TRENITALIA DISPUTE
The following is the letter that was sent to our credit card company denying the charge that we incurred on a train coming back from Parma to Rome. The King tried to protest and threatened not to pay but the conductor told us that we would be arrested when the train arrived in Rome. We will see what happens.
To: Credit Card Company
Address
From: Nolan Danchik
Disputed Amount: $324.14
Disputed Date: May 2, 2011
On April 28th my wife and I purchased two tickets at the Trenitalia automated kiosk at the main train station in Rome. One set of tickets was to go the next day (April 29th) from Rome to Parma, a city in the north of Italy. The cost, converted to dollars, was $193.66. We then purchased - for the same price - a ticket for two people to return from Parma to Rome on May 2nd - or so we thought. Although we selected May 2nd as the date of travel when we were selecting another time for that day the machine changed our date to come back not for May 2nd but for April 28th - the day we were buying the ticket. We did not notice the date change on the ticket when it was printed now April 28th and not May 2nd. It would have been impossible for us to use this ticket - it was stamped with the location where we bought it and the date and time which was April 28 at 11:10AM in the morning. Even though we were in Rome the ticket sold to us was for a train leaving Parma on April 28th at 1:30PM. There is no way we could have used the ticket that was sold to us - we could not have gotten to Parma in 2 ½ hours and it was not the ticket that we selected to be purchased.
At the time we did not notice the wrong date on the ticket. When we were on the train coming back to Rome from Parma the conductor checking tickets told us that the ticket was not valid. We could not understand why and when he showed us the date we realized that the ticket had been printed incorrectly. We tried to explain to him what happened and showed him the other tickets so he could see what happened. We were made to pay for the tickets again and also fined 50 Euros each so that the fare to return was now the disputed amount of $324.14. He would not listen to our explanation. When I signed my name on the charge slip I wrote `PROTEST' in big letters.
When we returned to Rome we went to the train station and explained what happened. The agent behind the counter understood exactly what had happened and even told us that it happens all the time but there was nothing they could do. They would not even consider refunding the amount of the ticket from April 28th which if they made us pay for a new ticket now became an unused ticket. We do not think they were justified in charging us again for the ticket that we had purchased and had been incorrectly sold to us and the ticket was impossible to use.
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