I regret joining Regus. I'm a small business owner who has been with them since 2014 in various small private offices at their Santa Monica location, but this report also applies to the company as a whole -- all locations are part of the same disfunction.
I didn't realize until this year how much they've been siphoning off money in ways I didn't see, understand or approve.
My experience:
1. Each year, we upgraded offices. They did not account for the original retainer fee each time, but took an additional retainer for the new office - each time. They now owe us 3X retainers now, to the tune of $5477.
2. They refuse to acknowledge 2 recent payments we made via credit card. Our credit card company insists they were paid, and all is equal. And I had to pay the balance of that credit card, so these are very real payments on my end. However, Regus says because they can't find the payments in their records, that it never happened and that they will take funds out of our retainer to cover these "missing" payments.
3. What's more, we also recently discovered that they were charging us for IT based on an old paradigm. For nearly 2 years they've been offering IT as low as $89 for all devices (or $99 if including a VOIP phone). However, we have continued to be charged the old rate for our device package - $225 - for this every month since. We had to do some deep investigation with our peers in the space to discover this inequity.
4. We also have been battling with them for charging us for extra parking spaces, over and over again, in the past 7 months. It turns out that HQ took the power away from their center staff to remove these charges, so we couldn't have them removed regardless of the obvious error. As a result, we continue to see these erroneous charges on our statements and the auto-pay forces us to pay for them. We continued to point these out but no action has been taken to remove the recurring errors.
5. As a bandaid, they put "credits" on our bill for some of those errors, and other minor charge errors.
6. There are two big issues with those credits -
- First they don't add up properly to the correct amount. They have repeatedly under-credited us and failed to acknowledge their math errors, or have ignored additional overcharges.
- Second, these "credits" never actually reduce our real payments. When the auto-pay deducts from our credit card, it removes the entire billed amount regardless of any credits applied, leaving a negative balance on our account - and not in our pockets.
7. When we tried to call the phone number listed on our credit card statement, that number is no longer in service.
8. When we ask the center managers to help us, they are helpless against the Regus machine. We get so angry and they are taking all the heat despite their inability to act, due to controls set by HQ.
9. Despite being paid up with Regus, and despite being owed thousands of dollars from Regus, we are now getting scary emails from "accounting" that our membership is being revoked for non-payment, that the amount supposedly still due will be seized from our bloated retainer. There is no phone number for us to refute this. They do not reply to the emails. What's more, included in that scary email is a phantom charge for another $3000+ that can't be explained. It's pure insanity.
Only the center managers reply. They try to help. But they are simply disempowered cogs in this corporate machine. Also, the accounting was such a mess on the corporate end that they couldn't even make sense of everything until I printed out every single statement, email and payment since 2014, and walked them through it one transaction at a time.
To date, they owe my small company several thousands of dollars. For a big corporation like Regus, this is a rounding error. For my small company, it is a noticeable chunk of my annual budget being taken away from us like a bully takes a poor kid's lunch money on the school play ground.
If you have a similar experience, to any of this, or can help me fight this, please let me know. I hear there are class action suits pending, and another one being formed. There must be something that can be done to keep them from siphoning off thousands of dollars from small business owners.
