My car was booked in for a week with the local main dealer to fix the gearbox fault i had, as mentioned in another thread. Ended up taking 3 times that . Apart from buying the car from them, this was my first contact with the main dealer and was very disappointing.

There was no way they were ever going to do it in a week once they said they had to remove the box, take it to a transmission specialist, decide what was wrong, order the parts, and refit everything. The promise to phone me everyday with the status didn't materialise at all. It went in on a Monday, so by thursday i thought i'd better call them. Was told it was awaiting a new synchro bearing, parts on order.

The following week they fed me a load of bull**** about what day they got the box back, different people gave me different days, and then it was fitted and there was a noise all the time so it had to come out again and go back to the transmission specialist. This turned out to be a worn mounting, again had to wait for parts. Again they didnt bother calling me i had to chase them all the time.

They also needed to fix a broken parking sensor, which could easily have been done while waiting for all the geabox stuff, but they left it until after the box was sorted!!! Adding even more time. I also asked them to check the rear wheel bearings which they didnt even bother to do.

Part way through the whole fiasco i had a moan at the service manager and she offered a free next service, but i wasn't that keen handing my car over to them again. I mentioned that it needed a new tail light as mine had a hole in it and they offered to supply and fit a new one for free to make up for the time it was taking.

So on balance i eventually got it fixed, got the light fixed for free and a free service, but also found out that my local dealer are pretty useless at fixing cars and customer service. :thumbdwn:

It's good to get back in a car where i can't hear a tractor all the time and has decent brakes, instead of the Fabia greenline courtesy car. Fuel consumption was the only good thing about it :P

This doesn't surprise me at all.

Most dealers sub-out transmission repairs to a specialist.

VAG gearbox parts can be very slow to come through. A while ago we had a Sharan (used as a taxi) that needed a gearbox rebuild. We needed a new mainshaft. That took 5 weeks to get hold of, including me phoning to Germany...

I had a similar long waiting time with my VW Golf III at a VW dealer, but I blamed it on the overfilled agenda of the dealer. Whenever I made a phonecall on the waiting time, I got a response from the head of maintenance that he was too busy with other work ("the normal jobs"). Appearantly some dealers do not have flexibility in their agenda's and the job was too big to do in between the scheduled work. They should have told me at the start.

I am glad to have found a flexible Skoda dealer nearby, who has proved to be customer focussed in acceptable costs as well as timely fullfilling the orders.

Frankly not surprised a repair (read strip, order and wait for new parts, then rebuild) took 3 weeks.

If the dealer had got its act together the work should have taken 1.5 weeks at most, despite then telling me it will take a week.

The total lack of customer focus is what annoyed me the most, but i guess i should have expected it as it's the norm these days.