Wanganui firms' anger at missing listings

Photo / Paul Estcourt

Three Wanganui businesses are spitting tacks at being dropped off the white pages phone book listings after cancelling their Yellow Pages ads.

The firms - a courier company, a concreter and an electrician - say they've lost business as a result.

But Yellow Pages Group denies there has been any specific problem in Wanganui or that there has been an issue elsewhere.

Sharyn Cooke, owner of Priority Couriers, said the company was faxed paperwork to renew its Yellow Pages listing last year but decided not to do so to save costs.

Yellow Pages followed up with a phone call but was told the ad was not required. "Then they just went ahead and did it anyway."

The company refused to pay the bill and the situation was eventually sorted out.

However, when the new white pages came out, Priority Couriers was nowhere to be seen.

"It's really bad. We've had people going 'you're not in the phone book, if I didn't have an old book I wouldn't know how to get hold of you'," Cooke said.

A competitor had been taking advantage of the situation by telling customers that Priority had shut down. "It's a bitch, basically."

Electrician Allan Luff had a similar experience. He also decided to drop his Yellow Pages ad - "it was just too expensive" - and then found his white pages listing had disappeared.

He was nearing retirement age and people had asked him if he'd decided to give up work.

People in Wanganui still liked to use the phone book.

"It's a pretty conservative town, a lot of old people, and that's most of my work."

Wayne Keenan, of Keenan Concrete Services, also cancelled his ad.

The building industry had been tough in the past two years and his firm could not afford to spend $3000 on the Yellow Pages.

He believed the resulting lack of a white pages entry had the potential to cost his business $1 million a year.

Yellow Pages Group communications manager Danette Hunter said it was not the company's policy to remove an individual's free residential listing when it did not want to continue advertising.

There had been no specific problem in Wanganui, and Keenan and Luff's listings had been removed inadvertently.

"We are investigating the reason that this occurred but it appears to be caused by human error and should not have happened."

Yellow was investing $40 million in new systems to ensure mistakes like this did not occur again.

It had reinstated the customers' numbers to the white pages website and the 018 directory inquiries listings.