We've had some hit and miss experiences with Book a Tiger, but overall, our experience as a customer has been mostly negative. Out of the dozens of 'Tigers' (cleaners) we've had in the past 3 years, I would say we were satisfied with only 5 or so. I understand it is not glamorous work, and that most people only do it to make ends meet while they find another job or study, and that means there is a lot of turnover. It also means that when you do find someone good, they tend to only be there a short period. Then you need to start the process of finding someone reliable again. The only reason we kept getting BAT services was because we didn't want to clean ourselves, and we couldn't find anyone else (or we were too lazy to). Now, after a few negative experiences, and one particularly negative experience, we decided we are done with Book a Tiger forever.
The particularly bad experience: Finally, we finally found a Tiger whom we were satisfied with, established a relationship with her, and gave her our keys. She came regularly for about 8 months. Then one day out of the blue, 5 days after her last visit, we received a nondescript envelope in the post containing our key, and what was seemingly another key from our building. The keys were insecurely placed into a paper envelope with no padding or anything. There was also no accompanying letter, we only knew it was from BAT from the return address on the envelope. We texted our usual Tiger, and she said she needed to leave Berlin abruptly and therefore she quit working at BAT. Fine. She also said she knew who the other key belonged to, and gave her former employers instructions on returning them, but that due to her agreement with BAT, should could not tell us. She said she would reach out to BAT to notify them. Fine. We logged in to the BAT 'system' and saw our usual appointment was still set, so we tried to call BAT for 5 days, but we were unable to get through. We also sent an email to describe the key situation and to tell them to cancel the appointment, which was scheduled with the 'new' Tiger who did not have our key (and who would not have been authorized to have our key). After 10 days, we still did not receive a reply to our email, a subsequent email, and we called them back and finally got through. Surprisingly, after we told the customer service rep the key story and about our negative experience, they said we would be charged for our appointment! After we argued with them and told them we had it in writing that we contacted them several days in advance to cancel, they relented, but it was weird, because the focus seemed to be to argue with us that we needed to pay, despite what happened. The customer service rep seemed surprised about the key story and said she had no idea who the key belonged to, and that the system indicated no other customer called to say they were missing a key. She even asked 'how do you even know it is from your building?' and we said it looks similar to our key, and we knew our preferred Tiger had other jobs in our large building complex, so we didn't know for sure, but were assuming. Why did BAT send us someone else's key? I think that's the real question. Of course, they had no answer for that. It was the last straw and we decided to never use them again. We texted our former preferred Tiger, who is back in her home country, and she said she contacted BAT several times regarding the key matter, but never got an answer. Go figure.
Other than that, the overall BAT user experience just sucks all around. The website itself is awful and very difficult to book appointments on. It's seemingly only a front end user interface with editable fields, and all of the actual booking is probably done manually in the backend. You don't get an acknowledgement or an instant confirmation when changing an appointment or contacting them. You need to wait several days and hope they schedule a time that works for you, and if not, repeat the re-booking process all over again. It could take over a month to schedule a new appointment. At one point, I even opened up a new account to book another appointment. Some other negative experiences were coming home 2 hours into a 3-hour appointment, seeing the apartment was barely touched, and not finding any Tiger there. That actually happened a few times. Like the other reviews here, the excuse from BAT customer support was that the Tiger 'finished early', which is a funny answer, considering you pay by the hour. Another time I came home to an improvised ashtray on my balcony with 5 stamped out cigarette butts (3 hour appointment, and we don't smoke). Missing food / drinks was the norm.
I would definitely never recommend BAT, ever. Go old school and look in the yellow pages. We found a local reputable company that has been in business for 30 years and are very satisfied. We should have done that in the first place. read more
