Supposing someone buys tickets, via an American Express card, for an event; the vendor of course has a ‘no-refunds no exceptions’ policy. Something happens to make the purchaser’s participation in the event impracticable, and the purchaser attempts to cancel, with about 10 days notice, and request a refund but the vendor refuses, citing ‘policy’.
Is there anyway for the purchaser to get out of paying for the tickets?
Short of fileing a lawsuit i would say no because you are screwed if syou don’t get a refund and you are screwed if you lose your case either way it’s lose lose.
Call Amex and ask if they can do anything about it.
Some premium cards have special perks such as reimbursement for certain bad luck things (e.g. your new laptop gets stolen).
I’m not saying that Amex does or doesn’t, but I would sure be asking them about it if I were in such a situation with the tickets.
Why don’t you just sell the tickets?
Probably not. One could dispute the charge, but the vendor will respond that goods have already been delivered and point to the no-refund policy, which the buyer was likely required to acknowledge before completing the purchase.
The only way a lawsuit would make sense is if you wanted to challenge the legality of a no-refund policy. I suspect that’s already been tried, and I’d be shocked if any court would side with the buyer in such a case.
No refund is gonna be forthcoming. Person with unwanted tickets should re-sell them, if that is allowed in their jurisdiction.
The buyer bought the tickets with all terms and conditions stated. The seller is free to set whatever return/refund policy they want, including “no refunds.” There is no basis to dispute the credit card charge. My sympathies to the buyer but that’s how it works. This is not a unique policy–see also airline tickets, retail liquidation sales, etc.
You can only dispute a credit card charge with “the charge was not authorized by me” or “the seller failed to deliver the goods promised”. (I.e. credit card fraud, or for example, you order a gold brick and a lead brick is delivered; or an airline goes bankrupt and you don’t get your vacation flight; but if you fail to show up for your flight, that’s not the airline’s fault).
You bought the tickets, the tickets were delivered, or in the case of “pick up at the gate” they were available and the service was available if you cared to show up and fulfill your end of the deal. You either agreed to the terms or failed to take notice of them and agreed by default. The merchant delivers on their end of the contract, there is no misrepresentation, you have no grounds to dispute the charges.
the other thing I recall - for in person purchase if the card is present, and the signatures “match”, then the merchant is not dinged either. For over the phone purchases, a different set of rules apply.
You’re SOL. Merchants have have whatever inflexible return/cancellation policies they want as long as they’re up front about it. I once have the pleasure of dealing with a client who had to cancel a vacation at the last minute because a death. Booked hotel room with credit card, hotel stuck to their stated policy and refused to give her a refund (IIRC they offered a credit toward a future stay), and she tried to involve her bank in the matter and was quite irate that there was nothing we could do.
Not in this case. Card-Not-Present transactions are treated differently for Fraud claims (the cardholder isn’t liable for the 1st $50 in that case), but not for billing disputes. Those are governed by the same rules whether the transaction was made in person, online, by phone, or by mail.
AMEX has a ticket protection plan that reimburses you under certain circumstances. It’s one of the benefits they offer to cardholders.
Really? Someone rips off your CC number (like any waiter or store clerk could do) and you are on the hook? Even if the merchandise is not delivered to you?
That would be a fraud claim, not a billing dispute.
If you lose your card or it’s stolen, you have no liability for any charges once you report it. Even if you fail to report it, your liability is limited by law to $50.
If your card number is used fraudulently but you still have the card, then you have no liability. The bearer of the liability in that case is hashed out between the association and the merchant. For a card-present transaction the merchant is required only to compare the signature on the credit slip against the back of the card and verify a match. (I almost never see a retail merchant do this.) They are not required to check another form of ID if the card is signed; they are even prohibited from doing so by most merchant agreements but many do anyway out of a misguided sense of security. For a card-not-present transaction, things were skewed against the merchant until the start of the security codes on the back of the card, which I think I started to see around 2001-2002. At that time if a customer provided a matching security code in a card-not-present transaction, it was considered equivalent to a matching signature.
If you authorize a transaction but then later dispute it against the merchant, that’s a different situation than the above.
(I managed billing & payments systems for a large online merchant for a few years.)
Thanks.
I had read that the rules were particularly skewed in that card-not-present merchants above a certain level of contested transactions found themselves paying a hefty penalty to the credit card company.
I suppose, though, the security code solves some fraud issues but not all; at a store, or especially a restaurant, they have the opportunity to record the security code too.
Regardless, yes, the OP’s scenario does not apply. The contested charges are for fraud or failure to deliver, not for cancellations or buyer’s remorse.
Too true. I imagine most hotels, airlines, etc. offer either cancellation insurance, or a much higher rate with more flexible cancellation options. If they offer a service for a significant fee, why would they give the same option for free to someone who chose not to pay for it?
My company was one of the first ones to do real-time authorizations of credit card transactions on a large scale. We got a reputation among the fraudsters for this and so many fraudsters came to our site to see if their stolen credit card numbers would work. Then the cardholders would see the charge and dispute it. We had no way to prove that the cardholder actually authorized the charge, no signature, nothing. So we cancelled the sale (domain names, so we could just cancel the registration) and ate the chargeback. But you are correct, the associations get very testy about this and we were threatened with very hefty fines (I think Visa was the first one to get after us) if we didn’t get our chargeback rates down. So we pursued a number of fraud detection measures including a third-party transaction rating service. The introduction of the security code was very helpful since these guys were mostly using databases of card numbers but didn’t have the security codes. Merchants are prohibited from storing security codes.
True enough. There is no way to make this foolproof. But the associations and banks have a profit equation that takes into account that they are just going to end up eating a certain amount of fraud. They generally think it’s worth the tradeoff to make the card easier to use.
They do. Also some credit cards do come with trip cancellation insurance as well, but that isn’t much help if somebody signs up for one that doesn’t sign up for one of those cards & want’s it after the fact.