CitySocialising - www.citysocialising.com

WASTE OF MONEY. NO ACTIVE MEMBERS IN MY CITY

No members attending any prearranged socials. All members in my city appear inactive having joined years ago. Even looked at nearby cities (well, near as in over one hour away), they also had no attendees for upcoming socials.

Waste of money. MeetUp is free and very hands on, so try there instead.

CitySocialiser will make you feel more lonely not less!

I thought it is going to be place to meet new people. But, was just waste of money! There is no one month's payment! They charge you quarter year!!

There is no place to cancel the payments!!

It was a stupid mistake joining the website and big waste of time!

I've been charged for a FREE account, when I log in it's not even possible for me to cancel my billing because it's free! When I've been in touch for a refund, I've been ignored, after at least 10 mails I received one to say that it's not their policy to offer refunds!

Unbelievable that this company is allowed to exist.

Steer well clear!

CITYSOCIALIZER DO NOT OPERATE AS AN HONEST ETHICAL OR WELL RUN COMPANY.

THEY DO NOT ISSUE INVOICES WHEN THEY TAKE MONEY FROM YOUR ACCOUNT!!

THE MANAGEMENT IS TERRIBLE MESSAGES GO WITHOUT REPLY, TRIED EVERY EMAIL COULD FIND AND EVEN CONTACTED VIA FACEBOOK PAGE TOTALLY IGNORE ALL CONTACT FROM CUSTOMERS AND THERE IS NOT EVEN A CUSTOMER PHONE NUMBER. PAPER LETTER VIA POST ALSO IGNORED NO RESPONSE. AND FURTHUR IGNORED REQUEST TO CANCEL ACCOUNT HAD TO CONTACT BANK TO STOP MONEY BEING TAKEN.

THIS COMPANY SHOULD BE INVESTIGATED BY OFCOM.

MONEY TAKEN FROM ACCOUNTS FOR NOT ATTENDANCE WITHOUT ASKING OR FINDING OUT IF THEY PERSON WAS INFACT AT THE EVENT! WHEN RECEIPTS FOR BUYING DRINKS CAN BE PROVIDED AS PROOF OF ATTENDENCE. AND NO INVOICE PROVIDED ONLY KNOWLEDGE IS ONCE YOU LOOK AT YOUR BANK STATEMENT.

BULLYING IS NOT TACKLED AS CITYSOCIALIZER DISTANT THEMSELVES CLAIMING THEY ARE JUST A PLATFORM. UTTERLY UNETHICAL AND DISGUSTING.

THEY DONT EVEN DESERVE THE ONE STAR

Sanchita Saha should be struck off as a director. She is totally unprofessional and does not care one bit about the trail of numerous amounts of customers the have left in distress from her Sanchita Saha Director of Citysocializer greed, greedy awful person Sanchita Saha.

I received an email inviting me to join Citysocializer(CS) as a premium member for 3 months for £3. I paid £3 and did not

-create a full profile

-correspond with any members

-attend any events

-have access to the full features of the website

At the end of 3 months I was billed £35.97! The reason being:

CS operates a Continuous Service Agreement for Membership Fees that users HAVE TO terminate themselves. This means that CS AUTOMATICALLY RENEWS YOUR MEMBERSHIP unless you terminate your membership.

Also note CS

1.customer care team do not respond to emails.

2. does not allow you to delete your account. You have the option to close your account but not delete it.

Paying to meet people through CS in London is not necessary. Membership clubs, sports clubs and meet up groups offer much more variety and value for money. This online social network should be avoided.

Citysocializer is THE worst place you can go if you wish to meet people in London. They charge an extortionate monthly fee to join, I was stupid enough to pay for 3 months ! I only later realised they do pub quiz nights and their offer of venues is a joke ! Pubs and bars I have never heard of , I think it is because they cannot afford to hire proper Clubs, plus I found it really annoying that I was sent marketing material inviting me to join Dating platforms

I joined in mid-November with the aim of making some more friends to get options for going out over the Christmas/New Year period. I paid £36 for a 'platinum service' whereby I could go to as many socials as I pleased over a 3 month period.

Some of the socials I planned to go to in November and December were then just cancelled- with no apologies or reasons given.

The site does not do refunds for any reason - beware and don't join!

When the November ones were cancelled I asked why and whether more would be cancelled in December - and now of course they have been cancelled!? I have still received no response from any of the organisers.

This is just a money taking exercise, the organisers do not live in Cambridge and so they would rather be out in London than here - of course they would ...

First of all, context. I'm a late twenty something and have moved country to settle in London one year ago. As most people I know are colleagues from work and I was sick of talking work all the time whenever on a night out with them, I decided to give this a try. I forked out the 38 pounds or so for 3 months of premium membership and boy, what didn't I do.

