Admit it, vacationing in a French château is a little bit of a cliché. So when the Château de Candes set out to turn itself into a wellness resort, its owners had one thing in mind: They didn’t want to be like everyone else.

And that’s exactly what they’ve done. 

When you set foot inside the 19th-century neoclassical hotel, built on a UNESCO World Heritage Site about a two-hour train ride from Paris, everything is, well, different. 

Sure, you have those panoramic views of the Loire, and of the iconic village of Candes-Saint-Martin just below. There’s a vast wine cellar with the press still intact. And there’s a medieval tower where you can sleep, if you’re feeling adventurous. 

But keep looking.

A “non-elitist” art hotel in the Loire Valley

Château de Candes is both a wellness center and, for lack of a better term, an artist colony. Bertrand Pignet, the château’s general manager, calls it an art hotel. The property has hosted over 40 resident artists who create modernist paintings, sculptures and other forms of visual art on permanent display throughout the property.

“We wanted to break the image of a castle frozen in time and open it up to everyone in a non-elitist spirit,” he says.

The story behind this unconventional approach begins with his mother, Monique Pignet, who says she initially resisted the idea of buying a castle 17 years ago. 

“I like Paris,” she says. “I like big cities.” 

But when she saw Candes, particularly the views where the Loire and Vienne rivers meet, she was won over.

Monique and her husband, Didier, took on the painstaking restoration themselves. She meticulously oversaw construction of a new staircase to match the original style and preserved priceless 17th-century wallpaper. 

Her guiding principle? Unity and calmness in design. It’s almost as if she’d planned to turn it into a wellness resort all along.

When fire juggling meets hospitality management

Bertrand and his wife, Jingwen, took over management in 2022. But like almost everything else at Château de Candes, this isn’t your typical hotel succession story.

Bertrand Pignet spent a decade as a professional fire juggler and dancer, traveling globally with his Chinese wife. They even reached the semi-finals of China’s Got Talent in 2021. Now they’re applying those performance skills to hospitality.

What do fire juggling and hospitality management have in common? Plenty. Both require discipline and organizational skills. You also need to understand your audience and its needs. 

Bertrand Pignet says while many fire jugglers have a reputation for their intensity, his performances — and he still performs from time to time — are quietly poetic, often evoking an emotional response from his audience, not unlike the art displayed in the château’s park.

More than just another spa treatment

The Château de Candes offers something genuinely different from conventional luxury wellness retreats. The centerpiece is the Troglodyte Spa, buried within ancient caves originally used as prune-drying ovens. These caves are said to possess special “telluric” energy from the stone, that fosters deep relaxation.

“It has a very earthy smell,” says Monique Pignet. “The energy is good.” 

The spa includes an indoor pool, sauna, relaxation areas, and massage cabins, all designed around a centuries-old cave.

But the wellness philosophy goes deeper. Hatha and vinyasa yoga classes take place in a geodesic dome within the château’s 12-acre park. Everything — right down to the landscaping — is done with wellness in mind. The rounded topiaries overlook a field of lavender.

“It’s calming,” she says.

The connection between art and wellness isn’t theoretical here. As Bertrand Pignet puts it: “Art can soothe you.” Most visitors to the art park finish their visit saying they feel like time itself was suspended as they walked through the oak forest. 

At this château, the accommodations tell their own story

The 34 rooms spread across 21 independent units range from seven bedrooms in the main castle to two in a tower, as well as various small private houses. Each comes with its own kitchen — a practical choice borne from Monique Pigner’s experience traveling with small children and wanting to cook for them.

“We wanted to make people feel at home,” she explains. The newly opened on-site restaurant, Baladin, reinforces this philosophy with homemade, locally sourced, organic, and vegetarian-friendly dishes at what she calls “friendly” prices.

This isn’t about creating a four-star hotel experience in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s about making you feel something.

The art of authentic hospitality

Guests who come to the château are looking for something out of the ordinary, says Bertrand Pignet. 

“Usually the guests that come here are happy to be here because they were looking for something different, and they found it.”

The challenge, he acknowledges, is conveying the spirit of a place through words or images before guests arrive. 

“It’s quite difficult,” he admits. “You can use words. You can put videos, photos, but it’s quite hard to tell the proper story without somehow simplifying it or choosing one aspect.”

That’s where the personal touch makes all the difference. When cyclists stop by the restaurant during their Loire Valley tours, Bertrand engages with them, shows them around, and often converts a meal into an overnight stay for their next visit.

There are some things you would expect. For example, the property offers authentic fishing trips down the river on a traditional wooden boat, and visits to nearby La Champignonnière du Saut aux Loups, a historic mushroom farm where visitors can taste local specialties like galipettes — stuffed mushrooms cooked in traditional ovens.

What makes the Château de Candes tick

Walking through the château, you sense this isn’t hospitality by formula. It’s deeply personal and influenced by a family’s passions and quirky journey from Parisian city-dwellers to château owners to fire juggliers — and back to French hospitality management.

The eclectic approach works. Maybe it’s the meeting of two rivers that creates a special energy. Maybe it’s the combination of ancient stones, contemporary art, and genuine family warmth. Or maybe it’s simply what happens when people stop trying to be like everyone else and start being themselves.

In a world where boutique hotels often feel like they’re following the same playbook, Château de Candes offers something rare: it’s a hotel where the owners threw out the manual and decided to go their own way. 

