I've been an idiot... intensive driving lessons

HopeAndDriftWood

Just by way of an update...

I did a charge-back through my bank. On the day they were notified of it, they cancelled the driving test that I had booked, despite me asking them via email not to do so. 

They refuted my first charge-back and said that they felt I just didn't want to learn to drive with them, and that they had booked a test and found an instructor. They said the second instructor was available to teach me and they'd ask him to contact me in reasonable hours to book lessons in. 

The bank gave me the option to escalate to Visa who would mediate, so I wrote out a fuller response which highlighted exactly what I paid for, what I'd got, and what their terms are. Given everything, I paid £800 and received 1 60-minute driving lesson, which I had to pay for privately, and a driving test that they cancelled. 

They refuted this, but the next morning, the bank emailed to say I'd won my case and I'd been refunded.

I haven't heard anything else from them. I wouldn't be overly surprised if they took me to Small Claims, but so far, no paperwork has arrived.

Thanks for all the advice! 

eskbanker

HopeAndDriftWood said:

They refuted this, but the next morning, the bank emailed to say I'd won my case and I'd been refunded.

I haven't heard anything else from them. I wouldn't be overly surprised if they took me to Small Claims, but so far, no paperwork has arrived.

Sounds prudent to expect recovery action - with chargeback you don't really 'win a case' as such, you just persuade the two banks to release money to you, but this does leave an aggrieved merchant without the funds they believe they're entitled to, so pursuing that debt isn't uncommon.

HopeAndDriftWood

eskbanker said:

HopeAndDriftWood said:

They refuted this, but the next morning, the bank emailed to say I'd won my case and I'd been refunded.

I haven't heard anything else from them. I wouldn't be overly surprised if they took me to Small Claims, but so far, no paperwork has arrived.

Sounds prudent to expect recovery action - with chargeback you don't really 'win a case' as such, you just persuade the two banks to release money to you, but this does leave an aggrieved merchant without the funds they believe they're entitled to, so pursuing that debt isn't uncommon.

Yeah, I thought so! 

From the timescales involved, I suspect they agreed to the chargeback. The bank had told me they'd give the other side 30 working days to respond a final time, and then Visa would mediate but that could take up to 45 working days, and I got the email the next day - so it's possible they decided it wasn't worth the effort to continue to defend. But I'll keep an eye out for court paperwork! 

Kim_13

I suspect that the reason they book a test at some random centre is so that they can use that as the completion date. But as they themselves said they would look for cancellations closer, then if there is any claim, you would argue that they clearly hadn’t been doing their job since they would have booked the September date if they had been. It makes me wonder if in fact they didn’t have a suitable instructor at that point in time, otherwise they would have booked the slot that you were later able to secure. So they presumably did nothing, as if they moved the date they’d have been increasing the chance that they had to refund your money. 

At worst I’d hope you’d only have to pay them a proportion, if this early bird instructor actually could have accommodated the now cancelled test date. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to swap an instructor you’re comfortable with for someone who thinks that is an appropriate thing to do - if he really needed to do anything at such an hour, he could have sent a text saying he’d provisionally booked you in for X and were you available - a text is far less likely to wake someone at a time that it would be reasonable to expect them to still be in bed. But then I also had experience with an unprofessional instructor, and know from experience that you’ll drive better with someone you’re comfortable with. Whether the court would determine that you use their instructor or are liable to pay for what they did do I don’t know. The first one fails the criteria as set out by another poster, so that is in your favour. 

Hopefully them cancelling your test was the end of it - it can’t have been done out of anything other than revenge, and that doesn’t look good on them. They should have left your test slot alone - especially as it wasn’t booked by them - and sent an invoice for the amount they thought was merited. If they’d done that and said your test might be cancelled if the matter wasn’t resolved, that would have been more reasonable than what they actually did.