Officine Panerai

I have been collecting Panerais since 1997 & have collected fair amount of pieces including lots of Special Editions. I must admit the boutique purchase experience has been excellent all this time and staff is very forthcoming and helpful in securing some rare pieces in the past. As the watches are getting older off course they require service & in some cases watches are either loosing time or gaining time. Recently i gave in my PAM197 rose gold 8 Days watch for complete service & care and gave a free hand to the boutique manager to do the best job possible and pre-approval from my side for any estimate to speed up the process. After a month the watch was ready & i happily went to the boutique and paid a hefty price for the service and in that too they changed the hands though there was no need. Since i gave a free hand so i had no choice but to accept the hands change etc. The watch was perfectly polished and looked as good as new. Loved it!!

But after 5 hours of wearing i realised that it had lost 15 minutes and as a benefit of doubt i re setted the time and checked again after an hour and so and found that again it lost 9 minutes..I was shocked and i own several watches with mechanical winding and automatic movements but never seen this kind of deviation. Totally unacceptable. I immediately sent a SMS to the boutique in charge and notified him about the problem however he claimed that he had wound the watch in the boutique and had tested the good time keeping for 3 days. Nevertheless he told me to send it back. Funny thing is that when i was picking up the watch the manager was praising about their new service centre & how the new service staff is trained etc etc. In my record this is my second unpleasant experience with Panerai and to me i have been seeing the prices of Panerai inflate over the years with little or no improvement in after sales services. In fact the service bill came with a piece of declaration from quality control department stating that watch was carefully checked etc..

I have no issues sending back the watch but it upsets me for the fact that it is the second time around with two different watches serviced thru same service centre. Panerai must take service seriously and actually do good quality control. 

Ovi

  login to reply