Does it work? It depends on what kind of traveler you are. If you like predictable, cookie-cutter hotels, then perhaps not.

But if you’re the type who’s grown tired of places that all look the same, then maybe a château where fire jugglers serve breakfast and artists paint among ancient trees is exactly the kind of vacation you never knew you were looking for.

Tony Rogozinski thought he followed the rules when he called StubHub to cancel his Lady Gaga ticket listing. But when the site sold the tickets anyway and billed him $864, he found himself in a customer service loop that led nowhere. Can he get his money back, or is he stuck paying for a mistake he didn’t make?

Question

I need your help getting a reimbursement of $864 from StubHub. I recently listed two Lady Gaga tickets for sale on its platform. Before the tickets sold on the site, I decided to sell them to another party outside of the StubHub website. I knew I needed to cancel my listing to avoid any issues, so I called its customer service department to make sure everything was handled correctly. 

I spoke with a representative who explicitly informed me that no further action was required on my part. He assured me the listing was taken care of. I acted in good faith based on that professional advice. 

To my shock, the tickets sold on StubHub because the listing remained active. Since I had already sold the tickets elsewhere, I couldn’t fulfill the order. StubHub then charged me $864 for the cancellation. 

I’ve tried multiple times to escalate this beyond the standard customer service line, but I haven’t had any success. It’s been a frustrating experience. This is certainly not a customer-friendly process. I have multiple emails showing my attempts to resolve this. I’d like StubHub to do the right thing and reimburse the $864 instead of stonewalling me and hiding behind a cancellation policy that ignores the bad advice its own representative gave me. 

— Tony Rogozinski, Sacramento, Calif. 

Answer

When a company representative tells you that “no further action is required,” that should be the end of the story. StubHub should have ensured that once its agent gave you that verbal confirmation, the listing was actually deactivated in its system. A customer shouldn’t be penalized for a company’s internal communication breakdown. 

You did the right thing by calling to verify the status of your listing. But phone calls are famously difficult to prove. To avoid this in the future, you should always insist on a confirmation email while you’re still on the line. If the agent says the listing is gone, wait until that “canceled” notification hits your inbox before you hang up. A paper trail is your only real protection when a company stonewalls you later. 

If you run into a wall with front-line customer service, you can always appeal to an executive. I publish the names and email addresses of the StubHub executives on my advocacy site, Elliott.org.

Your case is a classic example of what happens when the system doesn’t work as designed. I’ve seen similar issues with other ticket platforms where a glitch leads to a double sale and a massive penalty fee for the seller. 

I contacted StubHub on your behalf. A spokesperson for the company told me that after reviewing the order, they confirmed there was “confusion” around next steps after you contacted them. 

StubHub issued a full credit of $864 back to your original payment method. You’ve confirmed that the money is back and the matter is resolved to your satisfaction. It’s nice to see a company admit when its own advice caused a mess. 

After Holland America discovers a pricing error on a last-minute cruise, it cancels Cindy Woodring’s ticket and asks for twice her original fare if she wants to keep her plans. She wants the cruise line to honor its original deal. Who’s right?

Question

My husband and I are loyal Holland America Line customers. Since we live in South Florida, we often look for last-minute deals. 

A few months ago, I saw a 10-day cruise on the Zuiderdam posted on its website. The prices were changing as I watched, but I managed to book an ocean-view room for $479 per person. The total came to $958. 

We applied a $200 cruise credit and paid the remaining $758 in full. I received an email confirmation showing our booking was paid.

Three days later, I received a new confirmation from Holland America indicating we now owed an additional $1,530. I immediately called our personal cruise consultant, who was completely unhelpful. She told me the original price was a pricing error. When I asked to speak with a supervisor, she refused.

I followed the advice on your site and emailed guest relations managers. I even sent screenshots of the pricing I saw online. Holland America wouldn’t budge. We felt this was a bait-and-switch. We ended up canceling for a full refund because we weren’t going to pay double the price. But we really wanted to take this cruise to see crew members we know. Is there any way Holland America can be held to the original price it advertised and accepted?

— Cindy Woodring, Coral Springs, Fla. 

Answer

Holland America should have honored the price it published on its website. When a company displays a price, accepts your payment, and sends a “paid in full” confirmation, it should be a done deal. The only exception is when the company made an obvious fare error—for example, moving a decimal point and charging $9.58 instead of $958.

The cruise line pointed to Section 2 of its cruise contract, which it says lets it off the hook for pricing errors. I didn’t see anything in Section 2 about pricing errors, but in several places on its site, Holland America gives itself the right to cancel a cruise for any “lawful” reason.

 In supplemental pricing terms, the company says, “Holland America Line reserves the right not to honor any published prices that it determines were erroneous due to printing, electronic or clerical error. Holland America Line shall have the right to refuse or cancel any bookings made at an incorrect price whether or not the order has been confirmed and your credit card charged.”

But was this an obvious error? I think $47 a day on a luxury cruise, with all meals included, is almost too good to be true. But for a last-minute deal during the off-season? Maybe not.

You did the right thing by taking screenshots and keeping a paper trail. You also tried to escalate the issue within the company.  When a front-line agent refuses to let you talk to a supervisor, it’s time to stop calling and start writing. You can find the names and email addresses of the Holland America executives on my advocacy site, Elliott.org. 

