Click Happy
I have spent the last 3 hours since I woke up this morning either online or on the phone paying for stuff. I am trying to tie up all loose ends before leave on vacation Saturday. I was making online bill payments and then went to make my purchases of my train tickets to get to and from Toronto for my little getaway from vacation. I purchased my ticket to Toronto through Amtrak just fine and was getting excited. Something about having that ticket bought makes it that much more real and fun. I clicked over to ViaRail to buy my ticket back from Toronto - since I am heading from Toronto to another Canadian city, I can’t return on Amtrak. I went through all the steps on ViaRail, choosing my departure time, entering my information about who I am and then entering my payment information. I clicked PAY and was taken to an error page. So I went back and tried again. Error again. I am a bit stubborn so I did this 3 more times over the course of an hour and kept getting the error.
I had to make a couple more bill payments so I went and did those online and then checked my bank account. I got to the itemized statement list and was met with 5 charges of $56 to my debit card to ViaRail. But I still have no reservation!!!
I called them and very politely explained what happened. Maybe most people would’ve seen that first error and just called right away to do the reservation that way, but not me. Click. Click. Click. I will make this work. $280 later for a 3 hour train ride. Alas, they were very friendly and explained that they’re sorry this problem has been happening for people all morning. The database is being worked on and when it’s fixed, I’ll see a refund for those 5 charges and can make my real payment for a real life confirmed reservation.
This kind of stuff makes me nervous. I always expect my charges to be the ones that don’t get refunded and I’ll be the idiot out $280 for being click happy.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:17 am
I was buying airline tickets a couple of weeks ago and had a similar issue. I kept getting timed out or error messages so I would try again. CLICK! Now you’ve got me thinking I need to look at my bank statement. I might have a few extra round trip tickets! Eek. It took me all day to get those reservations, it was so frustrating! Good thing you noticed the charges and can get your refund easily! I shudder to think of all the charges we could accumulate in our lifetime on our charge/debit cards simply by error. It is worth going over it with a fine toothed comb!
Have fun!
Melissa
June 9th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
That definitely sounds like me: if I get an error message my immediate response is to continue clicking away until I get the result I want. I agree with Melissa that it’s important to check your bank statement carefully each month. Another problem I have is when you purchase an informational product over the internet and then it turns out that in the fine print it said that upon purchase you’re automatically subscribed to their newsletter and you’re visa card will be deducted by X amount each month. I’ve had a lot of arguments with merchants over that little trick.
June 9th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
uGGGGGGGGG I hate it when stuff like this happens.
DirectTv overcharged us $300 on our last bill and we called and got it straightened out and they STILL took that amount out of our account, so back on the phone we went. They promised to credit our account by tomorrow. Yeah, we’ll see.
Nothing is THAT simple with Direct TV.
Hope you have a ride once you get there. EEK!
June 9th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Look forward to hearing about the train travel!! We just bought our tickets for Christmas; New Mexico - Boston and back, already excited about it!
June 12th, 2008 at 6:04 am
[...] Remember the incident with ViaRail when I was buying my train tickets? You should remember. It really wasn’t that long ago. Well, I did get my refund. Hooray! It took 24 hours for the refund to go through. I was being gunshy about purchasing a ticket until I had my refund, so I waited to buy my ticket for that 24 hours. When I went to buy my ticket the next day - the fare had gone up by $5! Don’t roll your eyes at me! $5 is $5. I was MAD! They held my money hostage and then jacked the rate up to boot. Not happy. [...]