G’day folks! I did promise I would let you know how the ordeal of trying to get a refund from Trainline.com for the cancelled train I experienced back in France turned out, and so here is that update, thankfully a ‘final’ update. For the details of what happened you can check out the earlier post HERE.

Well, there is GOOD news, the refund has come through, albeit with another issue. I received an email saying the refund had been received by Trainline.com from SNCF (the French train company) and was on its way back to the card I had originally used.

The only problem was that I had cancelled that card. Which I had let trainline.com know and they had said basically that was fine when they receive the refund they will contact me and I can tell what account to put the money in. But guess what – that’s NOT what happened. I know, it’s a shock, right.

I was told that too bad the refund was made to the card in question and I would have to contact the card issuer to get my money! Once again, I marvelled at the quality and care of their customer service.

On a more positive note, American Express were the card issuer and I have to say they were super impressive. I used their chat feature to explain the situation – didn’t have to wait to chat to anyone, and they understood and I was told to contact them again when the money went through and they would transfer it to a bank account.

And that’s exactly what happened, I could see the money had been transferred and I hit them up on chat again and within 15 minutes it was all resolved. Talk about polar opposites of customer service.

So in conclusion, it took 4 months to get a refund that I applied for as soon as I knew the ticket was cancelled. Did I think they would come through with the refund? No I did not, so in some ways it’s a bit of a bonus. But it shouldn’t feel that way. If you pay for a service you don’t receive and it wasn’t your fault that you didn’t receive it, you deserve your money back and I would argue, you deserve it back as fast as is humanly possible. That’s clearly not what happened here.

We pay for almost everything in advance don’t we? A flight, for example. Some hotels let you pay after but these days the majority want you to pay in advance. We quite happily pay for a movie having no idea whether we will enjoy it. As consumers we work hard for our money so it’s fair enough to expect something in place when a flight, concert or train is cancelled. And it’s not unreasonable to expect companies to have something in place to expedite the experience.

Thanks for following this LITTLE saga through! My advice again is – work your way through the SNCF or other country websites despite the language difficulties. You won’t be left with my experience. Trainline does a decent job of getting you tickets, but should you encounter what I did, well, you’ll find it’s just not worth it.

Thanks for reading today. Take care wherever you may be in the world, May the Journey Never End!