Your problems: my car hire ordeal over a rejected Monzo card

I used Stressfreecarrental.com to hire a car for a visit to my 92-year-old dad in France. I paid £314.32 for a week, which included insurance. I did a lot of research to find the most reliable but cheapest automatic car. I am on disability benefit and a single mum.

When I arrived at Toulouse airport, Goldcar, which was providing the car, said it would not accept a debit card. I don’t have a credit card, and because of this the staff said they would have to sell me Goldcar’s Mega Relax insurance. This added £231 – almost the cost of the car hire itself. Are they allowed to do that? Neither stress-free nor mega relaxed.

You booked the car using a Monzo card. I checked Goldcar’s terms and conditions which clearly say that Monzo cards are not accepted, along with debit and credit cards issued by seven other institutions, including American Express and Revolut. I’m not sure how Stressfreecarrental and Goldcar missed the fact that you used a Monzo card to book the car.

The T&Cs also say that, apart from in Italy, you can use other Visa and Mastercard debit cards to book and pay for your rental car. You have a First Direct account complete with debit card that should have been perfectly acceptable, had you not been told, incorrectly, that Goldcar only accepts credit cards.

On that basis, I asked Goldcar to reimburse you for the cost of the unnecessary Mega Relax insurance.

It said: “Although the customer was able to pay for the booking online with her Monzo card, that card is not valid for the security deposit at the counter, which is a mandatory requirement in order to collect the vehicle. Therefore, upon arrival at the office and not having an accepted card for the deposit (the other card she presented was a debit card but was not used for this purpose at the time), the only alternative to continue with the rental was to take out the Mega Relax insurance, which eliminates the need to leave a deposit.”

The Goldcar staff then accepted your Monzo card to pay for this additional cover. Goldcar says this should not have happened, so it has refunded the £231 to your account.

On 2 September last year I took a Lufthansa flight out of Chișinău, Moldova, to Frankfurt to catch a connecting flight with the same airline to Washington DC. My flight out of Chișinău was delayed and I missed my flight to the US. Lufthansa guest services in Frankfurt told me that under EU regulations, I was entitled to compensation. I contacted Lufthansa’s customer service group and received several emails stating that I was entitled to compensation.

However, since then I have been in touch with at least half a dozen customer representatives. They all separately asked me for US or UK bank details, copies of boarding passes, personal ID and copies of credit cards.

Each time I would get a new representative and the frustrating process would start all over again. However, I was repeatedly assured that I would receive compensation for the missed flight.

On 12 March, a customer service representative emailed stating that I am not eligible for a refund, without saying why.

My wife is a diplomat, we live in Chișinău and I have flown Lufthansa many times and have always felt that they had a high standard of professionalism. But this customer service experience was truly terrible and made me waste hours for reasons that are still not clear to me.

You were trying to claim compensation under regulation EC261, which applies to flights departing from EU member states and operated by any airline, and to flights operated by EU-based airlines arriving in EU member states from non-EU countries (the rule also includes Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. Flights into and out of the UK are covered by its own legislation, known as UK261). As the start and end of your journey involved two non-EU members, Moldova and the USA, Lufthansa concluded, eventually, that you were not entitled to compensation.

The initial leg of your journey ending in Germany confused everyone. Lufthansa had promised you compensation and asked for bank account details repeatedly over six months, so I argued that it should do the decent thing and compensate you as a gesture of goodwill. It agreed and said it would pay you €600 compensation “on a voluntary basis”.

Email your problems to Jill Insley at your.problems@observer.co.uk