Santander - big thanks

Defender110

Ordered a new touring caravan from a relatively new company in 2013 (Eterniti Caravans), paying a deposit in total of £25k, intending to take delivery in April 2014. All was paid on a Santander debit, not credit card. The brief version of events was that we tried to ring the company to finalise delivery arrangements in late March 2014. No reply, so an email was sent. Reply received the same day from (shock!) the administrators saying that the company had gone into administration with no prospect of delivering ordered goods or returning monies paid. Had we paid any of the £25k on a credit card we would have had CCA protection, but no such protection on debit card payments. However ... There is a scheme run by the banks called 'chargeback' which is discretional rather than statutory (never previously heard of it). We rang Santander and told them what the problem was, and they sent application forms for chargeback, which we filled in and returned with supporting docs, but without much hope. Not a word from Santander by way of acknowledgement, but on checking the balances a week or so later the entire £25k had been placed in our account by Santander. My moral from the saga is that I will always in future pay at least some of the cost of a major item on a credit card to get the CCA protection. Also Santander will have to do something pretty dire to shake this customer off after that!

grumbler

MSE article:

• Visa, Mastercard & Amex Chargeback