My fiancé and I went to the Download rock music festival in Donington Park in Leicestershire this year and we had arranged disability access for him since he has fibular hemimelia, meaning that he is missing a calf bone in his leg.

The information we were sent before the festival was fantastic; it said that there would be shuttle buses to take my fiancé from the transport hub to the arena and back. However, when we got there, this wasn’t the case at all and he was mocked by a member of the security staff over his disability. He ended up having to walk, which was agonising.

Because of our experience over the first two days of the event, we decided that it was no longer possible to go on the Sunday. We had no faith that our treatment would improve, we had no confidence that the advertised facilities were in place and we couldn’t have risked my fiancé having to walk to the transport hub again because he was by now barely able to move.

We raised complaints with Download and asked for a refund for the Sunday since it was entirely because of its failure to provide the advertised service that we weren’t able to go. We had weekend tickets, so surely it should refund us at least a third of the ticket price — this would be £178.

Fibular hemimelia is a congenital condition that is often associated with deformity of the ankle and foot and can cause pain and difficulty in walking.

You were content with the idea of getting a third of the ticket price back, but even though you managed to get to the concerts on the first two nights, the whole weekend was ruined for you both so I felt you should have a full refund. However, in an email to you Download denied even the modest refund you expected. It said: “We would of course expect all of our staff working on-site to act in a professional, friendly manner, and it is indeed disappointing to have read that this may not have been the case in your experience. Please be assured that full details of your feedback here have been escalated to the Event Team. Your concerns have been heard and they have been passed on to staff at senior level. However, we would not be able to offer compensation in these circumstances.”

• British Gas left my 94-year-old neighbour in tears

Download is organised by LiveNation, which ignored my emails for nearly a month so I posted a brief outline of the situation under a comment by the rock band Black Stone Cherry on the Live Nation Facebook page. The next day the press office emailed me to say that they were “unable to comment on individual communications between customers and the customer service team”.

The press office then emailed to say that if I was in direct contact with you, could I encourage you to make contact with customer service again.

Customer service offered you a one-third refund, so I advised you to push back and ask for the full amount. You did and you have now been paid £534.

In an email sent to you, Download apologised for the inaccurate information given about the shuttle bus at the time of booking and said the conduct of security staff was “unacceptable”. It added that it would be reinforcing sensitivity training.

Like many customers, my daughter was left out of pocket when Carpetright went into administration last month — £4,000 in her case. She paid a £1,000 deposit on her Marks and Spencer credit card and the balance on her Triodos debit card. She rang Marks & Spencer to clarify that she would get the full transaction amount refunded having paid the deposit through her credit card. She was informed by Marks & Spencer that it was not Mastercard’s policy to do this and that only the deposit amount may be refunded. Is this correct?

Not a good start in her first home of her own.

When you buy anything costing from £100 to £30,000 using your credit card, your purchase is automatically covered by Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974. This very useful bit of legislation makes your credit card provider jointly responsible with the retailer if anything goes wrong with your purchase; if it is not as described, is faulty or is not delivered. You don’t have to use your credit card to make the whole purchase; £1 would be enough for Section 75 protection to kick in. Nor do you have to wait until your claim has been rejected by the retailer before approaching your credit card provider; you can claim against both at the same time, although you should only accept a refund from one.

Your daughter did the correct thing in approaching Marks & Spencer and it should have immediately offered her a Section 75 refund. Instead it offered a chargeback for the £1,000 she had spent using her credit card.

Chargebacks are also a very useful way to get your money back when purchases go wrong but they don’t offer quite as much protection as a Section 75 refund. The bank is not jointly responsible with the retailer, so you have to try to get your money back from the retailer before asking your bank for help. It will then try to get your money back from the retailer’s bank but if the retailer rejects your claim you are likely to be left out of pocket.

• What can spoil a section 75 credit card claim?

Refunds for problematic purchases made using a debit card can be made only through the chargeback scheme. If she had accepted the £1,000 chargeback offer from Marks & Spencer, your daughter would then have had to ask her current account provider Triodos to make a second chargeback claim for the remaining amount. Triodos might have asked her to see if she could get a refund from the Carpetright administrator first, which could have taken months to sort out.

I asked Marks & Spencer to refund your daughter in full straight away. It apologised for not treating her claim as a Section 75 refund from the outset and immediately repaid the outstanding £2,843.

You daughter said it was an incredible relief to get the money back: “Now we can keep going with the rest of the house.”

I had a Sky TV subscription for about ten years. In December we were moving house and I decided that I did not want to continue with my subscription. That’s when the drama started, because Sky made it super easy to join but almost impossible to leave.

It tells you to go online to cancel, but when you do it then tells you to call a number. When you do that, it again tells you to go online. I call it the circle of doom, a never-ending loop of bitter frustration. So having tried all known methods and getting nowhere I decided to stop my monthly online payments, which did get Sky’s attention.

Eventually I managed to speak to an unhelpful person who told me I would have to pay a penalty charge, but then Sky kept trying to deduct monthly payments and sending me emails from addresses that I couldn’t reply to. By this time we were well into the house move and had a million other things to do.

• Consumer rights UK: what you need to know

I’m a pensioner and taking prescribed medication daily for hypertension so I did not need any more stress. My wife and I decided to take a little holiday and locked the new house up and went off to de-stress. When I returned I made a complaint to Sky about the difficulties, stress and the way I had been treated.

Finally on March 6, I spoke to someone named Alan who was sympathetic. He listened to the tape of my earlier call and examined all the times I had tried to cancel my subscription. He verbally agreed it was unacceptable. He said he was closing the account and waiving any charges so that I had a zero account balance.

Phew, I thought. But no such luck. A few weeks ago I started receiving ominous calls, then texts, then emails, then even a letter dated June 12, 2024 from a debt-collecting agency called BPO Collections warning me I owed £102.42 to Sky.

I wrote to BPO explaining that I owed nothing and quoting my reference. I sent my letter by registered post and it was was received on June 18.

Since then I’ve heard nothing. But of course this is still hanging over me and I’m worried it will affect my credit score. It’s already affecting my mood and my sleep.

I asked Sky to release you from your contract as promised by Alan. It told me that in December you closed down your direct debit before it could take the final payment, including the penalty charge you had agreed to pay. Sky said that package cancellations are processed within 31 days after confirmation, so by the time it tried to take a final payment you must have thought all was settled. Many people make the same mistake of cancelling a direct debit before the final payment is taken, especially when ending mobile phone contracts.

As a result, Sky could not process your package cancellation and kept trying to take money from your account. In March you were successful in cancelling your Sky package but the early termination charges remained regardless of Alan’s attempts to clear your balance.

Sky has since contacted you to confirm that the final charge of £101.42 has been cleared as a gesture of goodwill. You should now be able to enjoy your new home in peace.

Email [email protected] or write to Question of Money, The Sunday Times, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF. Please send only copies of original documents. Letters should be exclusive to The Sunday Times. Advice is offered without legal responsibility and we regret that we cannot reply to everyone who contacts us.