The dangers of parking at Liverpool Airport

Liverpool airport tried to hit me for a £10 admin fee when their system took an erroneous payment from me.

Airport parking has become another example of the "book ahead or pay a penalty" culture.

Book ahead to park at Liverpool Airport, and you will pay usefully less than if you just show up unbooked. But where other airports seem to have a robust system for handling advance bookings, the Liverpool system has a big flaw in it: beware.

Having booked, you don't get a voucher - just a booking reference. The instructions (at least when I parked there in October 2006) were to note the number to quote if necessary, but that this would probably not be needed, as their system would identify me on exit from my Credit Card number.

Because the advance-booker has no ticket of any kind, the system relies on your inserting the same credit card as you booked with into the exit machine. There was no help button I could find, and the area is badly lit.

In my case, I put in my wife's Credit Card by mistake - but I could as easily have misremembered which of my credit cards I had used originally, or I could even have had a new credit card number issued by my bank. In any of these cases, inserting the credit card into the exit machine does not ask you to confirm that you want to pay as an unbooked customer. It simply helps itself to your funds (no PIN required) and tells you it has done so.

Call the airport, and you learn that they will only refund part of the erroneous payment - they want to keep £10 for Admin Costs. Amazed by the bare-faced greed of this, I checked with the head of Marketing at Peel Holdings as to whether this was really right - he bounced me straight back to the airport, who insisted that they were going to keep £10.

I disputed the transaction with my Credit Card company - I pointed out that I had inserted the card for the purpose of indentification and not for the purpose of authorising a payment. After a lot of form-filling and a two-month wait, I got the full refund.

But it shouldn't be like this. If Peel Holdings install a system that uses credit cards ambiguously (the card has to be inserted into the same slot whether for indentification or for payment, and the system does not ask the user which they intend) - then the very least they need to do is to refund fully and promptly when a payment is taken wrongly.

Their conduct with me suggests that they are more concerned with extracting every penny they can mug from their users than with any concept of decent behaviour.