Following my earlier post – here – on this subject, I still haven’t received a penny of the money owed to me. I’ve called four times now, and been variously told that “I didn’t return the tickets”, “Refunds may have misplaced the ticket”, “we’ll investigate” etc etc, and on each and every occasion I’ve been assured that I’d have my money back within four days.
The last call to Virgin (or TheTrainline, who runs it for them) was on Friday12th March (just before my brief visit to Mumbai), when I was categorically assured that I would have my refund. Nope, it didn’t happen.
So I’ve taken the advice of PFAS who took the time to comment, and asked the HSBC to refund the money back to my credit card. This will involve a bit of form-filling apparently, but all in a good cause 
I did try calling the ‘Customer Service’ department of Virgin here in the UK, to see if they could help, but on all three occasions I tried once I’d stepped through the menus, when I got to the “speak to a person” bit, the line went to an engaged tone. Very helpful. I did fill out one of their complaint forms – you can get one here if you need it – and send it off. I doubt I’ll hear anything though.
A quick search on the Internet reveals that there are legions of people having (or having had) much the same problem. Sadly, avoiding this bunch of crooks seems almost impossible, as they run 16 out of 20 of the UK Train Operators online booking systems – (source article). Thanks too are due to Jonathan who suggested writing to them, but as I’ve started down this route now, I’ll wait and see how I get on.
I wonder if anyone has spoken to Trading Standards about this kind of thing?
