Terrible experience with International Travelers' Warranty

whatcanido

I have searched both acer.com and acer.ae for an email address to which I can send my complaint, but there’s none listed. It seems that the only way I can send Acer a complaint email is if I have a valid warranty but mine’s now expired. So, since Acer doesn’t seem interested in listening to feedback from its customers, I shall post it here instead:

 

The hard drive on my Acer laptop recently failed – about eight months after I bought it. I was travelling in Ethiopia at the time and was pleased to find out that Acer had a “service location” in the country. What followed was a six month odyssey of incompetence, apathy and bureaucracy before I finally got my hard drive fixed. 

 

As best as I can remember, events played out something like this:

 

• I contacted Acer Dubai and they gave me the number for their “partner company”, System Technology, providing warranty support in Ethiopia.
• The number didn’t work, and Acer didn’t have another number to try.
• I eventually found the correct number myself, and called System Technology, who denied they had a service agreement in place with Acer.
• I told Acer, Acer contacted System Technology, and System Technology decided they did have an agreement with Acer after all.
• I gave my hard drive to System Technology and they sat on if for several weeks, taking no action until I called them and they said “we can’t proceed until we have your laptop serial number,” which I was able to give them in two minutes once they'd actually asked for it.
• Now, two months after the problem started, Acer decided that my laptop could not be repaired in Ethiopia as it had been bought in the UK. I said that I wanted it repaired under the International Travellers’ Warranty and they changed their minds and said it could be repaired in Ethiopia after all.
• System Technology could not access the Acer computer system which allowed them to order a new hard drive for me. About a month passed whilst Acer and System Technology tried to figure out their own IT systems, with me calling or emailing almost every day to ensure they actually took action on the matter.
• The manager of System Technology declared that he was sick of Acer and was cancelling their service agreement because he didn’t want to work with them anymore. He asked me to pass the message on to Acer in Dubai myself.
• I did so. Acer Dubai called System Technology, and all of a sudden the service agreement was back on.
• System Technology were still unable to figure out Acer’s computer system, so after much haranguing over several days I managed to induce Acer Dubai to enter my details into their system themselves.
•  The manager of System Technology stopped answering his mobile phone. Acer’s solution was not to call his land line, but rather to ask me to print out Acer emails in Ethiopia and physically courier them myself to Acer’s supposed “service partner”.
• After more haranguing I convinced Acer to explore other options for getting in touch with their partner company themselves. They did so, and my hard drive was finally ordered!
• It arrived several weeks later and was installed. Six whole months after the hard drive first crashed.
• Alas, no Operating System though. Apparently, despite having bought the Operating System when I bought the laptop, and despite losing it due to a defective hard drive which Acer supplied, it’s not covered under the warranty. Thanks Acer!

In summary, my entire warranty experience was characterised by abysmal customer service and an almost total apathy towards fulfilling Acer’s contractual obligations to me. How Acer could select a firm such as System Technology to be their partner in Ethiopia I have no idea. Acer’s own customer service team seemed only slightly less incompetent that System Technology were. Had I not bombarded them with 34 emails (yes, I counted) and at least twice as many phone calls, my broken hard drive would still be gathering dust on System Technology’s shelf.

 

My advice to anyone who has a technical problem with an Acer laptop: it would be quickest and easiest to just throw it in the bin.

 

Better yet, never buy Acer in the first place.

ScottyC

Acer's internation travellers warranty is almost identical to all of the other marks. They aren't able to install an operating system if you are travelling around the world because Microsoft has different versions of the OS from country to country. In speaking to Acer's support team from NA I've found that you are expected to burn a copy of your OS in case anything like this does happen. That too is incredibly common and most companies will gladly walk you through the steps to burning the discs. Asus just did the same thing for me and told me with one of my laptops that wouldn't create the media on it's own. They had me go download a tool to burn the disc image which still didn't work. They told me that I can buy a copy from them because my recovery partition was faulty. At least Acer offered me free RCD's when the same happened on their system.

 

The fact of the matter is that international warranties are almost always a pain. Sorry you had to go through all that. It's much easier to get sevice if you're travelling to say Europe. It's as though they're still working out the details on international repairs.

 

Here's a fun FYI. My cousin was in France with his HP unit and the thing wouldn't turn on. He tried calling me but couldn't reach me so he called HP. They had him send his PC from France to Canada for the repairs (which cost him way more than it was worth) and then refused to ship it back to him in France once the repairs were finished. He ended up having to buy another computer while he was there. He chose to buy another HP. So finally when he got back to Canada HP sent him his computer to his home address. We found out that all he needed to do was a power drain on his unit and it was working fine. HP reinstalled the OS anyway and he lost all of his files. After a few months the computer he bought in France died so again he called HP. They refused to fix it in Canada and told him he would have to ship it to France for repairs. He was worried that they would again refuse to send it back to him if he weren't in France to receive it but ended up not being able to send it in at all. They said that the travellers warranty was for travellers and because he lives in Canada and isn't travelling there he no longer had a warranty at all.

 

Moral of the story? Having computer troubles while travelling is horrible regardless of the brand.