Help my debit card has been charged twice and company will not refund me

KJenx

Hi

I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice as I am banging my head against a brick wall at the moment when dealing with this company.

Right heres what happened i book a flight through Low Cost Holidays website the flights being with Ryanair, got to payment page and was told the payment was for £532 plus £7.71 charge for paying on my debit card. Fine then the internet site crashes just after i had clicked to make the payment. Spoke to Low Cost holidays was told its had gone through and they confirmed my booking reference.
Two days later went to withdraw some cash from my bank and was declined insufficient funds (2nd payment of £567.92 had been paid to Ryanair). Spoke to bank who advised there were 2 large payments coming out of my account but they couldn't do anything until they had actually appeared on my statement. This happened on Saturday spoke to our bank again and now they say they cannot do anything as this wasnt fraud on the account and we should go back the holiday company. Ryanair will not speak to us as they say the booking is with Low Cost holidays. Low cost holidays we cannot get to speak to a manager as we are diverted through to a call centre in India with robots repeating themselves over and over and disconnecting our call soon as we ask for a manager. Monday morning been back to bank and they have asked us to get written confirmation from Low Cost Holidays that they made the mistake and then they will claim the money back from them for the wrong transaction. Cannot get this as no response from callcentre and no one replies to the 3 emails we have sent them. Since read really bad reviews for this company and no one it appears ever gets there money back. If anyone could help in any way or has some suggestions i would be most grateful.

Thanks.

stclair

Once it has been confirm the two transactions have actually debited your account and are visable on your statement you can
contact your bank ask them to start the visa charge back process.

You need to make sure first the payment is not just a pre authorisation hold and will drop within a few days depending on your banks processes.

MPH80

Has the money actually left the account - or is it just down on the 'available' balance?

If it's on the latter - there's a good chance you've got two 'pre auths' sitting waiting on the account. A pre-auth is simply a request to reserve money, it drops off if it isn't claimed within a period of time (which is normally defined by the bank - typically 7-14 days).

The retailer has to send a settlement file to the bank to actually take the money reserved on the pre-auth - so just because there are two pre-auths - that doesn't mean there'll be two settlement requests.

This means you probably just need to wait for the money to return to the account - not nice - but I can tell you that although the ability to reverse a pre-auth *does* exist - barely any of the banks/payment services actually respect it. So even if the website attempted to cancel the pre-auth - you'd probably have to wait for it to drop off anyway.

If it's the former (full amount from the actual balance) - then yes - you'll need to get the Low Cost website to refund the amount.

M.

Sublime_2

Amazon sometimes does a dummy transaction on my visa. I bought some boots for £80, but queried when £160 looked like it had been taken. Upon contacting my bank, I was told it was a pre-authorisation hold, which would disappear within the next 10 days, which it did. Bit of a pain though.