Rolex repair service is appalling in my experien...

Rolex repair service is appalling in my experience.

To be fair, it wasn t their St James s showroom that I dealt with. Another Rolex dealer sent my watch into their U.K. repair shop after some water got into the mechanism when I carelessly failed to tighten the crown sufficiently before going for a swim.



Unfortunately, the sorry saga does not end there! On receiving the returned watch I discovered that they had damaged it significantly during their inspection: The luminous paint on the hour hand had partially fallen out, various date numbers were marked and several of the minute markers on the watch face had disappeared! I complained to the jeweller who had sent the watch off to Rolex, but they failed to get anywhere and wouldn t provide me with a direct contact to approach (there is no Rolex service contact detail available online either, so far as I can see).

Frustrated, bored and busy (me - not you - though if you ve read this far I commend you!) I stuffed the broken watch into a drawer and left it for dead (dumb, I admit!) until now (4 years later!) when I came across a local independent watch repairer - a real craftsman - who has managed to completely revitalise it, including repainting the luminescence on the hour hand. Unfortunately he couldn t do anything about the missing minute markers, but other than that, the watch is now fully back to life and keeping far better time than ever (let s face it, Rolex really aren t very accurate time pieces!). He also charged me a small fraction of the price that Rolex had quoted. A highly skilled craftsman vs a profit-driven service centre.

Perhaps I shouldn t be so naive, but it would be nice to think that when you pay the Rolex premium to buy the watch in the first place, all of their marketing blurb about buying a time-piece created by master craftsmen would flow through into the quality of their after-sales service.

One last note (I promise!). Rolex apparently refuse to sell replacement parts to independent watch repairers. It seems they d sooner coerce people to use their service than encourage us to do so based on the quality of their workmanship. I m also not sure about the legitimacy of such a monopolistic practice, but what can you do?

The End !!!!!