Then came the problems. 6 weeks into my 3 month contract, Deutsche Bahn sent me a letter with a new card attached, and a request for a payment of €62 for a new card that would be valid for another 12 months. At first I decided I would under no circumstances be paying for this. The main reason is that I'm only here until July, so there's no need for me to have a 12 month card. Renewing my contract by another three months would have been annoying enough, but 12?
Apparently in the small print there's mention of an automatic renewal. I've never been one to fastidiously check terms and conditions, and finally this has come to bite me. Of course you should read all terms and conditions. But if you were buying a 3 month rail card, would you read hundreds of tiny words in German to check you weren't being screwed over? And moreover, would you consider the fact that it could be renewed for a whole year?
For a long time I remained stubborn, determined not to pay money into a system that, in my opinion, is designed to catch people out. I'm not the only person I know that this has happened to. I posted the card back to Deutsche Bahn with a letter stating that I cannot pay for this card as I did not request it, and that they should kindly send me no more letters. I received another letter a couple of weeks later, stating that I now had to pay a fine of €2.50 on top of the card amount.
I decided at this point to write a letter back, reiterating the fact that I had not been aware of the automatic renewal policy, and that I am only living in Germany until July, and that they now had my card so I couldn't possibly pay. Then I did some research online.
It turns out I'm not the only one who thinks that this policy is nefarious and shady. Apparently, according to a couple of sources, this practice of giving the customer no possibility of cancellation is illegal in both the UK and the US. And that's for good reason. Too often it's the customers, and not companies or governments, who get very little say in what they're paying for or where their money goes. After reading some more, including on a forum made for English speakers living in Germany, I saw that Deutsche Bahn employ debt collectors (at the customer's expense) to ensure that they receive the money you *cough cough* owe them. I also found that German law does not protect the customer here. Shame on them. On one forum someone explained how they had received a court demand for five times the original value of the card. On hearing these facts, I decided to cough up the €64.50 and try and inform other people about this policy so they don't make the same mistake as me.
There are two morals to this story. The first is that you should always read terms and conditions, and in hindsight that was a big error on my part (having said that, I bought this card when I'd lived in Germany for less than a month, and bearing in mind it was only provided in German, even if I had read it, misunderstanding parts of it would have been inevitable). The second is that, as is so often the case, a large corporation dictates the situation and the customer is left pretty powerless. "We cannot accept the cancellation of your BahnCard renewal, after 6 weeks prior to the expiration date" is corporate bullshit for "we've designed a policy that will usually end up in you paying for more than what you want, and there's not much you can do about it."
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