Don't use these taxi's unless you want to get stranded at 3am with no warning, get hung up on when you ask why and then get spoken to as if they are trying to start a fight with you on the street.
I booked a taxi online with these people at 1.30pm in the afternoon after speaking with someone over the phone who said I could book it online. He said that I would need to pay by card (which I thought was weird because I've booked with Cherwell cars online before and never had to do that) so I agreed and went to book it online. When I got to the payment section there was actually no option for me to pay by card, only by pay in car. So I made sure in the instructions that I mentioned how much we were quoted (last time I booked a taxi with these guys I was quoted a price on the phone and when the taxi came to pick us up he had significantly increased the price and also threatened to leave us stranded if we didn't agree. He also said the lady I spoke to on the phone was "stupid" - they are starting to sound like a nice bunch aren't they?). I then received a booking confirmation via text and that was it, sorted (or so I thought).
It's 2.55am in Leamington and I get a text from Cherwell saying that my taxi has been dispatched...which was odd because they were supposed to be picking us up at 3. So I went to track my taxi and it said that it had been cancelled. I was confused so I rang up to ask where the taxi was and the guy down the phone told me that there wasn't one coming and that ours had been cancelled. Bemused, I asked him why and he said because we didn't pay in advanced. So I explained how there was no option for me to pay in advanced when I was booking online and you can't just cancel a booking without telling me! He said he had tried to ring me at 1am and had left me a message to explain - can I just point out that I booked this taxi at 1.30 in the afternoon and the've waited 12 hours to tell me there's a problem. I checked my phone and there were no missed calls and no voice messages or text messages. This guy then accused me of leaving the wrong number on the website when I booked it which was funny because earlier that day I had received a booking confirmation via text which proves otherwise. So Cherwell had probably dialled the wrong number and left a message on someone else's phone to tell me my booking had been cancelled...after I accused him of this he got very angry and decided the best thing to do was to hang up on me. Charming. So I called back again hoping I could speak to someone more intelligent and more English which is when I got speaking to Steph. She told me that there has never been the option of being able to pay online and that all her colleagues knew that - obviously not all of them did because I was told I could this morning. She kept iterating that they tried to call me and couldn't get through and then she said "at the end of the day, it's not our problem". Soon realising that my hopes of speaking to someone intelligent were lost and these guys weren't going to pick us up, I hung up (of course not without shouting a few obscenities, I was fuming).
If anyone is planning on getting a taxi in the Banbury area please for your sake don't use Cherwell cars. They are rude, unintelligent and clearly don't care about their customers or their own business. I would much rather recommend Castle Cars in Banbury as they were the ones who saved us and wanted to pick us up when they heard our situation. Carriage cars are also great and the lady there is a much nicer person to speak to than Steph. read more