I reached out to Holland America on your behalf. 

“We regret that a pricing error briefly appeared for this voyage and apologize for the confusion this caused,” a representative told me. “Once the issue was identified, we promptly notified affected agents and guests.”

Holland America says it won’t honor the incorrect fare, but it has offered complimentary stateroom upgrades to anyone who chooses to continue with their voyage.” That “goodwill” upgrade required you to pay the extra $1,530 first. 

This is a disappointing result, especially considering your loyalty status. When a cruise line makes a mistake on its own website, it should own it—not ask its best customers to pay for the glitch. Next time, consider keeping your booking while you escalate your complaint to the executives. Once you hit “cancel,” your leverage disappears faster than the shrimp buffet on formal night.

I’m writing this column as a public service for the rest of us. I’m not happy about the resolution, but now you know: Even if you paid for everything, your cruise line can withdraw its offer and ask you to pay more.

Jerry Auer thought he’d bought great seats to see AC/DC at Notre Dame Stadium in Indiana. But he was thunderstruck when the seating chart on StubHub didn’t match reality.

Auer believed he had front row seats. He checked the map on StubHub, saw Section 121 was right by the action, so he dropped $506 on his tickets.

Just one small problem. StubHub’s map didn’t reflect reality. When Auer cross-referenced his purchase with the official venue map, he realized he hadn’t bought front-row access. He’d bought overpriced seats behind the stage. 

Auer contacted the company immediately, but instead of a “thank you” for spotting its mistake, he says a representative hung up on him.

“I was not treated nicely,” he says.

Auer found himself on a highway to hell, spending the next few months stuck in a customer service escalation loop. Finally, he contacted our advocacy team.

This case raises several important questions:

• Does the StubHub’s FanProtect Guarantee cover technical errors made by the platform itself?
• How can consumers prove a website was displaying incorrect information at the time of purchase?
• What should you do when a company fixes a mistake but refuses to acknowledge it impacted your order?

Can you trust the map on a third-party ticket site?

When you’re navigating the secondary ticket market, you aren’t just buying a seat. You’re buying a representation of a seat. 

Auer relied on the visual data provided by StubHub, which clearly showed his section adjacent to the stage. The trouble is that these platforms often pull data from various sources, and occasionally, the wires get crossed. 

In this instance, the map was literally flipped.

Here’s the StubHub map.

And here’s the actual map.

Oops.

Auer was proactive about the problem. He told StubHub the map was wrong, and the very next day, the company fixed it. 

But then came the corporate gaslighting. Once the map was corrected, StubHub looked at his order and told him that his seats aligned exactly with the now-correct map. They essentially told him he’d bought backstage tickets because the map said they were backstage—ignoring the fact that when he bought his tickets, the map told him the seats were in the front.

This is a classic “gotcha” moment. StubHub’s initial stance was that all sales are final unless there’s a seller error. Since the seller listed the correct section and row, StubHub argued the transaction was valid, conveniently forgetting that its own interface led Auer to that section under false pretenses. It’s a reminder that while the FanProtect Guarantee sounds like a warm blanket, it’s often more like tissue paper when technical glitches happen.

Why the paper trail must include visual evidence

I tell people all the time to start a paper trail—even when they don’t think they need it. Usually, that means keeping every email and text message. 

But in the world of digital interfaces, a picture is worth a thousand texts. Auer did something incredibly smart and, frankly, quite unusual: He took a screenshot of the incorrect map when he realized something was fishy.

Most people don’t think to do this. We assume the official site is right, or that if it’s wrong, the company will have a record of the change. They don’t. Or if they do, the front-line customer service agents can’t—or won’t—access that history. 

Auer’s screenshot was the smoking gun. Without it, he was just another fan with buyer’s remorse, a category StubHub uses to deny refunds.

If you are booking a special seat—whether it’s a specific view, an aisle seat for accessibility, or a front stage spot—you must document the interface. Websites are ephemeral. They change in an instant, often to hide the evidence of the creator’s own blunders. Auer’s persistence in sending these screenshots over and over was the only reason this case stayed alive.

What happens when escalation leads to a dead end?

Auer was stuck in the escalation loop for months. StubHub told him it was waiting for an internal team to review the case. Meanwhile, they told him nothing could be done until the tickets were transferred to him—which wasn’t scheduled to happen until the day of the concert in September.

What a brilliant stall tactic. If a customer has to wait until the day of the show to verify an error, they’ve already spent the money, traveled to the venue, and lost all their leverage. StubHub’s virtual assistant even suggested he could just relist the tickets if he wasn’t happy. 

Translation: “We took your money for a mistake we made, and now you can try to take someone else’s money to break even.”

Auer refused to accept this. He quoted the FanProtect policy, went to the BBB, and eventually found his way to my desk. He knew that he hadn’t made a mistake. He’d bought a product based on a faulty premise. 

When a company tells you that the internal team is reviewing it, they’re often just hoping you’ll get bored and go away. Auer didn’t go away.

Will he get his tickets fixed?

When I reached out to StubHub, it gave me the same answer it had given Auer. The tickets were for the correct seats. End of story.

So I sent the screen shots.

StubHub reviewed the “before” and “after” maps and finally admitted the map was inadvertently flipped at the time of purchase. 

