I’m having a current dispute with BarclayCard US regarding an over the limit fee they imposed on my Spirit Airlines MasterCard account. And the irony of the situation: it was a flight purchase ON SPIRIT AIRLINES that caused me to go over my limit; for only one day.

I spoke at length with a regular phone rep “Duke” and got nowhere with him and then he transferred me to a “Christine” who turned out to be just as much customer unfriendly as Duke.

The problem is the day their system notified me via email of the “approaching limit/over limit message”, which is when I made my payment, that turns out to be one day AFTER it was posted to my account. So in other words BarclayCard US only tell you about being over your limit once they’ve hit your account with a fee, nice folks.

Furthermore Christine went on to tell me that EVERY fee reversal is audited and “Big Brother” listens to the phone call so she couldn’t reverse the fee or she would get in trouble. When I asked to talk to that person, she didn’t have an answer for me.

My question for Barclay Card US is what is your acquisition cost per customer? Every customer-centric company with any sort of success in this country knows that number. I’m guessing it’s a few hundred dollars; and they’re going to lose me as a customer for a fraction of that cost. Logic would say if it costs “X” to get a customer, and only a fraction to keep them as one (and also so they don’t do blog posts like this or Tweets bashing them thereby causing them to lose more customers) then it would make sense to make them happy.

What we’re talking about here BarclayCard is one day (24 hours) where I made payment but it didn’t hit your system, so you ding me for over limit fee?  As far as I’m concerned you can take the laughable credit limit you gave me and can shove it. What are you going to do, to make your customers happy? It appears nothing. My next contact will be to the executives at Spirit Airlines to let them know how little you value your customers and how your alerts work in such a way that they incur fees for your customers, where they should help customers them prevent them.

Here is another similar complaint about BarclayCard on the Rip Off Report: http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/289/RipOff0289254.htm

Stay tuned more to come.