Question I’m wondering whether you could give me advice on how to cancel an Xbox subscription. During the first lockdown I restarted my son’s subscription as he was home from college for a few months. Now he’s gone back to college. Xbox is on auto-renew every March and €59 was taken from my credit card without me being notified beforehand, which was annoying.
I’ve tried everything to cancel the subscription. But one has to do it on the Xbox itself. Not only can I not log in on the machine, which is old and my son can’t remember the password, but I can’t even get it to connect to the WiFi in the house. Have you any suggestions how to get reimbursement? I’ve looked and emailed Microsoft Xbox but they keep saying to go back to the Xbox to cancel. — Liam Kelly
Answer This seems a bit unfair. While ideally you would have the password to the machine, it makes no sense that you can’t cancel a service unless it’s done from the exact same device — what if the device was damaged or lost? So if that’s what Xbox support is telling you, that’s a very poor reflection on their service. I asked Microsoft about this on your behalf.
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“Happily we’ve heard from our customer support team this afternoon, who confirmed they have been able to resolve the issue with Liam and, as a gesture of goodwill, refund the recent payment for March,” they told me.
“According to the team, the sticking point in this case was that Liam couldn’t recall the email address and login details he’d need to login to the account, which through a search the support team was able to identify manually.”
Microsoft also says that provided a customer has login details handy, they are able to cancel subscriptions online at any time and they do not need to do this via the console itself. For anyone else experiencing similar issues, Microsoft says that they should visit this dedicated Xbox Support page for details of how to cancel a subscription. This should allow you to stop your subscriptions auto-renewing and cancel at any time. However, that is obviously dependent on you knowing your login details.
While it’s good that this was sorted on this occasion, clearly there are sometimes issues with information not being immediately to hand in customer support teams: couldn’t the teams you contacted have done the same thing that solved the issue when I contacted them?
It’s also worth noting that these sorts of problems should hopefully become a little more streamlined in the coming years, thanks to the passing of the Digital Services Act. This new EU law includes a provision that it shouldn’t ever be hard or confusing to cancel services. In practical terms, this means that we’ll soon be able to cancel all services online if we signed up to them online.
In other words, companies won’t be allowed to require you to phone or email them, begging for their indulgence. This is a surprisingly common tactic among a range of everyday service providers today, from broadband and TV companies such as Sky to media subscription services.
Question I’m travelling to the US this summer for a short holiday to New York and Florida and wondering about data roaming options for light data usage in the US (messaging, email, news apps). I’m a Vodafone bill pay customer and have seen the ‘Red Roaming’ option for €4 per day. Is that a decent deal? Is purchasing a US sim card an option? Would that work in EU devices? — Padraig G
Answer For light data usage, the ‘Red Roaming’ add-on should be sufficient, although watch out for Vodafone’s data caps, which aren’t always clear.
In the US, I usually buy a local sim card (about $50) to guarantee that I’ll be able to use sufficient data for things like social media without worrying.
‘Slim’ fitness smartwatches are popular among those who don’t want a hulking crown on their wrists. Garmin’s latest entry into this category is light and simple to use, with good basic tracking abilities and decent battery life. It doesn’t have GPS, though, so won’t be useful for more detailed maps of your runs or walks.
If you’ve got too much money and want a pair of noise-cancelling headphones to show off at work, Cisco and Bang & Olufsen have come together with a product just for you. These headphones do basically the same thing, with roughly the same quality, as the likes of Sony’s XM4 headphones (€299). But they’re also Danish.