What are your rights in case of payment problems?

Questioner

Dear reader, Two years ago I had a subscription with a large transport company to travel freely between Haarlem and Amsterdam. Travels that you make outside the subscription are charged per month together with the subscription fee, as stated in their own terms and conditions. To my great surprise I received a bill of more than 600 euros from the transport company in June 2017. This amount was much higher than I was used to from them, so I went to see how this was possible. I had the direct debit as payment method, so I did not check the invoices that carefully. It turned out that the amount of 600 euros were the trips that I had made in addition to the free route in the period before, I think 5 months. I could not pay this in one go and contacted the debtor administration of the transport company. In addition to the question of whether we could make a payment arrangement, I also asked them how this could happen. On the one hand because they do not meet their own general terms and conditions and on the other hand because I wanted to prevent it from happening again and wanted to know what I could do to prevent this. An employee then acted decisively and stopped the reminders while the investigation was ongoing. Although I followed up again after the last message from the transport company, I didn't hear anything from them for a year and a half. I have to be honest, I had forgotten about it a bit until I suddenly received a reminder for the same amount in October 2018. Without explanation. I had to pay this amount within two weeks, otherwise there would be extra costs and eventually a collection agency would be on my doorstep. In the meantime, I moved and changed employers, so the subscription had long since been terminated. I have contacted the transport company via various communication channels (telephone, email, twitter). Each time with the same question: why don't you stick to your own rules. From 'you are not in our system' (why can you send me a letter then) to 'we will not respond to this, you must sort this out with the collection agency'. I have had all sorts of things thrown at me. Finally, I expressed my frustration again to the debt collection agency that had been called in by now and asked how this could have come to this and why the transport company did not adhere to its own rules. They have no authority to look into the customer base and history of the transport company and so the ball was bounced back to their client. Early January I received an email from an employee of the debtor administration of the transport company. He did not go into the matter but only asked if I could come up with a payment proposal. I then proposed the following: As of January 30, 2019, I will start paying the invoice in 9 installments of 9 months. The first 8 months I will pay 75 euros each time. The last month I will pay 22 euros and 70 euro cents. This means that I will transfer the last amount at the end of September. However, I will only start the payments if I receive an explanation before January 30th about: - Why don't you stick to your own terms? (Monthly debits of extra trips instead of letting everything run up. Could an excuse be made of it perhaps?) - What went wrong in the system? Then I know what to look for so it doesn't happen again. To date, surprise surprise, I have not received a response. It is almost January 30th and I actually do not expect them to respond. My conclusion is that it is downright disgraceful how they treat customers and that they abuse their monopoly position. If I were treated like this at the supermarket or telecom provider, I would go to another one, but unfortunately that is not possible in this case. I now wonder what my rights are in this case. I understand that I have to pay for the service I have used. But they do not comply with the rules themselves and thus saddle customers with unnecessarily high costs and a lot of frustration. My question to you is: What are my rights? And, what happens now if they do not respond to my proposal by January 30th? I'd like to hear it

Lawyer

What do you still want to achieve? If you do not pay according to the arrangement, a process will be started, via a summons. Then you can complain to the judge that they do not adhere to their own conditions, but you are also expected to know whether all trips made by you outside the subscription have been written off on time. A lawsuit can lead to a conviction in the legal costs of the other party.

Questioner

The arrangement I proposed myself, you mean? Which they have to agree to and for which I have to receive a payment reference and account number? What I want to achieve is fair treatment as a customer. It cannot be that everything has to come from me as a customer while the fault lies outside of me. And yes, I could have checked the invoices per month. But I can also assume that when you issue a direct debit, they can take responsibility for writing off the correct amounts. And, as the above story shows, communication is not their strongest point. So even if I had rung the alarm after one or two months, there would have been a fuss. What I find reasonable is that I get an explanation and some understanding. For example: Dear customer, How annoying that this situation has arisen. It is even more annoying that this happened through no fault of your own. We have looked into how it is possible that your extra trips were not automatically collected each month together with the subscription fee. There was an error in our system all this time, something that you cannot do anything about. We apologize that you have been confronted with a very high bill as a result. Because you have made the trips, you have to pay for them. But because we have not kept to our own rules, we give you a discount of 25%. In addition, we hope that the enclosed flower voucher brings the spring sunshine into your home. If you are unable to pay the invoice in one go after deducting 25%, you can contact our very friendly customer service. Kind regards, lala lala _________________________________________ Please, a perhaps somewhat overly friendly letter. But that's how it can be done. And this is not just because I am a communications professional. This is a way of dealing with customers. You made a mistake, admit it and meet the customer halfway. Or am I really one of a kind that I expect a little customer friendliness?

Lawyer

No, but you want to enforce that and that will cost you a certain amount of money or time. You could also raise the issue via social media, then often an apology will come.

Questioner

Yes, I contacted them via Twitter. But without result. Thanks for answering my question. I think I don't have the law on my side. This is about decency and that is of course subject to many opinions.