Woman pays R110k for two-hours of parking
What was meant to be a quick shopping trip for a mother and her daughters turned into a R110,000 parking ticket nightmare.
Parking tariffs have been known to leave motorists with their arms in the air on many occasions, particularly because there isn't a consistent approach to pricing.
For instance, two friends from Cape Town shared their inefficient solution to avoid paying more than R100 for parking at a shopping centre. The two decided it would be more cost-efficient to leave the parking before they clocked in three hours in the parkade and then return with a new ticket.
If they had stayed longer than three hours, they would have had to pay R150 for parking.
A UK woman who was caught off guard with her parking tariff, ended up paying way more than that for her two-hour stay at a shopping mall.
Yaditi Kava, 39, was out shopping with her daughters at Queensmere Observatory Shopping Centre in Slough, England, when she was overcharged for parking.
When she returned to her vehicle, the parking payment machines were closed, so she decided to pay at the exit using her bank card.
She told BBC News, "I tapped my contactless card, then a message displayed saying I needed to enter my PIN. I was in a rush, the girls were tired, and I did not see the number on the small card machine. The big display showed '4,5', so I thought it was £4.50. To my shock, I saw that they had deducted not £4.50 but £4,586 (R111,000) from my account."
The issue was said to be an "isolated accident" by Savills, the company that manages the shopping centre parking. They advised that they would be looking into the incident to avoid a repatition.
Kava shared that although she was promised her money would be returned within two to three days, three weeks had passed, and nothing had happened.
According to the BBC, Kava reported the case to a consumer rights programme, The JVS show, presented by Jonathan Vernon-Smith. "It was a godsend. One call from Jonathan, and the next day the money was in my bank," she said, adding that the full refund arrived a few days later.
Kava, who told the news outlet that she's currently going through a divorce, was saving money to pay for her legal fees.
Savills assured the BBC that this was an isolated issue and that they were investigating it to prevent it from happening again.
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