As someone said below, there were warning signs I should have paid attention to. Here are the problems I noticed :

1- Apparently if you're not a paying member you can't send messages at all - or even answered the one you received. This is a huge mistake in the business model has this prevent people not paying to be active at all. You can't force people to pay for a service they don't know if it will be valuable yet. Some will fall into the trap and pay as I did. But because of this "let's force member to pay to use the site at all" no community is built as most people chose not to pay for an unknown service - and wisely so. You can afford to make your service a paying one once you proved yourself, built up a community and scaled it up.

2- There is no added value to the service. By that I mean that there is no matching algorithm to match similar people together - not even by location. The simplistic design shows there are no qualified engineers being a poorly designed website (yes obviously, if the site is so poorly designed - crashing all the time and not easy to navigate - don't even hope for a m mobile decent app, there is none).

It's almost laughable but here is the way the site works : you choose a few basic activities - "sport" - "drinks" (...) "restaurant" and then an automatically generated "about me" section will be created. This section is barely modifiable as you are limited to 100 characters or so. You end up with a generic, unpersonnalized profile with a very very vague location. Result : when you look for like minded people, you can only search by age (and location but this does not actually works, presenting people living sometimes in Manchester or Leeds or even Scotland when looking in my immediate neighbourhood...).

You'll end up "matching" people you actually have very few in common with. I suspect it is because the founder did not have the budget to hire a real engineer to create a proper algorithm, hence the poorly designed website, absence of algorithm and amateur overall design.

3- it forces you to pay to be able to contact anyone at all....sure enough I got rid if almost 40 pounds and texted a lot of people, most of which appearing to be premium. Very very few answered. I suspect strongly there a lot of fake profiles, just as in dating websites.

I received tons of automatically generated messages also.

All in all not worth it. It has been designed by an unskilled person, with absolutely no added value as it only matches you on the basis of your age (yes, in citysocializer world, a "similar person" is just someone who is the same age as you. They could be a criminally convicted assaulter and you a young professional and this site would match the both of you because you're both 29. Soul mates! Yay!).

The level of amateurism is laughable and the exec of this company seriously needs to get a grip on reality. Soon enough lawsuits will be filed.

No wonder they try and force people to pay as the site has absolutely no value (no matching algorithm, poor database and amateurish website design).

Seems like a great idea, but the service is poor (I trialled this and cancelled my membership, and have been charged a recurrent fee which the company will not refund - after a lengthy wait for an email reply), and the number and variety of events is limited. Very expensive for what it is. I recommend Meetup - an essentially free service with significantly greater volume / variety / quality of events and members.

Now I've been a host at city socializer and before I go on and say anything...don't waste your time or money with this service. Now I had been involved with this company for some time and for a while I was loyal and would recommend it to anyone but in the last year my opinion has changed somewhat. I would be hosting two to three events a week and i was getting people attending every event and my social life was great. For personal reasons I had to leave CS and my city for a short time. When I returned I became active again by taking on a regular membership in hope of becoming a host again. I emailed CS (just want to make a point, they don't have a phone line for contact, the only way to contact the head office is by email!) and they would never reply to my emails. When I had returned alot of my friends had left CS to join a rival called Meetup which I'm now with and for one thing, it's a lot more cheaper, sometimes free to be part of depending what groups you join.

I can't speak for each city CS is in but with the one I was at, the group itself now has very low activity. One of the reasons people don't use it anymore is because it's overpriced. CS claims it's gone global creating new networks where people can make friends but when you click on a new city to view on the site, you'll be welcomed with a message stating "CS hasn't started here yet!" I get that some places in the UK CS has built what they like to call "Networks" where you can make new friends but it's a bit of a joke. If you join, you might meet a few people but for the money you have to pay, it just ain't worth it. There are problems with cancelling transactions once they have your bank details. It's not happened to me but many of my friends have cancelled their memberships yet CS seem happy to continue taking money out of your account long after you left the site and their customer service, like mentioned before, is all done by email with little or no response and when they do reply it's always a patronising experience! They want to talk to you like your ten. If you've not joined yet and are thinking about it...Don't! Save your money and consider meetup.

Again I can't speak for other areas but because of low activity CS has now done a thing where they will "suggest an event" where there is no host and encourage members to talk amongst themselves and arrange to meet via the site. The important thing about when going to socials is you need a dedicated host who will welcome members, especially those who are new because it can be a very nervous experience.

What's also bad is they don't like bad criticism. Some of my friends have mentioned how bad the service is and CS seem to block anyone on social media like facebook or twitter who even say anything negative. This company will be around for a while and they want to maintain their clean reputation but deep down things could well be falling apart. I know my review won't really do much but if you are reading this, google meetup and see what they have to offer! It's a true international company who have been around alot longer than CS with plenty happening in your area and even if there isn't, you can always start your own group and the cost to run it is far cheaper than a yearly membership with CS!