What’s the most compelling reason to pay for things with your credit card? The loyalty points and discounts? Yes, those are nice, but it’s the ability to lodge a chargeback dispute when you don’t get what you paid for that’s the real perk.
It’s a consumer protection mechanism globally offered by Mastercard and Visa via the banks that issue the credit cards.
If that online purchase never arrives, a concert that you’ve bought tickets for is postponed to a date that doesn’t suit you or an airline goes out of business before your departure date — and the merchant concerned refuses to refund you — you can approach your bank, provide proof of your loss and they then liaise with the merchant’s bank.
If the merchant can’t prove they did provide you with what you paid for — at the agreed time — your payment is reversed.
I’ve done this when an airline added a mysterious extra charge to my tickets and then denied any knowledge of it. I got my money back satisfyingly fast.
Gillian Ferreira of Gqeberha booked four Mango return tickets on the George to Johannesburg route for family members to attend her son’s wedding in November 2021. But in July the airline went into business rescue and stopped operating in September, meaning she had to incur the expense of four new tickets with another airline. (Boy, air travel has been an extreme sport for South Africans in the past year or two!)
Five months later, in April 2022, Ferreira was reading one of my columns about chargeback when she had an ah-ha moment. “It gave me so much hope that I immediately followed your advice on a chargeback claim with my bank, FNB,” she said. “I thought I was going to get my R2,531 back after all.”
And she did, albeit four months later. But the story didn’t end there.
Last month, that money, plus an extra R74, was subtracted from Ferreira’s account. Why? Because the chargeback time limit is 120 days: she lodged her dispute too late.
When I raised this with FNB I asked why the bank didn’t inform her of this when she first applied for chargeback last April. That would have been far better than giving her the money in August then taking it back in January, of all months.
The bank’s initial response boiled down to: we told her we had raised the chargeback with the merchant concerned and that the credited amount was a temporary credit.
“This is an internal bank process to help customers while we await the outcome of the investigation ... and it may not apply to all dispute cases.
“Should the chargeback return as successful, the temporary credit will remain on the customer’s account permanently.
“Where the chargeback is declined, the customer will be re-debited for the amount.”
The credit card associations set the 120-day limit, FNB said, not the banks.
And why did they rub salt in the wound by taking back R74 more than they gave her last August?
That’s because Ferreira booked those tickets via a foreign-based travel agent and the R74 was due to an exchange-rate fluctuation.
Ferreira is adamant she wasn’t told upfront by FNB staffers that she’d missed the chargeback dispute window of 120 days.
“If they had, I would not have bothered to go through the rigmarole of the chargeback request.
“In fact, before reading your article I did not even know there was such a thing as a chargeback.”
The woman who called me from the bank was lovely; she apologised for my experience and said the money would be refunded to me — again.
— Gillian Ferreira
But I’m happy to report that FNB has again debited Ferreira’s account with that ticket spend amount, “hopefully once and for all”, she says.
At first, I didn’t realise that’s what had happened.
The statement, in response to my repeated questions around why Ferreira wasn’t told that it was too late for her to apply for chargeback, read: “The bank communicated this process to our customer when we initiated the chargeback, and have since apologised and updated on it coming back unsuccessful from the acquirer.”
Not until Ferreira thanked me did I realise that was the bank’s convoluted way of saying Ferreira had got her money back after all.
“The woman who called me from the bank was lovely; she apologised for my experience and said the money would be refunded to me — again,” she said.
As for why she chose to book those air tickets via a foreign-based travel agency, rather than directly with the airline, or using a local agency, Ferreira said she did so unwittingly, having used a ticket search app. “I was not aware the company we booked with was not a South African company,” she said.
She’s certainly not alone in making that mistake. Definitely something to watch for when hunting for bargain flights. And spread the word: if you don’t get what you paid for with your credit card, don’t wait more than four months, from the date of non-delivery, to get that chargeback dispute in.
• GET IN TOUCH: You can contact Wendy Knowler for advice with your consumer issues via e-mail: consumer@knowler.co.za or on Twitter: @wendyknowler.
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