Help! I Signed Up for a $4,800 Bird-Watching Trip but the Company Shut Down.

20.07.2023 - 12:47 / nytimes.com

In 2021, my husband, my sister and I signed up for a five-day Tremendous Tawas Lake Huron tour run by Pardson, the Ohio company that publishes Bird Watcher’s Digest magazine. We paid almost $4,800 in all. The tour was canceled because of Covid that year, but we were so eager to see the rare Kirtland’s warbler that we accepted a credit. Shortly before the rescheduled trip was to leave in May 2022, the company emailed to tell us it was going out of business, and someone would contact us about a refund. No one did, but through my own efforts I got in touch with Jack Harris, the receiver responsible for the dissolution of Pardson. He told me the only way to get my money back would be through my credit card. But American Express said I was too late. Can you help?

My inbox is full of messages from people who, like you, gave no thought to whether the company they booked a trip with would remain solvent until their departure date.

Most of those complaints, though, concern lost flights and cruises, not the missed chance to see a yellow-breasted songbird so rare that it breeds almost exclusively in the shade of young jack pine trees of Michigan and Wisconsin.

What this avian cutie has against the shade of more mature trees is beyond the scope of this column. But I can tell you the frustrating reason behind your money being gone forever — even though many others, in similar situations, can get their money back relatively easily.

We are talking, essentially, about bankruptcy. But I’m not using that term here because, technically, it applies only to cases filed in the federal court system — often using the infamous Chapters 7 and 11 statutes. Pardson, the company that published the birding magazine since 1978 and ran its tours, filed in the Ohio state court system.

But for our purposes, the federal and state processes are, like crows and ravens, more alike than different. And in both systems, there is one pretty straightforward way for travelers to recover their money, and another — with much longer odds — if the first way fails.

The easy way is through a credit card, although only under specific conditions. To begin, the traveler has to have used a credit card — debit cards and other forms of payment won’t work. That’s because credit card issuers must follow the Fair Credit Billing Act, signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford in 1974. Under one provision of this law, credit card issuers are required to refund card holders who were victims of billing errors.

The law’s definitions of “billing error” includes a company’s later failure to deliver a good or service. How does a bankruptcy retroactively turn what was a legitimate purchase into a billing error? I don’t know, but I’m not complaining.

You did use a