I was concerned to read a report (March 29) about a caller saying he was "put on hold" while waiting to speak to an officer on Brighton and Hove City Council's visitor information hotline.

Under the terms of our premium-rate licence, the system does not allow us to keep people on hold or in a queue.

If all our officers are busy, the caller is given the option of choosing from the recorded information menu or calling back later.

Up to this point, the call will have taken between 35 and 60 seconds and cost the caller between 29p and 50p.

If the caller does not make a choice, he or she is then given details of the council's web site and brochure line.

Then the call is automatically ended after a few seconds. To get to this point will have cost a total of 66p.

The council has designed the system to be as customer-friendly as possible and to take as little time as possible.

In an ideal world, the council would be operating a freephone for visitor information but the cost of this would be enormous.

The current system, with average calls costing slightly more than 80p, allows the council to handle almost 100,000 calls a year.

Before the council introduced the premium rate line, the vast majority of callers failed to get through. Now the vast majority get a response.

-Amanda Shepherd, Head of Tourism and Conferences, Brighton and Hove City Council