StubHub refunded Auer’s $506, putting him back in black. It also sent him a 25 percent discount voucher for his trouble and offered to help him find replacement tickets. StubHub is also reviewing other purchases made during that flipped window to make sure other fans weren’t left in the dark.

Auer’s case is a cautionary tale. For those about to rock, don’t trust the pixels. Verify the venue map elsewhere, and for heaven’s sake, take a screenshot. You never know when you’ll need to prove that “front stage” actually meant “behind the speakers.”

On a recent flight from Queenstown, New Zealand, to Melbourne, I discovered the limits of luggage tracking technology—theirs and mine.

At the baggage claim, Virgin Australia delivered all of our belongings except for my son’s. It was a hard-to-miss purple Peak Design rollaboard. 

What happened to it? Even the airline didn’t seem to know. Its system showed it scanned at the origin and destination, and then it vanished.

That’s when I realized that tracking a bag and delivering it are two very different things. Despite recent improvements, your tracker and the airline’s system still can’t always talk to each other. Fortunately, there are things you can do to keep your luggage from getting lost right now.

The numbers are getting better, but …

Airlines mishandled about 24 million bags in 2025, and the mishandling rate fell 23% to 4.9 bags per 1,000 passengers, according to SITA’s 2026 Baggage IT Insights report. The IT provider says it’s the first time mishandling has dropped below pre-pandemic levels. It’s progress, but bags are still being lost, and when it’s your luggage, the statistics mean nothing.

International routes are five times more likely to lose luggage than domestic flights. So if you’re flying from New Zealand to Australia, congratulations: your chances of becoming a statistic just took off. But it doesn’t have to happen to you.

Why your tracker and the airline still don’t speak the same language

Your tracker and the airline’s baggage system are finally getting introduced. Apple’s Share Item Location feature lets you send an AirTag’s location to participating airlines. In March, SITA added Google’s Find Hub to WorldTracer, the system more than 500 airlines and ground handlers use to trace delayed bags. SITA says the Apple integration cut permanently lost luggage by 90 percent in its first year and sped up delayed-bag recovery by 26%.

But it only works if your airline participates and your tracker runs on Apple’s or Google’s network. Otherwise, the two systems still speak different languages.

“Airline baggage systems fundamentally rely on optical barcode scanners at choke points,” says Jacob Wedderburn-Day, CEO of Stasher, a travel tech company managing luggage storage across 1,000 cities. “If a paper tag is smudged, torn or facing the wrong way, it misses the scan and enters a black hole until manually processed. Devices like AirTags rely entirely on mesh networks of passing smartphones.”

In other words, the airline knows where your bag should be. Your phone knows where your bag is. It’s not the same thing.

Marzena Beltek, general manager for the travel logistics company Doma Shipping & Travel, frames it as a data-integration gap. 

“Airlines track tags, not bags,” she says, “and tags are the weak link.” A creased label, a wet barcode, a rushed transfer — any of these breaks the scan chain. Meanwhile, your Bluetooth tracker keeps pinging away, blissfully unaware that no airline agent can act on it without a matching internal scan record.

Alex Sarellas, CEO of PAJ GPS, has lived this. “There have been times where my AirTag showed my bag sitting in an arrivals storage room and my Tile confirmed it was on the opposite side of the terminal, but the airline kept insisting my bag hadn’t even left the departure airport,” he says. “I showed them screenshots from both trackers and magically my bag reappeared in 10 minutes.”

So is luggage trackable? Yes, with the right strategy.

What’s the best way to track your bag now? 

Single-tracker travel is so 2020. One AirTag is for amateurs. Two trackers on separate networks is more of a strategy. Experts are now calling this approach tracker-stacking — and it’s become the closest thing to a genuine gold standard.

“The most effective strategy is a layered approach,” says Raymond Yorke,  a spokesman for travel insurance company Redpoint Resolutions. “Redundancy matters.”

Paul Stewart, founder of My Baggage, an international luggage shipping company, recommends what he calls a “High-Low” approach: “A Bluetooth tracker for short-range recovery in the terminal, paired with a permanent QR-coded exterior tag.”

Harry Morgan, CEO of Global Charter, suggests pairing an AirTag with a Tile for iPhone users, or a Samsung SmartTag2 with a Tile for Android users — specifically because the underlying networks are different. 

“One tracker should be placed near the handle or outer shell for stronger signals and faster pings, while the second sits deeper inside the case,” he says. “Batteries should be checked before every trip.”

Namrata Thakkar, an AI systems architect, goes a step further, advocating a triple-stack: an AirTag for its massive Find My network density, a Tile or Galaxy SmartTag2 for cross-platform coverage in Android-heavy international airports, and a permanent QR-code plate from a service like Dynotag or Okoban — one that doesn’t rely on batteries and links to a cloud-based contact page.

“Until airlines allow passenger-side GPS location data to trigger exception handling in their sorting software, the two systems will never truly sync,” she notes.

Fortunately, you have a tool in your pocket that can lessen the chances of your luggage being lost.

Your phone is your secret weapon against luggage loss 

There’s a checklist developing among frequent travelers that sounds almost paranoid until you’ve spent 48 hours watching your kid wear the same clothes.

Before you leave home, shoot a 10-second video of your packed bag before you close it. That’s your inventory if the bag is pilfered or the exterior tag is torn off. Then, at check-in, take these photos:

• The tag close-up. A high-resolution image of the 10-digit barcode on the airline’s bag tag. This is the number agents actually search.
• The weight receipt. A photo of the bag on the airport scale. This proves the content’s weight for reimbursement limits.

