Josie Eccles forgot to pay a £5 drop-off charge at Manchester Airport.
The next bill she saw was £170, and it arrived from a debt collection firm.
The 32-year-old marketing consultant from Cheshire was flying to Malta on 30 May with her mum and her three-year-old son.
Her husband, 33, pulled into the Terminal Two drop-off zone at around 2pm, lifted the bags out and left.
“My husband was there for under five minutes,” she told Creatorzine.
Neither of them remembered the £5 charge inside the 24-hour window.
She rang him from Malta a couple of days later to ask, expecting a penalty.
He checked the airport’s payment portal, entered the registration and found nothing waiting.
“I tried again a few days later, and still no charge appeared, so we thought we’d just wait and see if we got a letter in the post,” she says.
Nothing came.
The letter that turned up two months later
Almost two months on, she opened a letter from a debt recovery company.
It said she had ignored previous correspondence. The charge now stood at £170, payable in full or in four instalments of £42.50, with a warning that the figure could climb and end up in court.
She says no original parking charge notice ever reached her.
“I was very confused, as it had been two months since the airport drop-off and I had received no correspondence at all,” she says.
“To receive a letter from a debt recovery company seemed rather extreme. At this point, I thought it must be a misunderstanding.”
An appeal window she says she never saw
Josie went to APCOA, the airport’s car parking operator, to appeal.
An automated reply told her the appeal window had closed and the case had gone to debt recovery.
So she called the debt firm. According to her, staff said Manchester Airport held evidence that a letter went out on 5 June. She asked whether it had gone tracked or recorded.
She says she was told it hadn’t.
That left her stuck, because the letter was the only thing that would have told her how to pay.
“The only way I would know how to pay the penalty fine was by reading the instructions sent in the letter,” she says.
“So without the letter I had no chance of ever paying the charge before it was handed over to debt recovery.”
Two more letters followed, this time raising the prospect of court and a bill of up to £235.
She claims a member of staff confirmed her emails had arrived but told her the company would not look into disputes.
Pay £170 or go to court, she says she was told, and any court action would be the airport’s to bring.
A reply in 10 seconds
She submitted an online enquiry to Manchester Airport offering to pay the £60 she believed she owed, attaching her dispute and the legal grounds behind it.
“Within 10 seconds of submitting, I had received an AI response stating this had been handed over to debt recovery and I should liaise directly with them,” she says.
She forwarded the lot to the complaints department.
“I have still not had any response or acknowledgement.”
“It’s about the principle”
Josie takes the £5 on the chin. The rest, she doesn’t.
“I hold my hands up, we forgot to pay the standard £5 charge within the next 24 hours, so a fine was expected, but to increase it to up to £235 was ridiculous,” she says.
“I can afford to pay the fine, it’s not about financial difficulty. It’s about the principle of the system being set up to catch you out.
“If the letter is so important, surely it would be sent tracked?”
She points out there is no barrier and no machine at the drop-off zone.
Cameras log the plate, then the airport waits for the driver to remember.
“I’m sure that’s why they removed the barriers, as they knew it would catch people out.”
She wants a free grace period. “I think under 10 minutes should be free, but unfortunately all airports in the UK at least charge these days.”
Settled, in the end
An APCOA spokesperson said on 3 September that the company had been in touch with her and offered the original £60 charge, which she has since paid. The matter is resolved.
Manchester Airport had not commented at the time of publication, as reported by Jam Press.
Why It Matters
The following is Creatorzine editorial framing.
Stories like this one travel because the numbers are absurd and the escalation is legible to everyone.
A fiver becomes £235. That’s the exact shape of content that performs, which is why airport-fine videos and screenshot threads keep landing in feeds and why creators who cover consumer grief rarely run short of material.
The AI reply in 10 seconds is the other half of it. When the complaints route answers instantly and says nothing, the audience becomes the escalation route, and anyone with reach knows it long before they know their legal grounds.
Drop-off fees have crept up across UK airports while the barriers have come down, leaving camera systems that log a plate and rely on drivers paying later from memory.
Josie’s case is what happens when that memory fails once.
APCOA has closed her file at £60. Whether that concession is standard when the first letter can’t be proven is a question the airport hasn’t answered yet.
