Going on vacation, most people don’t expect for things to go wrong. And if things do go wrong, most don’t think that it’ll be bad enough to literally change the course of the trip. Unfortunately one Southern California couple was charged $30,000 for an Uber ride that was supposed to cost just $55, KTLA reports.
Douglas Ordonez and Dominique Adams planned their vacation to Guatemala for over a year. The couple intended to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary there. Things started to go south when Adams, who was in Costa Rica at the time, went to take an Uber to the airport so she could meet Ordonez in Guatemala.
“I took an Uber, everything was fine. It was like a 30-minute ride. I didn’t think twice about it,” Adams told KTLA. Not long after she was dropped off by the Uber, her husband called her saying his card had declined when he had gone to buy a cup of coffee.
After some quick research, the couple found out why: Uber had charged them $30,000 for Adams’ ride.
“I sat down and looked at what the heck was going on, and that’s when I noticed the $29,000 charge on our account. I didn’t believe it at first, but obviously it was actually true,” Ordonez said. The problem looks to have been a mix up with the currency.
Costa Rican money is called Colones. Adams’ Uber ride cost ₡30,000, which converts to just $55 USD. But Uber processed that ₡30,000 as $30,000. Uber not only ruined the couples’ trip, but it tried to place the blame for the charge on the couples bank. This resulted in finger pointing between Uber and the bank with neither taking the blame.
“We contact the bank. The bank says contact Uber. So it was just like that back-and-forth of nobody knew really how this happened or how it passed all the security measures,” Adams said. The bank eventually agreed to let the couple dispute the charge but it would take seven to 10 business days to fix the issue.
Sadly the couple had to change their trip, penny pinching with the money that they had on hand. Luckily the issue only took four days to resolve but the damage had already been done. The couple thinks social media had a hand in getting it resolved quickly.
Uber issued a statement that made it seem as if the company was on top of things while still underhandedly placing blame on the couple’s bank.
As soon as we received the user’s report, our support team promptly addressed the issue and released the authorization hold mistakenly applied due to a bank error in Dollars and not in Colones. However, the time it takes for the refund to be processed depends on each bank’s policies.
As for the couple, they say Uber has lost them as customers as the company kept them in the dark through the whole ordeal. “I definitely will not use Uber again. I’m going to keep it as short as that. Never using Uber again. To this day, Uber hasn’t contacted us. They haven’t emailed us back. Before this was resolved, they marked this case as resolved in their app. They were very negligent.”