After 3 months of enjoying my new 2014 Lexus 300h, I received a bill from Sirus XM for my audio portion of the radio. I had forgotten that the audio trial ends after 3 months. All the other features from them continue for a year.

I do not use the XM radio so I called today to have that disconnected. It took 28 minutes on the phone to do this. Wow! Got transferred to another rep who would put me on hold and I had to reexplain why I was transferred.

XM support is a joke! They have poor audio quality! I have Pandora and HD radio stations that I can listen to that offer much higher quality audio.

And most of the time their support reps are so hard to understand.

 

My tip for calling Sirius/XM is always to go directly to "cancel subscription". Their customer service, believe it or not, is miles ahead of what it used to be.

 

Are you sure it was a bill and not just a notice asking you to pay to keep it going if you wanted to subscribe with a figure on it? Sirius sends them at least once a week/once every 2 weeks with a payment figure on them, trying to get you to pay for a subscription.

I own 3 Lexus vehicles and was never auto-enrolled into any kind of Sirius XM Radio payment after the 3 month trial expired; the XM Radio stations just no longer worked. How would they even collect your payment? They should have no financial information. Just curious about your experience!

 

If you call in and, when prompted, say "cancel", that will also get you to someone who can make you more attractive offers to continue your service. If you say that you want to cancel your service, the normal first offer is for a year of service at half the normal price. But there are even better offers available. One is a year of service for $75, and another is for six months of service for about $25. While the better offers come if you are calling to cancel your service, the very best offers are the ones for re-starting your subscription after you have canceled it.

The only downside is that you have to be organized enough to remember to call to cancel the reduced-cost subscription when it is about to expire. Otherwise, it will auto renew at the full normal price, but, if you are willing to cal whenever your subscription is about to expire, there is no reason to be paying any more than about $4-5 per month for the subscription.

 

Agreed, however, the $25+ fees plan offered is for 5 not 6 mos. Anyway, you can leave a reminder for yourself on your smartphone or pad, for about a week before your plan is to expire. Call then or else you'll automatically be renewed for 3 mos. at a time at the full subscription rate.

 

I think that the specifics of the reduced cost plans may vary from time to time. I notice that the web page for their special offers now says "call for information about our current special offers for returning customers". About a year ago, I had a 6 month $25+ fees subscription. I currently have a 5 month $20+ fees subscription that will be expiring in about 2 weeks. I did just check my records to confirm the length of time and the cost of those two reduced-cost subscriptions. The current 5 month subscription is, for example, $19.99 plus a $2.50 "music royalty fee".

The bottom line is that, for Sirius XM, the vast majority of their operating cost is leasing the transponder capacity on the satellites. Once they have the satellite capacity, their cost of providing service is virtually the same whether they are providing that service to 1 customer or to 10 million customers. Thus, while I'm sure that they would rather be making $15 per month from a customer, they are better off making $4-5 on a customer than making $0, and that $4-5 is essentially a pure addition to their profit margin.

 

My 3 month free trial ended a few weeks ago. Last week I got an offer to renew for 1 year @$89 + taxes and fees. When I called, they insisted I had a credit from the pos CRV I traded in for the ES. Not wanting to be rude and disagree with the nice customer service person, I graciously accepted a 1 year subscription for $10 and change.

-Bob

 

I had a previous subscription with my Acura and also had a credit. I did not want to use my credit for the audio portion. I've also done the song and dance for many years with calling in to receive the reduced rate.

IMO, my time is worth more than this. If their audio quality was any good, I might consider keeping the service. I do like their Nav traffic however. But now with apps like Waze, who needs to pay for this service.

 

In my opinion the traffic is a waste. When I'm going slow, stuck in traffic, for example, and I check their traffic alerts to find out what's going on, it tells me "slow traffic". Now, that's helpful! Traffic info. is much better on local radio.

Although my time is worth some bucks, it's worth it for my satisfaction to pay 1/3rd or less of their normal subscription rate for a 5 min. phone call every 5 mos. Their customer service is now much improved compared to years ago. Also, my reception and quality is either not bad or I'm too clueless to notice it isn't that good.

 

What does it cost to renew nav traffic, weather etc. without getting the music stuff? I don't listen to sat radio for poor sound quality like some others on here but was wondering about the other xm stuff.

 

This link has pricing information, and I believe that you can subscribe to it separately, but I'm not absolutely certain of that.

http://www.siriusxm.com/navtraffic/pricing

To me, the price seems a bit steep.

 

You can subscribe to them separately. The 3-year subscription is the best deal.