'm giving up and going back to the old way if I'm gonna keep my family warm tonight. What have you got to say for yourself, Pippa? Oh, that is harsh. It does work, I promise you! (LAUGHS) I promise you, it works! We will get back to Mahe later in the show. Courier drivers ` they can either leave you with a smile on your dial, or they can leave you fuming. What are they up to now? Hey, so Corinne, he just went like this, did he? Oh, perfect! Just like that? Perfect. What have their drivers been up to? It would've been my word against theirs. CourierPost fronts up. It's not OK for our couriers to do this, and they know that. And the B-word. Um, scary! (LAUGHS) I don't really wanna hear that name, ever. What you should do if the dreaded Baycorp letter arrives. You're, like, in trouble. Boom boom. Welcome back. Signature required adds a certain security and comfort when you book a courier, doesn't it? Yeah, but whose signature? Stupid question ` the recipient's of course. Um, no. Not in this case` two cases, actually. Here's Brodie. Kelly Scott has a ridiculously long driveway. My driveway is horrible. It took me so long before I could, you know, bring myself to back my car down. Corinne Greenwood's is pretty short. Seven, eight, nine... it's only 10m! But this is not a driveway competition, so I'll get to my point. Corinne and Kelly have both been let down by CourierPost. Let's start with Corinne, eagerly waiting for a parcel back in March. I'd been checking online, and I saw that my parcel was on its way, so I thought I won't go out, I'll wait here, cos it was actually a gift for someone else I'd ordered, so I wanted to get my hands on it. The dogs she was looking after at the time started to bark, so she thought, 'Oh! Might be the parcel!' Sure enough, the courier was in her driveway. So, by the time I got the dogs up and taken them to the back garage out the way, I looked through the window and could see the guy was still in the car, but I saw this arm come out and put something in my letterbox, and I thought, oh, OK. Hey, so, Corinne, he just went like this, did he? Oh, perfect! Just like that? Perfect. Oh, too easy. Didn't even have to move. Nope. > (LAUGHS) I don't think it would've taken him any longer to get out the car. I haven't got a long driveway. Knock on the door, thank you, see you later, bye. It was bad enough to Corinne that the driver hadn't even bothered to see if she was home. But what was worse was that it was a signature-required courier package, and the courier had signed for it. Yep, the courier! If that had got stolen out of my letterbox and I would've rung, and they would've said, 'oh you've signed for it,' and it would've been my word against theirs. And that is what really bothered me. Now, signature required is a service you can pay for for peace of mind and a bit of added security, because you have to be home to sign for the parcel. If you're not, a card is supposed to be left at your house. You can either arrange to have it re-delivered or you pick it up at your nearest depot. This process had not been followed for Corinne, and Kelly has a very similar yarn. I was in my house and I heard something at the door. I wasn't sure what it was, but it definitely wasn't a knock, um, so I went and checked the door. I saw a courier disappearing up my driveway and a parcel on the doorstep. Just down there? Just down there. No knock at the door? Nothing at all. No? I heard it hit the door. And that was it? That was it. And you bet ya, it had been signed for ` and not by Kelly. So she got in touch with CourierPost, who said they were going to speak to the driver. They got back really quickly and told me that this was quite important to them as well, uh, that they'd spoken to the driver, and that the driver said my next door neighbour had signed for it. Kelly says that is not true. It offends me more that somebody is signing my name for something and trying to get out of it by saying my neighbour signed it. She's frustrated that a service she pays for is not what she's getting. I would be totally happy for a re-delivery at a later stage, or I'd even be happy going and picking it up from their depot. Neither of those options worry me, but I'm having my options taken away from me in this case. So what have CourierPost done for both women? Well, until we got involved, nothing. What's going on, CourierPost? We do take this very seriously. It's not ok for our couriers to do this, and they know that. In this case, we just haven't responded like we should've done, so no, that's not OK. Paul Trotman invited us to this giant CourierPost depot in Auckland. He told us that the company deals with 45 million courier packages every year, and because I'm so good at maths, I can tell you that that is around 170,000 a day. Does that mean that you're losing sight of the individual customer? No, absolutely not. No, there's no excuses. We're designed to deliver 45 million items, and every individual parcel is important to our customers, both the senders and the receivers. Paul says what's happened here is simply not good