My parents have been going to India for the past 15 years to help people in need in Kolkata and every year I book their tickets as they are in their 80s and not computer literate.

Last December, I booked their flights with Emirates through Lastminute.com. But, as I hit the pay button, the Lastminute website went down with the result that I didn’t get confirmation on the page, or through an email.

I booked again immediately and received confirmation. Lastminute now has two bookings for each of them, at an extra cost of £1,100. After protracted correspondence during which I supplied bank statements as proof of what had happened, it eventually decided that my father’s extra ticket would be refunded “within two months”.

But it will not refund my mother’s extra ticket because, it says, her middle name was included on one of the bookings.

Emirates says, categorically, it has only one booking which can only mean that Lastminute.com has kept the money.

The final insult is that I have been charged £200 for the mobile phone calls I made to Lastminute’s customer service which has a premium number. Please help. MF, London

Sadly I can’t … because Lastminute is refusing to change its stance. It claims the addition of the middle name in your mother’s booking makes it a whole new booking, and not a duplicate. This is complete nonsense, but it won’t budge.

You should take this up with your card provider, and send the evidence from Emirates that only one booking was made.

This is not the first time that we have reported this problem with Lastminute. And in January the Mail reported the exact same problem, and again, the Switzerland-based Lastminute refused to deal with it.

This case is a wake-up call to stop using firms like Lastminute as it is rarely simple to sort out problems like this – which would have been much easier had you booked with Emirates direct.

If you are booking a flight online and the website freezes, wait a day to see if the booking has gone through before you make a second.

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