Customer Ratings & Reviews

The good news is as consumers we have an outlet now to write reviews on products and services we receive. As a consumer today I am writing a review about the Gaggia Titanium Espresso Silver SKU: 9754165 that I purchased from Best Buy on January 2, 2014 for roughly $900. This espresso maker worked great for about a year and in February 2015 the steam kit broke. I called Gaggia (Importika) and they instructed me to buy a new steam kit ($50) and have a local appliance repair specialist install it (around $100). I did this. Importika only offers technical service at their Rochester location; you pay for shipping to and from and pay them for labor at $66 an hour. Given my local guy said he could do it I sided with having him repair it. He did a great job and it worked till yesterday (10/20/15). The real kicker here is that the steam kit issue was a known issue and the employee mentioned this to me when I called. I still had to pay the $50 bucks to buy the steam kit and pay for the technical service at my local repair shop. Seems like a bad deal for me, because it is. Why can Nordstrom’s have such a good return policy but Importika can’t? Backing up a little bit, the grinder also recently stopped working and wont grind the beans down to a fine enough texture to create espresso. Again I had the local repair guy take a look and he did his best with it, but it still does not work properly. The machine still worked though as you have the ability to use pre-ground espresso coffee as an option. Long story short I called today and Importika had this to say. Since this unit is past the warranty we can offer you the ability to send it to us at your expense and pay us $66 an hour to fix it. It is important to note that Importika is not obligated to fix this as its past the 1 year warranty and they are not obligated to replace it. Frankly I don’t blame them, as doing this for many people would probably get expensive. Where Importika and I differ is that if I pay $900 for an espresso machine I would think it should last longer than 2 years. They are within their rights to not take care of the issue and I am within my rights to warn other consumers of the issue. As any good finance person would say don’t throw good money after bad, so I am cutting ties with this brand and this espresso machine. In conclusion, after 13 months of owning this machine I faced my first repair and Importika did not offer much help even after admitting it was a known issue. After 16 months the grinder stopped working and finally after 22 months the steam kit broke again. My warning to consumers is this might be a great product (assuming you don’t own mine), but if you happen to get a dud than you could be faced with this complicated and expensive repair process. My message to companies is if you are going to charge $900 for a fully automatic machine it should work longer than 2 years and if it does not you should fix it. If its too expensive to offer repair services than you should consider making a better product that wont break after 2 years.