ALSA ALSA Read All About It!

ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture...NOT!

Back in the days, I used to love figuring out the meanings of abbreviations. Today, you can actually find out what something stands for right here.

So what is ALSA?

ALSA is as much a part of Spain as PKS is a part of Poland. Perhaps the buses are a bit better, and best of all you can sit right next do the bathroom and be subjected to involuntary anesthesia. Actually, you can get used to the smell, but I suppose that's kind of bad.

ALSA stands for Automóviles Luarca S.A. It was incorporated in 1923 and generally provides excellent service, but it kind of got lost in the age of high tech. It seems that they invested a lot of money into computer systems, but their own employees have not been trained to use them properly.

Anyway, if you ever happen to go to Spain I'd suggest you rent a car. We decided that it would be better to buy kmtriko (kilometrico) passes, which cost 99 EUR and allow you to travel around Spain as much as you please for a week. This, of course, turned out to be a terrible mistake as we ended up paying 198 EUR + 86,44 EUR. A bargain!

To make a long story short, the passes expired when they shouldn't have and no one wanted to help us resolve the problem, so we ended paying an extra 86,44 EUR for a pair of tickets from Sevilla to Alicante.  I was livid, but the clerk managed to soothe my nerves by assuring us that we would get our money back once we reached Alicante -- since that's where we had purchased our kmtriko cards. In Alicante they said no way José and asked me to file a complaint. The last thing I did was call them, and the man on the phone reassured me that he would call me back. In fact, he said he'd do it within 5 hours. As you've probably predicted, that never happened.

Anyway, I've been trying to get around to filing an official complaint and today I went to ALSA's website to do it. Upon clicking on the submit button, a matrix-like stream of JavaScript code lunged at me, clearly letting me know that complaints are not welcome.

And then, eureka!

Apparently, in the EU we have something called the ECC and no it's not the European Central Bank but the European Consumer Centre. I believe it's actually called ECC-net. It deals with cross-border complaints within the European Union. They have a nice website where you can download an interactive PDF form which allows you to submit your complaint and even add all the relevant attachments. Within an hour of submitting the report, I received a phone call from a really nice lady who asked me to send copies of the receipts. The whole process has so far been very professional and it's nice to know that after coming back home it's possible to resolve some consumer-related issues that one may have had in other (EU) countries. Not sure about how effective it's going to be, but I'm glad there's someone out there who came up with the whole idea.

Here's a link to the website of the Polish office: ECK