Dear Vue,
My boyfriend and I went to see a film at Vue Islington last night as a treat. But we left having spent about £27 and feeling scammed and ripped off.
First, the sizes and prices of the popcorn and soft drinks sold were unreasonably oversized and overpriced. Instead of selling smaller, more normal portions for a more reasonable price, Vue has to sell unhealthily large sizes just so you can charge more. Customers then are made to feel like they have no cause for complaint because the sizes are so big and we feel like we have to eat and drink all of it since we paid so much. The size of the Sprite we had was basically diabetes in a cup.
We then walked into the cinema to find that half of the seats are reserved as “VIP” seats, whereby customers have to pay more to have a seat reserved. From what I could see, there isn’t a significant difference in terms of comfort, and it looks more like a method to get customers to pay more for what we deserve anyways – reserved seats.
Because it’s free seating for standard ticket holders, we have to go into the cinema extra early to make sure we have seats with a reasonable view of the screen. After paying almost £10 for a ticket, then £7 for an unnecessarily oversized soft drink and popcorn, and having to go in early to get nicer seats, we are made to sit through almost half an hour of advertisements.
Our tickets say the movie starts at 9.10pm. We sat there advert after advert and the movie only started at almost 9.40pm. That is outrageous and unacceptable. It makes me think whether free seating was created, not only to make us pay extra for reserved seats, but also to create a captive audience to watch those hideous adverts.
Regardless of whether we enjoyed the movie we saw or not, our experience was severely dampened by the policies of Vue which made us felt like were designed to squeeze every penny out of us.
We left feeling scammed and ripped off. Vue, you could be assured that the next time we want to see a movie, Vue will definitely not be our choice of cinema and I definitely will not recommend Vue to anyone.
Yours sincerely,
Dora
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Po
I totally agree with you. I don’t go to Vue but to Odeon. They charged nearly £4.00 for the smallest box of popcorn I have ever seen. I am never buying popcorn in movies in this country again. Wehn I go to the local Apollo in my town the popcorn is bought already popped so it is incredibly stale and old. And yet they still charge £4.00
Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 9:13 pm
mag
i think here they tend to show the film much later than what’s said on the ticket. i remembered being annoyed at this, but now I actually enjoy the trailers (and got annoyed if they only showed few/ bad trailers)…
Don’t know about snacks though, cos bf usually do the buying and eating (if we do get them that is, which is not often), and he didn’t tell me how much they were.
I haven’t done any comparison though, but don’t think there’s much difference apart from the ticket prices (eg. odeon at leicester square is very pricey!)… I do like my local vue though….
Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 9:40 pm
dora
Yeah, granted I don’t go to the cinema very often, but when I do go, it’s mostly been smaller independent cinemas like Screen on the Green (Angel), and I’ve been wanting to go to Genesis (Bethnal Green) or the Prince Charles Cinema in Chinatown (£4 or £5 a ticket I think?). Other than that, I’ve been to Cineworld and they were pretty good.