Dear,
I recently bought two day passes from Velo Antwerpen for me and a friend. It is a very enjoyable service. However, with a day pass, when returning a bike, you have to enter eleven digits: seven for the user ID plus four for a PIN. When booking multiple day passes, the multiple user IDs that you get from Velo Antwerpen are apparently adjacent to one another, meaning that ultimately the user ID for my friend only differed in the last place, compirising a total difference of one out of eleven digits.
Upon returning the bikes, let's call them A and B, after our last trip that day, I got an error message when trying to return bike B. Bike A worked fine and gave me a message roughly stating "Thanks, your bike was returned correctly". Instead of instantly calling the customer service, I decided to instead re-adjust the bad-egg bike B a little bit and try again, to not cause a ruckus.
And so I did. And I got another feedback message, again roughly stating "Thanks, your bike was returned correctly". Then, a day later, I was charged a fee of 96.50€ for overconsumption. I wrote to customer service, which were nice enough to explain what had actually happened: When returning bike B, I had entered my user ID instead of my friends user ID. Once again, the whole sequence of digits only differed in one out of eleven places, and I didn't get a message that reminded me that I already entered the code, but just that same message I got when entering the correct code before.
Now, I wrote to customers service thinking that it is a little bit insane to be charged 96.50€ for entering one wrong digit, especially since the feedback from the Velo terminal gave me exactly the same feedback as if I had done it correctly.
After a few e-mails and a call to their hotline, I conclude that Velo's customer service claims this is entirely my fault, and there is no way I'm getting a refund. They have no understanding in how something like this could have possibly happened by accident and constantly keep referring to their TOS, as if those would completely exempt them from any liability towards their clients in all cases.
I think their charge is definitely not justified, and the general behavior customer service had towards me was also not very nice. Their terminal clearly gives ambiguous feedback and their system needs improvement, and they should be thankful to have clients such as myself, who actually care to communicate this. Instead, I am left feeling quite disrespected by this otherwise great service provider. To conclude, here are a few flaws I could identify their system has, which I feel like they're trying to somehow blame me (and possibly other clients) for by charging 96.50€:
1. Sometimes, the bikes can't be returned properly, even though you follow the exact procedure described by Velo
2. The terminal gives the same feedback when trying to return a bike twice, instead of letting the user know they have already returned that bike
3. They generate adjacent user IDs for bikes rented by the same client, this improves chances of doing a faulty bike return by accident, especially in light of points 1 and 2
4. The customer service is not very understanding. Both of the agents I talked to constantly refer to Velo's TOS and do not even talk about their system problems being something that can possibly be improved in the future.
Thank you for reading.
