There’s a few steps to raising a chargeback now - the quick summary is, after you’ve raised the chargeback
- We now notify the merchant immediately and they get a few days to refund you and send us details of the refund. If they do this, you’ll get the money back promptly, but not many merchants are signed up to this yet
- If that doesn’t happen, it can then sometimes take a little time for a disputes COp to get the formal documention in order
- We submit the chargeback
- The merchant has 45 days to dispute the chargeback. If they don’t, you win and we’ll release the funds to you in a couple of days (this area is on the “to automate” list)
- If they dispute it, we have 45 days to request arbitration. It can take a little while as this requires more documentation; depending upon why they’re disputing we may also need to gather more info from you. We don’t always have to - sometimes the basis for the dispute is just factually and blatantly wrong and re-raising it is a no-brainer.
- They then have a period of time to either concede it or allow it to arbitrate
- If it goes to arbitration, it will take longer while Mastercard deal with it
So 3 months is a pretty reasonable upper estimate (especially because it’s unlikely for a flight refund to escalate the full way). Note also that Mastercard are replacing arbitration soon - I’m not familiar with the specifics of its replacement, though the operating principles aren’t dramatically different.
There’s some work to be done around making chargebacks more “visible” and giving better status updates in the app, but believe me when I say the majority of the time a chargeback is stuck in the “waiting for the merchant to maybe dispute it state”. There’s also no “concede early” option, which is a bit unfortunate - it would be nice if there was (and even better if there was some kind of incentive to be speedy about responding to chargebacks)