Entry for July 1, 2008
There are two sides of this story, the Hampton Inn aspect which is where the problem started and the gift2go side where this card issuer has set up its procedures to not leave any capability to determine if the merchant has taken appropriate actions in charging the credit. Other debit cards have a timeframe that is reasonable before they remove unclaimed charges. I am told that lifting the pending status can only occur at the merchant but the card issuer should make disputes possible from day one of any charge. The delay which is created by a charges pending status appears to make the card user vulnerable to missuse of their card by the merchant.