Can i recover my money for this?

duckie88

I was wondering if anyone had any advice that may help. Over a year ago i booked with a local florist for them to do my wedding flowers. I booked because the girl we met was fantastic and really seemed to understand what we wanted. I have since then found out she has left so a few months ago when we started going for meetings to arrange the flowers we had another staff member take over the order. She was pretty useless (often getting the names of flowers wrong!) she did not seem to understand what we wanted at all despite several meetings and countless pictures (she also regularly changed stories about how we could have some flowers, not others ect). Finally i had had enough of her and we found another florist (who i am happy to say is not only much better but is much cheaper too). We visited the shop to cancel the order with the original florist expecting them to say they would have to keep the original £30 non-refundable deposit but to give us the £300 part payment my grandma had made a few weeks back as a wedding present. However they are saying that they will not refund the full £300 as they have consultation costs they need to cover. They also say they have put a £40 deposit down on some flowers so they need to cover that (although so far they have offered no proof of this).
Does anyone have any advice on where we stand? I thought as we paid on a credit card we could recoup it through that but the credit card company did not sound optimistic with our chances when i talked to them earlier!
Ive been told that they have not technically broken any contract we may have had with them as our only contract was for them to deliver flowers but we have had to cancel with them as we lost faith in their ability to deliver high quality goods.

hcb42

one person leaving would not be grounds for you to cancel.

I appreciate you dont like this new girl, but have you discussed with the owner themselves?

With weddings it is normal for staff in venues and in other organisations to move on before the wedding date.

As to the ability to cancel, this will depend on the contract terms and their fairness or otherwise. (and how far you will want to go with it, is it really worth court at this time in your lives, or better resolved by a frank chat about your expectations?)