Standing up for my rights no matter how much is at stake

I recently signed up for a membership with one of the largest sporting bodies in the country which would give me access to tickets at their new stadium (you can probably guess which organisation I am talking about!). My annual membership fee of £50 promised access to some of the biggest sporting events in the country from just £99 and proudly listed them off.

I was therefore very disappointed when I logged in to discover that tickets were not available for some of the events they had promised and absolutely furious when I discovered that prices ranged from £179 to £399 for the events they had originally mentioned in their email. So within hours of signing up I fired off a complaint by email requesting a refund.

What followed was over a month of being either being told I couldn’t have a refund or simply ignored. However I knew I was entitled to a refund as the advertising regulations state that “any stated price should be clear and should relate to the product advertised” which in this case was arguably not the case.

Regardless of that, the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations gives me the unconditional right to cancel an order as long as I give notice within “seven working days from the day after that on which I agreed to go ahead with the contract”, which I clearly did.

And my commitment and conviction finally paid off after 5 weeks of arguing my case as they agreed to refund me the £50. Result!

I also discovered last week that I had been charged 48p by O2 for mobile internet charges despite the fact that all my attempts to connect to the internet had failed. So again I fired off a quick email stating my case and requesting a refund. Within 48 hours they responded to tell me they would be crediting my account. Result!

Now you might think that chasing a 48p refund is a waste of time, but writing that short email took me less than a minute. So if I spent a whole hour writing similar emails I could potentially earn £28.80 per hour, although clearly O2 wouldn’t keep paying out for the same thing.

In contrast chasing my £50 refund took 6 far longer emails stating along with a couple of phone calls, taking in total about 2 hours of my time which works out at £25 per hour. So chasing a 48p refund actually worked out as a more profitable use of my time.