In April, Kathryn Hansen was ordering some new checks from Wells Fargo when the agent on the phone made her an offer. Open a home equity line of credit and you’ll get two free plane tickets to London. That’s easily $1,000 per person, she determined, well worth paying the $275 closing costs for a HELOC, which she was interested in anyway.

Hansen, who lives in St. Paul and works for Target in real estate development, checked with her partner and settled on the dates for the trip, next year. Then she learned the tickets came with a condition: you have to pay for a week’s stay in a hotel. Well, she and her partner were going to have to get a hotel anyway, so that was acceptable. Then came the unacceptable.

When Hansen called to make the reservations, the company handling the promotions informed her that she would have to pay $600 per ticket “for taxes and a surcharge.” Translation: the free tickets would actually cost $1,200.

“It was a real surprise to me,” she said. “I just couldn’t believe what they were telling me.”

Hansen did a little investigation, and managed to get Wells Fargo to fax her something that looked like an internal document about the promotional program, which ran from April to June. On page 2 of the three-page document, there it was: “Two Free Round-Trip Airline tickets to Mexico, Hawaii or London with the purchase of accommodations at a participating hotel for 7 nights.”

When she had the document, Hansen had the goods. She said a Wells Fargo vice president in California called her and it was clear that the executive was perturbed that someone had let this paperwork out of the building. Unlike government, corporate America has the legal right to withhold virtually all of its internal records from public scrutiny.

I contacted Wells Fargo’s communications office on Monday. On Tuesday, Peggy Gunn, a Wells Fargo spokesperson, said she would look into the situation.

This morning, Hansen got a Fedex package from Wells Fargo. Inside were three Visa gift cards totaling $1,250. Later came a call from the executive, apologizing profusely.

Gunn, the spokesperson for Wells Fargo, told me that Hansen was the only customer who had this experience.

“Our folks have been working with her, prior to your call,” she said. “There was just a miscommunication about the details of the offer.”

And that’s all she wanted to say about it.

Hansen isn’t sure she’s going to London, since she’s not thrilled with her choice of hotels. But she does know something: “It pays to look into things. When something’s not right, it’ s not right. You need to pursue it.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Complaint sagas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.