Steve Payerle, president of Next Level Technologies, a managed IT and cybersecurity firm in Columbus, Ohio, says you should not rely on the airline’s systems to track your luggage. He recommends photographing the airline-printed tag number alongside the bag itself — and keeping it handy. “That exact tag number becomes your leverage when an airline’s system says ‘lost’ but your tracker says ‘Terminal B, Gate 12.’ Agents can manually pull a bag by tag number far faster than by description.”

How I found got my son’s bag

A Virgin Australia employee assured my son that they’d find his luggage. “It’s around here somewhere,” she said. “But I can’t go looking for it right now—we’re a little short-staffed.”

Fortunately, my son had a Tile inside his bag and a photo to show the agent at Virgin Australia. He filled out a property irregularity report and we got a ride to our apartment in Melbourne.

Looking back, I wish we’d taken more photos of the bag, including the barcode and its contents. I’m also adding a second tracker. I use an Android phone, so I’m looking forward to Google’s Pixel Tag, which goes on sale next month. It runs on Google’s Find Hub network, so I can share its location with any airline that accepts Find Hub links through WorldTracer. My son couldn’t do that with his Tile.

The biggest mistake we made wasn’t related to tracking, but packing. He had all of his clothes and toiletries in his checked luggage (I warned him against it), so he spent the next two days wearing the same clothes.

Finally, almost 48 hours after we landed, a courier delivered my son’s luggage to our apartment. Better tracking technology might have led us to the checked bag faster. Triple-layered tracking and obsessive photographing of your bag is a great idea, but the best solution is to avoid this mess in the first place by never checking your luggage.

Remember that new rule on unfair or deceptive fees that went into effect back in 2025? You know, the one that was supposed to kill resort fees?

Since then, a hotel or booking site that advertises a room to an American traveler is supposed to show the total price, mandatory fees included, in the first number you see.

Or not. Our readers are still running into these annoying extras. It turns out that exterminating these dishonest charges is more difficult than it first appeared.

How did resort fees become “illegal”?

The new FTC rule covers short-term lodging and live-event tickets. It bans what the government calls bait-and-switch pricing, and it defines a mandatory fee as one you can’t reasonably avoid. A resort fee counts even if the front desk waives it when you push back. Cleaning fees on vacation rentals count, too, which is why Airbnb started including them in its prices last year. So do card-processing fees when there’s no other way to pay.

But three things can still appear later: taxes and government charges, shipping, and optional add-ons you choose yourself.

States moved first on resort fee bans:

• California’s SB 478 took effect July 1, 2024, requiring advertised prices to include all mandatory fees, with exceptions for taxes and reasonable shipping. Another law, AB 537, applied the same idea specifically to short-term lodging advertising.
• Texas authorities have reached settlements with six companies over hotel pricing. Booking.com paid $9.5 million on Aug. 19, 2025. Hyatt paid $1.25 million on Dec. 30, 2025. Marriott, Omni, Choice and Hilton also reached agreements.
• New York City announced a ban on hidden hotel fees and unexpected credit card holds in January. It’s the first American city to take this action against resort fees.

In Congress, the Hotel Fees Transparency Act was introduced in both chambers as S.314 and H.R.1479. It’s stalled in the current congress, but could pass next year.

Abroad is a different country

The FTC rule reaches businesses advertising to U.S. consumers. Book overseas hotels on non-U.S. websites, and you’re outside that system.

Europe has its own framework for handling resort fees. The EU’s price indication rules govern how prices get displayed, Under a coordinated enforcement action, Airbnb committed to showing the total price including all applicable mandatory charges, with Booking.com and Expedia agreeing to pricing presentation changes in December 2020.

So the traveler’s rule of thumb is geographic. In the United States, the number you see should be the number you pay, taxes aside. Elsewhere you have to closely read the confirmation to confirm what charges you’re really paying.

The other side

Hotels argue the fee bundles real amenities, including Wi-Fi, pool access and the fitness center, and that unbundling lets rate-sensitive travelers pay less. Of course, that’s absurd because at the end of the transaction, customers paid more. It only made them think the price was lower.

Some hotel operators say the rule accomplished what it set out to do, since the comparison is now apples to apples, and that a fee disclosed up front is a legitimate line item, not a trick. The American Hotel & Lodging Association has backed a single federal standard, which the Hotel Fees Transparency Act would create, over a state patchwork

And outside the U.S.? It’s still the Wild West, unfortunately. When you book a hotel across the border, you really have to read the fine print. (Then again, you always have to read the fine print.)

If yes: Was the fee included in the price you saw when you booked, or added later?

• Included up front.
• Added at checkout.
• I didn’t notice until I received the folio.

If no: Why not?

• I avoid properties that charge them.
• I asked and it was waived.
• I only book abroad.

My take

The rule did the job it was written to do, and the reason no one noticed is that these fees shouldn’t have existed in the first place. Here’s what I’m curious about: Has the all-in pricing brought the total down or simply forced hotels to raise their prices? I suspect the latter is true. I’ll have to do some more research.

Your turn

Have you noticed the death of resort fees? I’d love to get your comments.

If you’re in Topeka, Kan., next year, you can tour the state capitol, spend an afternoon at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park or catch a concert at Evergy Plaza. 

