Dear Zipcar, please stop stonewalling and pay me the $55 you owe me

UPDATE: According to the postal service, Zipcar received my letter on May 25. I received email from them the next day confirming that the $55 they owed me had been refunded to my credit card. Apparently, a letter to the president of the company was necessary to get the problem resolved.

Here’s the original letter, which I sent via certified mail on May 23:

May 23, 2017

Tracey Zhen, President
Zipcar, Inc.
35 Thomson Place
Boston, MA 02210-1202

Dear Ms. Zhen,

Your company owes me $55. I have been trying to get this resolved for more than four months. Your customer support representatives are ignoring my emails. I am writing to you – at my expense – in the hope that there is someone in your office with the ability and desire to solve this problem.

I was supposedly cited for a parking violation by the City of Newton during a Zipcar rental on October 26. However, I in fact paid for parking that night, and there was no ticket on my windshield.

I first heard about this was when Zipcar emailed me on January 11 notifying me that they had paid a $25 fine on my behalf and charged that fine and a $30 processing charge to my Zipcar account.

I want to be clear here about several things:

• I could not possibly have known about this violation prior to January 11. The citation was erroneous – I paid the meter that night – and there was no ticket on my windshield.
• The overdue notice sent to Zipcar by the City of Newton was dated November 24. Zipcar waited a month and a half after receiving the notice before notifying me about it.
• Zipcar notified me about the notice after paying it, without giving me a chance to dispute the citation with either Zipcar or the City of Newton.

After several exchanges of Email with Zipcar, I was told on January 18, “Zipcar will refund the money charged to you, including the violation processing fee, if you are able to get the ticket successfully overturned.”

I was able to get the ticket successfully overturned, on March 22, after months fighting Newton’s parking-ticket bureaucracy. I sent email that day notifying Zipcar that the ticket had been dismissed.

Unfortunately, I am not able to obtain written proof that the citation was dismissed. Newton has declined to provide me such proof, saying instead that a dismissal notice would be mailed to the vehicle’s registered address (“PV Holding Corp, 375 McClellan Hwy, Boston, MA 02128-1177”).

I explained this in email to Zipcar on March 22, and again on April 16. Emails I’ve sent to Zipcar about this on April 16, April 26, May 3, and May 11 have been ignored.

Please fix this.

Thank you,
Jonathan Kamens