Unfiltered Story #255913

(Sadly, I’m the idiot customer here. Feel free to provide copious amounts of abuse…)

I recently gave my daughter’s family a vacation across the country, paying for her plane fares, rental car and motels. For simplicity she made the reservations using my personal credit card on one of the major travel sites.

Everything went fine for the air travel but after she’d reserved and prepaid the rental car the site took my name off the card and put me down as the principal driver. After struggling unsuccessfully for fifteen minutes to change the driver’s name she called the travel site and they agreed to take the charge for the rental car off my card, sending an email promising the refund in 10-15 business days.

Five days later she got a notice saying that one of her flights had been changed from a 10:45 AM departure to 7:20 AM. With two young children, this was a non-starter for her, so she called the rental site again. No problem, they were able to authorize a refund with another email giving us a 15-day window for the reversed charges to show up.

My first statement came shortly thereafter with no refunds on it, which I didn’t expect, and the second one arrived with the refunds for the plane tickets on it, but nothing for the car. I checked daily for about a week with no success; the car charge had not been refunded.

I called the travel site and their records showed the money had been refunded quite a while ago. I told them my records didn’t show it and they referred me to my bank that issued the card. They had no record of receiving the refund and told me to call the travel site back. By now I’d spent over 40 minutes on the two calls and didn’t look forward to the hassle but I made the call.

Eventually I used my landline and cell phone to talk to the two parties simultaneously, muting one to talk to the other, and then vice versa. I confess to getting a bit nasty until, at the 47 minute mark, I finally looked more closely at the two card statements. There was no refund showing, true, but THERE WAS ALSO NO ORIGINAL CHARGE!! I’d wasted multiple man-hours among the various representatives from the two organizations. At that point I could have simply said bleep it, called them both crooks and hung up, but I took the high road. I apologized (to the point of groveling) for wasting their time. They were nice enough to accept the sentiment but I’m glad I couldn’t read their minds at that point.

In my (weak) defense, the original credit from the site was somewhat ambiguous, and when I check card statements I’m looking for things that are there but shouldn’t be, not things that should be there but aren’t. I throw myself on the mercy of the court…..