My complaint:
I feel I have been wrongly charged and treated unfairly in this matter, so your help with this dispute is highly valued and highly appreciated.
Summary:
To recap the issue at hand, I have been unfairly charged $1,350.08 USD by a travel merchant named eDreams. The cost is the result of my wife and I purchasing airline tickets to fly back from India to our home in the United States during Spring 2021.
We used our Costco Citi Credit Card to make the purchase on Emirates airlines, and with the full expectation of being on the flight. This expectation changed when the nation of India entered into its second wave of COVID infections, which dramatically affected the lives of everyone in India at that time as well as companies doing business with India.
At this point in time, without any notice, warning, or refund, Emirates cancelled all of its flights from India as a health precaution. This decision, while understandable on the airline and Dubai’s behalf, was very damaging to customers — both from a health POV (effectively negating a way home) and from a financial POV (this is clearly theft.)
Once this happened, I reached out to eDreams via email to ask for a refund, but did not hear back. I also attempted to phone them directly, but did not find any phone number on their website where they could be reached. I felt completely out of luck and completely ignored.
Although we continued to fight for my hard-earned money to be returned to me, my wife and I still needed to return to the USA by May 3, 2021. As such, we scrambled to buy whatever available tickets we could (we found tickets via Air France at a more expensive rate), and eventually got back to Chicago.
Once we realized that eDreams would be uncommunicative to us directly, we escalated the issue to you, the Citi team, for help. Initially, you were able to reverse the charge, but have since said the vendor is claiming this charge is legitimate, so we won’t in fact, get the money back.
To this I ask, shouldn’t Citi stand on behalf of its customers to fraudulent vendors whose word is taken at face value? I do not understand why eDreams word was more valuable to Citi than one of their own (very loyal and active) customers.
I am, therefore, officially asking you to reverse the fraudulent charge for services not rendered. Should the matter at hand continue, my wife and I will take the next step of working with a lawyer in a case against eDreams with Citi being cited as the enabling financial institution.
Final note:
I want to stress at this point that as a customer, I did absolutely nothing wrong in this case. We were victims of a global circumstance that was entirely out of our hands, and should not be penalized for something that never even came to fruition.
I look forward to hearing back from your team,
Suggested solution:
NO MONEY IS PAID SO FAR - AUG 30, 2021
