Access UK Doesn't Work - IHS Surcharge Refund

[USAStudent]

Studying in England starting mid-September. I am 18 and applied for Tier 4 general student visa yesterday using Access UK (immediately after receiving CAS number). I went through, including paying the IHS surcharge, to the point where one schedules the biometric appointment.

But Access UK will not allow me to schedule an appointment-- no matter what location, date/time, premium or standard service. Whatever choice I make, I receive the error message: "Review your answers: the appointment you have chosen is no longer available. Please choose another time." This non-functionality has continued for the last 18 hours.

I do not have time to waste and I am not going to pay 1.37 GBP per minute to the UK government because they cannot get their own visa application software to work properly.

So I restarted my application from scratch on Visa4UK. Worked like a charm. Now I am at the point where I pay the IHS surcharge-- for the second time because I also paid it on Access UK.

So I am hoping the refund process for the first IHS surcharge payment does not take too long. Anyone ever have to pay twice and then get refunded one of their surcharge payments?

Oh, and Access UK is very poor quality software. Unfortunate but true.

[USAStudent]

PS: As far as the Access UK non-functionality is concerned, I attempted to schedule the biometric appointment both from a Microsoft based laptop and an Apple laptop with identical results. So it was not a "cookies" or other other issue on my end.

[wikki]

yup. Lots of people have encountered the same issue...so not surprised. As for the refund it is about 2 weeks.