Problem Solved is a weekly consumer column that fixes reader problems. From broken laptop computers to faulty kitchen appliances, nothing is off limits for this feature. Each story brings a fresh problem and solution in an engaging and succinct Q&A format.
Adriana Gores overpaid her Comcast bill by $4,762 by mistake. Comcast refunded her on a prepaid debit card. The balance then dropped to $82, with a charge she says she never made and no statement showing where the money went.
Brian O’Leary needs accessible seating, and the Bruno Mars chart showed plenty of it. But every seat he selected came back unavailable, over and over. The next day the same seats reappeared, this time only through resellers, at a markup.
The dashboard of Jay Catelli’s Alfa Romeo Stelvio is separating from the air vents. His service contract covers interior surfaces. Mopar denied the claim, saying the part number sits on an exclusion list that appears nowhere in his own contract.
Craig Field bought tickets to a Rick Springfield concert through StubHub. The show was postponed once and given a new date. StubHub never updated the change in its own system.
On the day of the concert, with no tickets in hand, he called. The representative told him the system still showed the event as postponed. He explained that the show was happening that night. The agent could not release the tickets, and told him that without confirmation from the organizers or the venue, nobody higher up at StubHub could modify the record. The venue knew the concert was on. The promoter knew. Rick Springfield knew. The computer did not, and the computer was the only opinion that counted.
Stephen Stein had booked a two-bedroom suite at a Homewood Suites in Bonita Springs through Booking.com, and his party of three arrived to find the hotel had no reservation for them. He handed over the confirmation number. It made no difference. A family dinner was 90 minutes away, so while he waited on the phone with Booking.com and got nowhere, the group went and found another hotel themselves. The only rooms available were regular ones, so they took two, which came to $126 more than the suite they had already reserved. A representative promised to cover roughly half the difference. Then came the calls. Over the following days each conversation produced a new reason the payment could not yet be authorized, including a request to prove which currency he had paid in, for a Florida hotel booked on a US credit card.
Debbie McNulty had listed her vacation home on Furnished Finder for three years and never once received a booking through it. She paid the annual fee anyway. Now that she was renting short term again, the platform was no use to her at all. Her membership was set to auto-renew, and the company sent a reminder email the month before. She missed it, back from a two-week trip and buried under the same avalanche of email everyone else is buried under. Then she woke up to a $179 charge. She contacted the company that same day, asked to cancel, and requested her money back. What came back was a form response: fees are nonrefundable, it is in the terms you agreed to. She did not dispute that she had missed the deadline. Her question was different, and it is one worth sitting with. When a customer cancels on the very day the charge goes through, and has just told you plainly that she will not use a single day of the year she has been billed for, is keeping the money really the right call?
Two charges David Melton never made showed up on his PayPal account, both for sports tickets to a Knicks-Bulls game. One, for $1,098, hit a linked American Express card. The other, for $757, pushed his PayPal balance into the negative. Together they came to $1,855 for a game he had nothing to do with. So he did what you are supposed to do: he opened disputes with both PayPal and Amex. And both turned him down, telling him he had made the purchases. He had not, and he spent hours trying to piece together how it had even happened. Here is the trap that catches so many fraud victims. When someone gets into your account and buys something using your own credentials, the transaction can look perfectly legitimate to an automated security system. The computer sees a login with your name on it and assumes the charge is yours, which is very likely why both first-round disputes were denied without a human ever taking a real look.
Michael Damarino and his wife thought they had done everything right. They booked refundable American Airlines tickets through Expedia from Boston to Tucson by way of Phoenix, paying extra for the flexibility. Then a 90-minute delay in Phoenix, blamed on a sick first officer and a baggage weight problem, made them miss their connection. With no later flights available, they did the resourceful thing: they rented a car and drove the final 100 miles so they would not lose their vacation. What they did not realize is that solving the airline’s problem themselves had quietly turned them into a “no-show” for that last leg. In the airline’s system, skipping a flight without canceling it first triggers a clause that can cancel the rest of your itinerary and wipe out the ticket’s value, even when you paid for a refundable fare. American offered only a flight credit and called the ticket nonrefundable. Expedia pointed back to the airline, and the airline pointed to Expedia.
Lina Mahmoud’s $687 Michael Kors order never showed up. UPS investigated, declared the package lost, and confirmed in writing that the refund should come from the shipper, Michael Kors. That should have settled it. Instead, Michael Kors refused, pointing to a proof-of-delivery photo that, she says, does not clearly show her package at all. She was told the claim was denied and that this was the final answer, and when she kept pushing, she says customer service agents began disconnecting her live chats. She was left feeling as though the company now viewed her as a fraud, caught in a game of corporate hot potato: the carrier says the retailer owes the money, the retailer hides behind a questionable image, and the customer is stuck in the middle. It is a stark reminder of how much the burden of proof can fall on the shopper when a package goes missing, and of what recourse you really have when the standard customer-service channels simply stop answering.
Karen Plaskon’s refrigerator died in February. That should not have been a crisis, because she had paid for a Sears Master Protection Agreement, the whole point of which is to make a failure like this someone else’s problem. Sears approved a replacement in April. Then the real ordeal began. The Frigidaire she ordered was canceled over delivery delays. Sears suggested a GE model in June. That one did not show up either. She spent hours on the phone, shuffled between departments that blamed vague “manufacturing delays,” while retailers like Costco were delivering refrigerators in days. Years earlier, Sears had settled a similar problem by simply cutting her a check. This time, it said that option no longer existed. Six months in, she still had no working refrigerator and no clear answer, just the question of what a protection plan is actually worth when the company that sold it decides to stall.