enough, and both drivers have been spoken to. At times they do work very hard, and in a couple of these examples, the reasons being given was, you know, was, 'I was running late.' So that does happen, but again, it doesn't make it OK. They've been re-trained. Um, how we've managed that is an internal process. Now both women felt let down not only by the service but by what they perceived as CourierPost not caring when they raised the issue. I think the perception that Kelly and Corinne have that we don't care, and that we haven't apologised, we've gotta reflect on that. I'll be calling them myself if they perceive the apology is not there, cos we do care. Corinne and Kelly have both been in touch to say Paul called them. He was very nice, very apologetic, and they were both very happy that. CourierPost is trialling some new services across the country, like this doodackey, and they'll keep us posted on their developments. Thanks to CourierPost for fronting on this and showing Brodie around that giant depot. Now, this is a scary letter sent to a colleague I won't name. It's a demand for payment from Baycorp. Surely one of the scariest words in Kiwi English. That's only for $12. You might get one for way more. So what do you do when one of these lands? Now when you see that name, what does that logo, what does that name, Baycorp, make you feel? Um, scary. (LAUGHS) Oh, I don't really want to hear that name ever. Run a mile. Run a mile? > That you haven't paid your bills, and you're in trouble. You're, like, in trouble, boom boom. Baycorp ` a name to fear, and cheer. The truth is some people don't pay their bills, and we need companies like Baycorp. We want to find out how Baycorp works and what you should do when the dreaded Baycorp letter arrives. We've got three Baycorp stories... I thought they were rude. None of this is my fault. Now they spoil my name. ...and some stuff we think will surprise you. First, one of those surprises. Which one of those do you think is most likely to be the boss of Baycorp? The middle guy. The intimidating one. The tough guy. The guy in the suit. But it's more likely to be her. The lady? She's right. Gidday, you'll be Donna. 'And we're talking to the newish boss.' You don't strike me as the typical debt collector, Donna. Oh, thank you. (LAUGHS) I appreciate that when people think of Baycorp or the collections industry, sometimes they picture big burly men knocking on doors collecting money. I can assure you that isn't who we are or what we do. And what is it they do? Debt collection or resolution or...? I feel like they hunt people. Cos they're after us man, they're coming after us. Debt collection. Resolution. Debt resolution? > Correct. That's just the sugar-coated name isn't it? Well no, says Donna. She says Baycorp is about helping people who are struggling. Struggling to get paid or struggling to make ends meet. In either case it's probably keeping them awake at night. Baycorp's been keeping Cherie awake at night. I'm sorry can you cut it? I'm getting quite emotional. They chased Cherie for about $600. It had been paid years before. It was a joint debt, and her ex's credit record was cleared, but hers wasn't. I was angry, I was really angry that it had been a black mark against me, something that wasn't even my fault, and, you know, you get treated like a criminal. What Cherie could've done was check her own credit record. It's free to do and would've shown her where the mistake was. I've got a Veda credit file, and I should have checked it, but I didn't even know Veda existed. and Baycorp's now made changes to its systems, so... ...this won't happen in the future for anybody. It wasn't hard to find other Baycorp stories on our files. They put stress on me for no bloody reason, frankly. They chased Kalz for about 1000 bucks she simply didn't owe. Wrong person, wrong address, wrong city! Oh, they completely stuffed up. They totally had it wrong. Kalz had it right. She got in touch pronto with Baycorp and said show me the invoices. Baycorp then realised their error. Unfortunately in this situation we made a mistake, so Kalz's details were inadvertently linked with someone with somebody with the same name as her. She called us, and within 10 working days, we were able to confirm that she was correct and apologise to her. And here's another Baycorp surprise ` they now chase unpaid tickets for Auckland Transport. Really?! Scary. Oh it's pretty fair, I reckon. Fair enough. Bit of a shock for Sunil, though. He didn't know he'd got a ticket. It was sent to an old address. Baycorp found the right one, but... When I got that letter, it was a shame for me that my name been sent to Baycorp. If we hadn't been using Baycorp for collections that issue would have gone through the courts. But Sunil thought if Baycorp was chasing him, there goes his credit record. Wherever I go for finance, they would see it. Even banks, or, you know, car loan or house loan, They're gonna see that my name is in Baycorp, so they'd probably reject me. But if it's paid, it does not hit your credit record, and AT says