Lighthouse USA Web Site

There are bargains out there in used hingeless pages if you are patient. In the past few weeks I have found a German dealer on ebay who has sold me complete page sets. DDR complete for $199, Berlin for $60 and Bundepost to 2000 for $166. In each case the older pages are the original style with the heavy Gothic title and hand drawn illustrations, but who cares?

Update- after an initial contact, I cannot get anywhere with MIT63, I think that contact is a dead end- they apparently only want to deal in what they have in their ebay store. I have totally given up on Lighthouse USA, their customer service is simply awful. No reply to several inquiries/phone messages.

If I didn't like their products so much, I'd have given up and moved onto some other supplier long ago.

I do understand your frustration with the US customer service - I sent in an order via the website and didn't hear anything for 2 weeks so I called and actually spoke to someone in the office. The product was on back-order but I got the feeling I was bothering them. Not a very customer centric!

I am seriously considering complaining to their home office in Germany. Of course their US office is probably being run on a budget set by the home office so I don't know how much that would accomplish.
I do wonder what criteria a major supplier like Lighthouse uses in deciding who gets to carry their flag in a given area. This situation is not unique- 'Safe' albums has as their US distributor a dealer who has been reprimanded twice by the APS for shoddy business practices.

And sometimes you great service ...

Ordered five sets of " smaller country" leaves from Schaubek in Germany on Thursday morning. By Thursday lunchtime, I'd received an e-mail confirming despatch, and the leaves arrived in London on Monday lunchtime, extremely well packed. Very impressed.

Terrific service, agreed. At one time I had a Schaubek album and liked it, here in the US their distributor, Amos Publications, only caries the hingeless pages. I really do not care for split back mounts, it's just my preference. The album I used to have did not come with mounts.

BTW, I sent Lighthouse USA an inquiry listing six page sets asking if they had them in stock- that was three weeks ago- no reply ever received.

Might it be worth your ordering direct from Lighthouse in Germany? The postage on my order of goods costing €122 was €10. The postage cost to the US would obviously be higher, but factor in the excellent € exchange rates currently available and it may be worth a go. And you can presumably get a much wider range straight off the shelf.

GeoffHa- terrific suggestion. I checked out the German Lighthouse site and their prices for retail are much lower than here in the US and they also seem to have a lot left of the 'regular'- non-hingeless pages. I am considering purchase of the whole range of pages for prewar Germany also of the US- I could save a bundle going that route. Sent them an email to inquire stock status on some of these. I will report back if this works out.

I tried to order direct from Germany and answer is no. Have to go through dealer in the country you reside.

Lighthouse is not what they used to be. They are dumping a great deal of inventory, discontinuing a lot of countries, no longer selling single pages unless broken lots in stock and the are $7.50 per page for the hingeless.

Eventually you will only be able to buy sets of pages.

Many if not all of the newer pages are also split back as are most supplements

I have given up on them and prefer Davo, Schaubek, or Palo. They all make hingeless as well as standard pages.

In most cases they are cheaper than Lighthouse and all will sell to you direct with great service.

If lighthouse keeps going the way they are, they will not be in business long, especially in North America

Oh, Lindner are also excellent and give great service as well.

I wonder if you'd have better luck buying from a seller on ebay Germany rather than Lighthouse direct. If you use Google Chrome as your browser, it will automatically translate the page for you.

I was also going to suggest ebay Germany. Just be careful about payment methods - not all sellers accept Paypal - and shipping cost of course.

Here's the listings for Leuchtturm (original German name of Lighthouse) albums/pages:

http://www.ebay.de/sch/i.html?_odkw...sacat=162057

So they won't ship to other countries that have an agent? Maybe then they need to make sure their agents answer calls and emails, maintain a site properly and in general act like they want your business.
I am thinking maybe they don't.

I am looking into some offerings on ebay, prices are much better than from the USA site and have an inquiry into one now about shipping prices.

Update- I just looked st the Palo album website, they are now US agent for Lindner and.. it appears they have a built in 20% discount from list price on all those products. That could sway me to switching to them. I have used Lindner before and the biggest issue was the thickness of the pages results in only a 50 page capacity er binder- and they are not cheap. But- Lighthouse seems to be too much work to deal with and I wonder if they even care. Something to think about..

Well I just got an email from someone at Lighthouse in Germany. They apologize for the problems I am having and are asking I send them a list of page sets I need and thy will be happy to sell them to me!
Reading between the lines- I think they are getting a lot of blow back from customers on some of their policies and someone is trying to repair damage. After the post dutchman made I was expecting to be told I had to go through the USA office. Getting them a list in today, we'll see...not celebrating yet.

Good luck! Be sure to pick up the champagne cap and bottle-top albums while you're there!