Over Charged by the National Trust

Suz3000

I've been double charged from March '23 to July '23 by the National Trust (two lots of £6.40 per month). In February '23 I asked them to change my name and address but instead they set up a new membership and didn't close the old down the old membership. I don't have any email record of this as it was done over the phone. They said they cannot refund the £32 back as the I had 2 active memberships at the same time. Am I entitled to the refund as it wasn't my error and what can I do if they continue to refuse a refund?

pramsay13

Ask to make an official complaint. 
If no luck speak to your bank and tell them you've been charged twice for the same thing. 
Is it a direct debit?

ForumUser7

Suz3000 said:

I've been double charged from March '23 to July '23 by the National Trust (two lots of £6.40 per month). In February '23 I asked them to change my name and address but instead they set up a new membership and didn't close the old down the old membership. I don't have any email record of this as it was done over the phone. They said they cannot refund the £32 back as the I had 2 active memberships at the same time. Am I entitled to the refund as it wasn't my error and what can I do if they continue to refuse a refund?

pramsay13 said:

Ask to make an official complaint. 
If no luck speak to your bank and tell them you've been charged twice for the same thing. 
Is it a direct debit?

Scroll to

Membership, visits, fundraising and other enquiries

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/services/help-centre/complaints-procedure

km1500

if it is a direct debit and a mistaken amount being debited and under the debit guarantee you have the absolute right to call your bank and ask them to immediately refund the payments which they will do

RefluentBeans

If they’ve set up a new account surely they’d need your payment information again? If you gave it to them/set up a new DD, you can try claiming back through that/ask for those months free for your existing account. 

If they didn’t - then I would raise a serious complaint, as it sounds like they’ve made a new account and copied over the same payment information. I would think that is illegal, and would be surprised they have access to do that on their system. 

I’d call back/email again and say you were unaware a new account was being set up and this was clearly not what you intended. If you want to keep your membership, ask for those months as credit to skip paying for a few months and if not try and use the long time customer speech to try snd get them to do out of ‘goodwill’. If that doesn’t work, formal complaint and raise the issue of how they procured your payment information. 

TELLIT01

Presumably, if you were paying to 2 memberships you were receiving 2 sets of membership cards.  Did you never query why that was happening and probably more important in respect of getting your money back, did you ever use any of the second set of cards?

HillStreetBlues

TELLIT01 said:

Presumably, if you were paying to 2 memberships you were receiving 2 sets of membership cards.  Did you never query why that was happening and probably more important in respect of getting your money back, did you ever use any of the second set of cards?

Personally if I had done what the OP did and received a new card at new address I would have put it down to that's how their system works.