Top 10 Costa Rica

When a tourist uses a credit card to make an international call at one of those funny looking telephones at about 400 hotels here, everybody wins. Except the tourist. ICE (the only phone company in Costa Rica) allows U.S. phone firm to skin callers. Its $36 for the first minute of a New York call, the hotel gets $7 and the Costa Rican phone company gets paid, too.

BBG telephone stands ready to charge $36 for the first minute of a call to New York.

And the owner of the phone, BBG Communications of San Diego, California, gets a payday that may run into the hundreds of dollars.

BBG Communications has managed to accrue at least 800 complaints since 1996 at the San Diego Better Business Bureau. Not all are from Costa Rica. The company places its funny looking phones all over the world where tourists travel as well as in hotels rooms around the country.

“BBG Communications is a company of extraordinary concern for the better business bureau,” said Sheryl Bilbrey, president of the bureau in San Diego. “BBG seriously overcharges customers and they are reluctant to do anything about complaints,” said Ms. Bilbrey. Bilbrey said customers at times are forced to use the services of BBG, and some say they never even used the services at all. Most complaints are international, but the bureau has received some complaints from within the United States as well.

Ms. Bilbrey said one of the major concerns the bureau has had with BBG is their untimely and static responses to customers’ complaints.

“We take every complaint seriously,” said Christina Rodríguez, corporate counsel for BBG Communications.  She said, “once in a while” customers are not satisfied with the services, and BBG handles these complaints in a timely manner. Ms. Rodríguez said that over the years “we have improved a lot,” and that BBG is now working with the better business bureau and is able to respond quickly to complaints because of their “automated voice system.”

She declined to say who owned the private company.

The company says on its telephones that it will give rate information to callers, but sometimes operators require a credit card number before doing so. A company employee eventually yielded the information Wednesday that a call to either New York City or Anchorage, Alaska, would be $36 for the first minute.

The service works closely with the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad, the phone company known as ICE, via a contract signed in 2001. The company maintains the telephones and service personnel here, but one employee said that the firm pays no taxes in Costa Rica.

In fact, the man with the BBG e-mail address bragged on a complaints Internet board that the company had the help of highly placed government officials to set up the operations.

What does BBG do? It appears that the company’s sole function is to handle credit card calls to international locations. ICE abdicated that responsibility in the original contract.

The contract does not identify BBG Communications as being registered as a foreign corporation in Costa Rica, something many firms do to have a legal presence here. The contract was negotiated during the presidency of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez who is already facing corruption charges for unrelated deals made by the phone company.

Dunn & Bradstreet, the U.S. credit agency, estimates that BBG Communications takes in more than $3 million a year.

San Diego newspapers only now are beginning to look into the question of why the firm has so many complaints.

Costa Rican officials have been reluctant to provide information on the contract. Only recently ICE provided a copy of the contract. The contract was made without competitive bidding, said an ICE spokesperson.

In Costa Rica, what BBG is doing is legal said an engineer from the Autoridad Reguladora de los Servicios Publicos in Costa Rica. ICE has full capability to provide these services, he said, but they don’t want to deal with the hassle of the credit cards and complaints. ICE gets the money from each call and each minute no matter what, so they prefer to work with BBG rather than handle it themselves, he said. The authority only sets rates between the local telephones and ICE, he said.