Oh, and you’ll pay more for your hotel room. On January 1, the city’s transient guest tax rises from 7% to 8.5%. The City Council approved the increase unanimously in May. The money will help fund Visit Topeka, which promotes tourism to the area, as well as Evergy Plaza, the Jayhawk Theatre, Constitution Hall and a planned downtown ice rink. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at your hotel bill, where taxes are added as a “P.S.” and without much explanation.

The hotel industry generated $85.1 billion in local, state and federal taxes in 2025, up $1.7 billion from the previous year, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association.

A single line marked “taxes” makes it too easy for cities to keep raising them. Every hotel bill should come with a standard label, like the Nutrition Facts panel on a box of cereal. I call it Room Facts.

Hotel taxes are out of control

Topeka Deputy Mayor Michelle Hoeferer has pointed out that the tax isn’t collected from Topeka residents “unless they stay in a hotel.” In other words, the people paying it don’t get a vote.

The city has plenty of company. Eagle County, Colo., doubled its lodging tax from 2% to 4% this year. Hawaii raised its transient accommodations tax to 11% too, calling it the nation’s first climate impact fee. Tulsa voters will decide Nov. 3 whether to nearly double their city’s hotel guest tax, from 5% to 9.9%.

And then there’s Omaha, Nebraska, where the combined lodging tax can reach 20.5%, the highest among the nation’s 150 largest cities.

The world is doing it, too

Vienna raised its lodging tax from 3.2% to 5% on July 1 and plans to go to 8% in July 2027. It also got rid of an 11% deduction hotels used to take before calculating the tax, so guests now pay a higher rate on a bigger number. 

In March, Kyoto raised its per-person tax on rooms costing 100,000 yen (about $670) or more from 1,000 yen (about $6.70) to 10,000 yen (about $67). Edinburgh began collecting a 5% visitor levy this year, the first citywide levy in the U.K.

It’s not unfair to ask visitors to chip in. After all, tourists ride the buses, walk the sidewalks and call the police when someone swipes their luggage. 

Covering the cost of a theater or ice rink is more questionable. The trouble is that almost nobody knows they’re funding a community’s entertainment when they stay in a hotel. It’s not disclosed in a meaningful way.

You can’t haggle with the tax man

You can try to negotiate a room rate. You can skip the minibar, and maybe talk your way out of a resort fee or destination fee. But you can’t negotiate a tax. It’s the one charge on your bill you have no say over. Worse, no one has to explain it to you. (Not only that, but even if the front desk clerks wanted to explain it, they probably have no idea what the tax is for.)

The Federal Trade Commission’s rule on unfair or deceptive fees took effect in 2025. It requires hotels to advertise a total price that includes mandatory fees, which was a long-overdue win for travelers. 

But the rule also lets businesses leave “government charges” out of that total. So the price you see online may still exclude taxes. And when you check out, your bill often lumps them into a vague, single line.

We need Room Facts

Here’s a fix that comes straight from the grocery store aisle. Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act in 1990, and the familiar black-and-white Nutrition Facts panel followed a few years later. 

When regulators added trans fat to the label in 2006, manufacturers started reformulating their products. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention later found that trans fat levels in the blood of white adults fell 58% between 2000 and 2009. The label helped change how people shopped, and it changed what companies were willing to sell them.

Room Facts would work the same way. It’s a standard box on every hotel bill. It lists each tax, its rate, the dollar amount, who collects it and what it pays for.

Here’s how one might look for a hypothetical $150 room in Topeka next year. Once you add Topeka’s new guest tax to the usual state, county and city sales taxes, that room carries $26.78 in taxes a night. That’s almost 18% on top of the rate. You’d never know it from a single line that says “taxes.”

Why the label pays off

Knowing what you’re paying won’t lower your bill, but it could change where you stay on your next vacation. If your label showed that a big share of your taxes went to convention marketing, you might book a hotel outside town next time. You might even email the mayor.

City halls would notice. Lodging taxes are politically easy because visitors don’t vote. They do, however, spend money, write reviews and tell their friends. A traveler who can see the whole stack of taxes can complain about it, compare it with the next town or decide not to come back. That kind of feedback is the only brake the system has.

Room Facts would cost next to nothing. Hotels already calculate every one of these taxes, so printing them in a standard box is a formatting job, not a new burden. Any hotel that objects to showing guests where their money goes should have to explain why.

In the meantime, Topeka, you’ve got a new ice rink coming. 

When is a room guarantee not a room guarantee? Omer Malik discovered the answer when he booked a few nights at a chain hotel in Germany.

Malik, the CEO of a computer security firm in London, always reserves rooms on lower floors. His expertise is in infrastructure and risk management, so exits, evacuation routes, and stairwells aren’t abstract concerns. 

When his confirmation came through for a king room on a low floor, he thought the matter was settled. 

It wasn’t.

Malik arrived late one evening after a long flight. That’s when a front-desk employee told him he was actually on a higher floor in a twin room. Malik pulled up his confirmation and pointed to the room type.

“The employee calmly said, ‘That’s subject to availability,'” he recalls. “‘Only elite members get guaranteed room type.'”

Room type is now a loyalty perk

Across the hotel industry, a quiet but significant shift is happening. What used to be a reasonable baseline expectation—getting the room type you selected and paid for—has been repackaged as a loyalty perk. If you don’t qualify for status at your chosen hotel chain, your room selection is merely a request. The hotel will try to honor it, but it doesn’t have to.

