I haven't a clue how red-tape or bureaucracy works in the Euro-zone especially over the last year of C-19 changes, still ongoing. But it looks like your family was a casual victim of downstream collateral damage when dealing with businesses, especially online.

We are some old fogies over here in the states and my wife insists on paper statements whenever she/we can when dealing with business online. Those old-fashioned paper trails (or e-docs) can come in handy like yours did when the airline still didn't want to grant a refund. It's like who are these guys? Legit mobsters, maybe an insurance company, or just a bank, where input is easy and output is another game entirely. Ever noticed that?

Of course every time we deal with any kind of finance online we get pitched to go paperless, and it's always a temptation for me personally, silly me. But if we can we always get a snail mail statement even in 2021, I know our bad. :-) But with all things e-business when there is some discrepancy over just about anything, the burden of proof is assumed to be the customer's problem, and all their adverts about how much they care and such is just so much ad gas. (not all biz is like this online, but many are)

One more drizzle here: Our pharmacy has an online presence and basically the whole web design is almost always in some state of flux, remember the old days of the website were under construction(?) 🚧 Well, web marketing has advanced to the point of never informing the users of anything at any time until corporate can cook up some bonafide horse shit boilerplate that explains nothing but blathers on forever. (Kind of like listening to a Senate hearing in D.C.). So, the (1)webmasters and the (2)local pharmacy, and the (3)corporate-speak messaging, all 3, are NEVER on the same page as to WTF is going on this idiotic web site that never seems to get standardized, (and really, basically they do this; the web site is constantly pitching to let the pharmacy totally control your med regime, like any business service on the web which is 'go paperless' or some subscription auto-billing - No F'ng Way!) BTW: no matter what does/doesn't happen online the customer always ends up calling the pharmacy, getting into a long phone queue, and if lucky then the customer gets what they want, using the 100+-year-old technology - sigh.

That's enough ranting for now, you got the book today, sorry, in the future I'll try to condense this down, a lot. :-)