customers get more time to pay, and ratepayers save money. And effectively we are saving the ratepayers of Auckland $35,000 a week. So, last question. These are all quotes from Baycorp customers. The first one, mongrels. (LAUGHS) Oh I'd probably say friendly and helpful. I think they deliver results. Friendly and helpful ` not! Mongrels, yeah. The Baycorp people may or may not get it right. So, what do you do if you think these people are wrong, or if you know they're right? If somebody doesn't owe the money, they won't be asked to pay it. So if you need to sort out a debt that isn't yours, or has already been paid, get in touch with Baycorp pronto. If the debt is yours, Baycorp can help you negotiate a payment plan. The sooner we talk to someone, the more likelihood we have of finding a great outcome for everybody involved. Sorry Baycorp. I'm sorry. Don't come after me! (LAUGHS) Good luck, mate, but is up to you Baycorp stay on your case. Now, as we said, your credit record won't immediately suffer if Baycorp are on you for a parking ticket. Sunil paid up. His credit record is OK. If you don't pay, it goes to the courts, and it gets ugly. Same with other debts. Your credit record will take a hit if the debt is yours and you don't start paying. So don't ignore that letter. Call them up now. They've got extra people on the phones tonight, and they've set up a special webpage... A lot of feedback on our story about booking travel online with Expedia. Garth's been sorting out a few sticky situations. And I've just got get Mahe to prove to himself that my upside-down fire really does work after his big fail. Oh, Oh, it's not looking good. You've stitched us up, Pippa. It hasn't worked for a second time. I'm giving up and going back to the old way of keeping my family warm tonight. what have you got to say for yourself, Pippa? Welcome back. We've heard quite a lot from you since our story last week about booking travel online with Expedia. Here's Garth with the latest, and some good news for unhappy travellers. You could say Expedia made its bed, and now it has to lie in it. We heard from more unhappy Expedia customers after we told the tale of Geoff and Jill Harper and their trip to Melbourne for a room they'd cancelled, to India by phone for pointless conversations promising refunds from Expedia. We've got four emails in which they acknowledged that they had made a mistake and a refund was due, but then they failed to follow through with that. It landed in the District Court in Tauranga, where the Harpers won, but Expedia somehow missed three letters about the Disputes Tribunal finding and failed to pay up. Their story sounded very familiar to Trudi, who'd cancelled a hotel booking in Auckland for the Eagles concert and was still waiting for her Expedia refund months on. Then there was Joseph who had to pay twice for his trip to Los Angeles. He was out nearly $1200. The Becketts had to fly home for Mum's funeral and spent a year trying to get a $500 flight credit honoured. The Daleys wanted to get to Melbourne but overpaid nearly $500, because Expedia cancelled their flight three times trying to fix a spelling mistake. And Rosemary was owed $90 from flights to Darwin, because Expedia's website gave her the wrong information. So, big sum, smaller sums, the common ground ` trouble with cancellation and then with pushing Expedia to make good on refunds promised by its call centre staff. The good news is in all of those cases which we passed on to the Sydney office, Expedia has investigated and apologised. And of course it paid up - in some cases a little more than had been sought, to show goodwill. A spokeswoman promises a detailed review of the cases and changes from that. Hopefully, Expedia will take better care of the housekeeping from now on. Good on Expedia for clearing those outstanding cases up. Now, back to our fire wars. My upside-down fire does work, I know, so Mahe had another go. GEORGE EZRA'S BUDAPEST It's looking a little bit positive, but... I think it might work. (LAUGHS) Well, sorry, Pippa. I decided to persevere. I tied knots in the paper this time, put it in, and it seems to have worked, so tip for you, NZ ` tie knots in the paper. Tell us next time, Pippa. OK, fair enough. I don't know if it's absolutely necessary, but I think knotting the paper probably does help. Actually, I would like to have seen a row-off between you. Uh, yes. You did rowing, didn't you? (LAUGHS) I did, yes, Gordon. Thanks very much, but I don't think I wanna put myself in that kind of competitive arena with, uh, Mahe. Anyway, look, apologies for the poor sound quality on last week's show. We stuffed up there, and we're pretty certain we'll never let that happen again. No, and that is the show for tonight. We will be on Facebook for the next half hour to answer your questions. Our programme, of course, is all about your problems and your thoughts, so do get in touch. We're on Facebook. Email us, or write to us. That's our show. See you next week. Captions by Alana Cruikshank www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2015