Consumer complaint received 2016-06-02
Company: AMERICAN EXPRESS COMPANY
State: NY
Product: Credit card
Issue: Billing disputes

Complaint:
I 'm an American Express card holder with account ending in XXXX. This is regarding a charge for {$2000.00} transaction that posted back in XXXX XXXX by a merchant named XXXX. Shortly after the transaction posted, I contacted XXXX to dispute this charge as the merchant did not deliver the service as promised. The the billing dispute Reference # assigned for this was XXXX. The charge was initially suspended, but on XXXX/XXXX/XXXX this charge was rebilled to my account without any legal basis. We also understand that Per the Amex rules, American Express neglected to properly investigate this and failed to go back to the merchant timely, thus Amex may have failed to recover the funds from the merchant. However, regardless to American Express conduct in recovering these funds from the merchant, it is my position that per Reg Z and per my card member agreement with American Express, you had no right to re-bill me for this disputed charge. The merchant did not deliver what it promised to deliver, we reported this issue to Amex timely, and we filed this billing dispute with all required details. Per the Amex rules, per my card member agreement, as well as the reg Z, Merchants policy has absolutely no bearing if they failed to provide the service in its originally described and agreed description. Here the merchant failed to deliver the service as described, we disputed this transaction, and XXXX had no business to re-bill this {$2000.00} on my account. The merchant presented to me a luxury vacation apartment rental which was described to be a XXXX bedroom apt with XXXX beds. The apartment was to be a luxury apartment, clean bedding for XXXX, a cleaned apartment such as expected for a vacation rental and clean toilets. When we arrived at the apartment, the overall apartment was very dirty, XXXX of the XXXX bathrooms were in a condition as just used with the batch even full of used water, and used bedding. Instead of XXXX bedrooms, there were only XXXX, and instead of XXXX beds there was only XXXX beds in total. When called the hotel receptionist, they offered that we can use the couches, and that they can send over someone to clean the following day. Obviously, that was unacceptable and we demanded alternative accommodations, which they refused. Without any option available to settle with them, we had to leave the property and go search with alternative accommodations which took hours and was a great nightmare. We understand the merchant provided there copy of the terms being all sales final. However, this is the first time I see this, this was not properly disclosed to me at the time of the transaction and they must have signed this on their own. In addition, we find that no merchant policy has any bearing on this situation since the merchant failed to deliver what they promised. The merchant improperly described the property, and they can not expect that we shall be stuck to accept something we never agreed to accept. We made reservations for a clean luxury villa with XXXX beds and XXXX bedrooms. We can not be forced to have accepted a XXXX bedroom in place of a XXXX, and a dirty one in place of clean, and XXXX beds instead of XXXX. They can also not expect that accept couches to accommodate the missing beds. No policy of the merchant has any legal bearing on this situation, and pursuant to the bankcard rules, such policy would be void and null when mis-described in such a magnitude. Regardless, as stated above, such final sale policy was never properly disclosed to us.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation