I don't know if images can be recovered after a format as I suppose it depends exactly what the format actually does.
In any case I think I'd ignore the bloke in Jessops and give recovery a try. It's deffo worth a try as the recovery software is free so all it costs is someones time on the net downloading it and then some pc time trying it.
I don't know anything about the 360 software. All I can say is that a couple of girls at work had problems and I downloaded two free packages and both were easy to use and both worked a treat, although sadly I can't remember what the software I used was called.
A few days ago I accidentally formatted the CF card in my Canon 1Ds MkII after taking about 150 pics.
These pics were quite important to me.
Fortunately my Canon has 2 cards so I immediately changed to the SD card and went on shooting.
Back home I downloaded 2 programs to see if anything could be recovered.
One was a free program "Digital Image Recovery" which allowed me to recover ALL my JPEG pics which I thought had been lost.
I also had some files in Raw which had already been downloaded to my computer but these were rendered as TIFF files so I didn't bother with those.
I also downloaded another program "Card Recovery" which cost about £36.00 but this one was able to show the RAW files too as RAW files.
So it is quite possible to recover files after formatting a CF card as long as you don't take any other pics on the card.
I haven't tried my SD card yet to see if it works on that but I will.
The one thing which did surprise me was that DIR recovered files from quite a time ago even after the card had been formatted several times.
And both pieces of software also told me that the CF card had bad sectors which could mean it was coming to the end of its life (It was over 6 years old).