I’d call it confirmation theater. You click, you choose, you pay. You feel like you bought something specific. But the hotel sold you something else.

The hospitality industry has a term for this. It’s called a run-of-house booking. Originally, run-of-house was a budget option. You’d accept any available standard room in exchange for a lower rate.

Today, hotels have extended that same flexible-assignment logic to full-price bookings, using sophisticated revenue management systems that treat room assignments as adjustable inventory right up until you check in.

“Preserving assignment flexibility enables hotels to accommodate late-arriving elite members, manage out-of-order inventory, handle maintenance-related displacements, or rebalance housekeeping workloads across floors,” says Apostolos Ampountolas, who teaches hospitality finance at Boston University’s School of Hospitality Administration. “This creates a structural gap between what guests reasonably believe they are purchasing and what the hotel is obligated to deliver.”

So when you’re on the hotel’s website at 11 p.m., scrolling through room photos, selecting a specific floor, configuration and view, what you’re doing is telling the hotel what you’d like. The system responds as if you’ve made a purchase. But what you’ve actually done is submitted a very expensive preference form.

Nick Holroyd-Doveton, co-founder of Candid Hospitality, a hiring platform for the hospitality industry, says you have to pay attention to the details when you book a room.

 “The myth of ‘guaranteed room type’ lies in the fine print,” he says. “Many consumers assume that clicking on a room category secures that exact layout or floor placement. In reality, guarantees often apply only to the bed configuration, not to view, floor height, or square footage variations within the same category.”

When an inconvenience becomes a safety issue

Most of the time, a room reassignment is annoying. Your preferred view is gone, or you end up next to the elevator bank. 

But some travelers pick specific rooms for reasons that aren’t about the view. They choose lower floors because of fire safety concerns, evacuation anxiety, or past trauma. They book specific bathroom configurations or proximity to elevators because of mobility limitations. They need accessibility features that weren’t just a preference, they were the whole point of the booking.

When those travelers show up and get reassigned, the shrug from an employee at the front desk can be infuriating. 

Stanley Gichuki, chief operating officer of Majestic Kenya Safaris and Tours, runs a tour operation that puts him in three or four hotels a week. He had a client last year who booked a lower floor because of mobility issues. The hotel assigned her a room on the ninth floor.

“When she asked about it, they told her the booking was a preference, not a guarantee,” he says. “She paid the same price as everyone else. She had a confirmation number. But somehow that wasn’t enough.”

Joe Cronin, president of International Citizens Insurance, says the shift can affect your security.

“The problems arise when there are legitimate safety concerns, like needing a lower floor for mobility reasons,” he says. “Then you end up in a position where you’re advocating for yourself or a family member at the check-in desk after you’ve been traveling all day and you’re exhausted.”

Who’s legally responsible?

When it comes to getting your preferred room, your rights are probably not as strong as you think.

Most booking confirmations include qualifying language that allows hotels to substitute accommodations if the booked category is unavailable. Phrases like “room type subject to availability” or “specific room requests cannot be guaranteed” are standard contractual language. Hotels have drafted these terms carefully to give the property maximum operational flexibility.

Tom Warsop, a 25-year travel industry veteran who curates high-end hospitality experiences, notes that U.S. deceptive advertising law requires material features be honored if explicitly promised. 

“If a property advertises specific features such as balcony access or accessibility modifications and then fails to deliver, that can raise consumer protection concerns depending on jurisdiction,” he says.

The clearest legal exception involves accessibility. If a hotel confirms an ADA-compliant room with specific features and fails to deliver it, that may create obligations that go beyond a room swap apology. If your accessibility needs are not just a preference but a legal accommodation, say that clearly in writing before you arrive. It changes the conversation.

For everything else? Ampountolas, the hospitality professor, notes that some card issuers may treat a dispute as worth reviewing if you paid a premium for a specific room type and received something materially different. Some jurisdictions with robust consumer protection laws may offer additional avenues. But don’t expect an automatic win.

Marieme Seck, founder of Weelp, a global safety app, says the real problem is disclosure.

 “If a room type is not guaranteed, that limitation should be visible before payment, not embedded in secondary terms,” she says. “Clear labeling such as ‘room preference’ or ‘guaranteed configuration’ would likely reduce misunderstandings and disputes at check-in.”

What should you do if your hotel room matters?

Don’t rely on the booking interface. Selecting a room type online is the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. Call the hotel directly after booking and ask them to note your requirements, specifically whether they’re medical, accessibility-related, or safety-related. Get the name of the person you with whom you spoke.

Use the word “requirement,” not “preference.” Alex Veka, founder of Vibe Adventures, says it matters how you frame your needs. If the hotel hears “preference,” it treats the room as flexible. If it hears “requirement,” it creates a different obligation in the reservation notes.

Screenshot the room description at booking. If you end up at the front desk in a dispute, documentation helps. A lot.

Arrive earlier in the day. Room inventory is less constrained before the afternoon check-in rush. If you can get there by noon, you have more options. Midnight arrivals, as Malik discovered, leave you at the mercy of whatever’s left.

Some hotels offer a pre-arrival upgrade bid. If you care about your room type, you might want to consider it. While it costs extra, it will ensure you’re more likely to have the exact room you want.

