I've had a similar experience
With Raymarine and also chose to drive my unit to them. My Sea Talk buss fried possibly due to lightning, which I told them, and to be honest, and they still replaced it and fixed it while I waited. While the guy was in there he replaced my C-80's screen too, he said it was delaminating but I had not noticed a problem and consider my self very, very fussy, he also updated my firm ware and did all this in about 30 minutes! I'm in the process of buying a new boat and was considering switching to Garmin but after looking at their current line up I'm sticking with Raymarine again! I asked & the service guy told me they are under orders to provide the best service in the industry period! When I mentioned the internet grumbling about Raymarine service he said that this directive is a direct result of the beatings they had been taking on the net. If they don't perform the hammer falls! I guess all the bulletin board bashing of Raymarine actually had an effect! Keep up the good work out there fellow forum members and continue holding manufacturers feet to the fire you can make a difference! OK I'll admit it! I had a role in that, I think, and I hope. You see I bought a boat equipped with Raymarine and was scared to death after reading all the horror stories of poor repair service. For a long period of time, at least a year, I quietly copied and pasted links from many, many, many forums, about poor Raymarine customer service into emails, and forwarded them directly to them on a "thought you guys should know what people are saying about you out there" type of basis. I received a few thank you notes but mostly I was trying to improve their customer service so I did not care about anything other than hearing good results, on the net, and that has finally started to happen! Yes what I did was a little selfish and self serving but I don't think it was wrong as many have now possibly benefited from the "forum bashings" Raymarine was taking. I did have a very bad experience with Raymarine before I started letting them know what the general sentiment was and this was part of the reason I sent them the links to the forum bashings. If I was the president of Raymarine I would hope someone would alert me to what is being said especially when it was negative & the DIRECT result of my company's own doings..
