In early February Miss A bought a pair of concert tickets over the internet, making an electronic payment. The concert - featuring her favourite singer - was scheduled for the first week of August and there was a message on the concert website saying that tickets would not be sent out until four weeks before the event.
However, Miss A failed to notice this. So when the tickets had still not arrived by the beginning of March, she assumed that they had gone astray. She therefore sent a formal claim to the electronic payment company.
The company explained that the tickets had not yet been sent out - but that she would get them in the first week of July, So Miss A agreed to withdraw her claim. However, by the beginning of August the tickets had still not arrived. Miss A contacted the electronic payment company again - saying she needed to re-open the claim for the missing tickets. However, she was told she could not do that. Citing the terms of its user agreement, the company's representative told her that it was not possible to re-open a claim that had previously been resolved. Unable to get any further, Miss A referred the matter to us.
complaint upheld
The electronic payment company's user agreement did indeed state that once a claim has been raised and closed it cannot be re-opened. And the company insisted on sticking to this policy in all circumstances.
In our view, Miss A was fairly relying on the electronic payment company's advertised "buyer protection policy" to ensure that her money would be refunded if the tickets failed to arrive. The policy restriction - that a closed claim could not be re-opened - was not featured particularly prominently in the information that users were given. And we were unable to conclude that, in this particular case, it had been clearly brought to Miss A's attention.
We also thought that, if Miss A had known of the restriction, she would not have agreed to "close" the complaint after she had first contacted the company about the missing tickets. In the light of this, we upheld the complaint and told the business that it should refund in full the amount Miss A had paid for the tickets.