Locked out of my Co-Wheels account

As soon as I joined the car sharing scheme in the village that allows you to borrow an electric car for a reasonable amount of money, I was hooked. I took it to Machynlleth and to Glan Clwyd. And I planned to take it to many more places!

The next plan I had was to take it to Antur Waunfawr; it is a social enterprise that sells secondhand furniture. If I get a Ukrainian, I need to make sure my upstairs bedroom is fully furnished. A wardrobe would be in order. But my little Corsa is not very good for transporting furniture. The MG is a station wagon; it is a lot more suitable for that! But a few days before I had planned to go on a furniture mission, I noticed some transactions on my bank account I did not recognise. I phoned the bank, and they said it indeed looked like fraud, and suggested I block my bankcard. I would get a new card in the mail. And I indeed proceeded like that.

Something I had not immediately thought of was that that meant that co-wheels would not be able to take the payment from my bank account. So the booking was made void, and my account was suspended. Luckily, a few days later I indeed got first a bank card and then a pin number in the mail. I was back in business! I added the new bank card to my suspended co-wheels account, and tried to pay for my canceled booking retroactively. But it didn't work. I just got a message that said "oops, something went wrong".

I phoned them, and asked if I could make that payment some other way. They said I couldn't. There seems to be only one way of paying for the bookings, and it wouldn't work for me! That was frustrating. They said I should contact my bank.

And when I phoned my bank they first said that they couldn't push the payment through, but there was some software malfunction going on which stopped them from finding out what was going on, so I should try later. That was a bit annoying; my bank tends to only answer the phone after 20 rather dull minutes. But I did. And with the malfunction now fixed, could they now sort me out? No, of course not. They said it was a problem with co-wheels.

So now I had co-wheels saying they could not help me out and the bank needed to, and the bank saying they could not help me out and co-wheels needed to. Great! Stuck between a rock and a hard place. How am I going to get out of this? I think co-wheels should pull their finger out. They should really have a mechanism for letting people pay in more than one way. I can't imagine I'm the only person who ever ended up in a situation like this! And I don't think it's a good business model to have people who desperately want to use your services and pay for them and just telling them they can't.

I will I get out of this? I will go back to co-wheels and be persistent. Wish me luck!