Room confirmations are just a starting point

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: When you book a hotel room, you’re not buying a specific room. Most of the time, you’re buying a room category, and you’re hoping the hotel will assign you something that matches what you saw on its website.

That gap, between what the interface implies and what the contract actually guarantees, is where travelers keep getting blindsided.

A room confirmation isn’t a contract these days. It’s an expensive lottery ticket. The hotel sells you flexibility and calls it a reservation. You learn the real terms only when it hands you the wrong key.

Malik’s conclusion, after his late-night reassignment in Germany, cuts to the heart of it. “Most travelers only discover that at check-in,” he says, “And by then, there’s nothing left to negotiate.”

Tracey Croisier bought a high-end Lenovo laptop expecting a powerhouse, but the battery died faster than a cheap phone. After five repair attempts and some truly bizarre advice from tech support, she’s stuck with a “portable” computer that only works when it’s plugged into a wall. Is it time for the company to give her money back?

Question

I paid $1,866 for a new Lenovo Yoga 9 a little over a year ago. I’m a writer and keynote speaker, so I need a device that works when I’m on the move. Less than a year after I bought it, the battery started crashing. It would go from 100 percent to 30 percent in just two hours. 

Lenovo sent an in-home repair technician who replaced the battery and the motherboard, but the problem didn’t go away. Every time I call tech support, they run diagnostics, tell me they fixed it, and then the battery crashes again a few weeks later. I have six different repair ticket numbers. 

Lately, the laptop is getting very hot to the touch. My own diagnostics showed a peak temperature of 134 degrees. When I told a Lenovo representative that the battery dies while I am driving 10 miles to my writing class, he actually suggested that I should consider turning the laptop off while I’m in the car. 

I didn’t pay nearly $2,000 for a desktop computer. Lenovo specs claim a 15-hour battery life, and reviews say it should last even longer. I’ve done everything they asked, including mailing it back for more “diagnostics.” I want a full refund so I can buy a computer that doesn’t burn my hands or die in the middle of a presentation. Can you help me get my money back? — Tracey Croisier, Bellevue, Wash. 

Answer

Lenovo should have replaced your laptop or refunded your money long ago. When you spend $1,866 on a laptop, you’re paying for portability and a reasonable amount of battery life.  If a computer can’t survive a 30-minute car ride without losing most of its juice, it’s defective. 

Most manufacturers offer a one-year limited warranty that covers defects in materials and workmanship. When a company tries to fix the same hardware issue four or five times without success, it’s considered a lemon. At that point, the repair cycle needs to end and a replacement or refund should begin. 

I liked the way you kept a paper trail. You had a clear chronology of every repair attempt and every promise made by tech support. That’s exactly what you need when a case short-circuits, like yours.  If you ever find yourself in a similar spot, you can also escalate your complaint to the executives at Lenovo. I list the names and email addresses for the company on my advocacy site, Elliott.org.

The suggestion to turn off your laptop during a 10-mile drive to save battery life is one for the Hall of Fame of bad tech support advice. It’s right up there with “have you tried using it as a paperweight?”

Most troubling was the sudden temperature increase when you turned on the laptop. If you ever experience something like that again, shut down the computer until a qualified technician can take a look. This could have ended badly for you, and I’m glad it didn’t.

So how did it end? I contacted Lenovo on your behalf. I shared your history of failed repairs and the concerning temperature readings. 

You received an email from a corporate representative offering you a choice between another repair or a full refund. You took the refund. It’s a shame I had to get involved for Lenovo to do the right thing, but at least you can now buy a laptop that really is portable.

Mila Schoun and his wife paid for a comfortable ride in premium economy, but Swiss bumped them to the back of the plane on their return flight. The airline then claimed it had already paid them at the airport with a mysterious cash card. But did it?

Question

My wife and I recently purchased tickets from Miami to Prague through Lufthansa. We paid $3,274 for premium economy class, including specifically reserved seats. On our return trip from Prague to Miami, our flight was rebooked. For the long-haul segment from Zurich to Miami, the airline downgraded us to economy class.

Lufthansa sent us an email stating that the downgrade was due to “operational reasons” and told us to contact its service center for a partial refund. We followed those instructions and filed a form. Lufthansa then forwarded our request to Swiss, which operated the flight.

The response from Swiss was confusing. It claimed that because we landed safely in Miami within three hours of our scheduled time, no compensation was due. We weren’t asking for delay compensation; we were asking for a refund for the seats we paid for but didn’t get.

We tried everything to get a real answer. We used the Lufthansa live chat, but the agent ended the session while we were waiting. We even emailed executives at both Lufthansa and Swiss. No one responded.

When we finally heard back from Swiss after filing another form, a representative claimed that we had already received an Easy Cash card at the Zurich airport as compensation. That never happened. A Swiss agent at the airport actually told us we couldn’t apply for compensation until the flight was over.

The price difference between premium economy and regular economy is $165. We just want our money back for the service we didn’t receive. Can you help us find our missing refund? — Mila Schoun, Pompano Beach, Fla.

Answer

Swiss should have processed your refund the moment it moved you to a lower class of service. Under European Regulation EC 261/2004, passengers are entitled to a refund of a percentage of the flight price if they’re downgraded. 

The airline also shouldn’t have told you that it had paid you without checking. Claiming a passenger received a cash card they never saw is a great way to end a conversation, but a terrible way to run a business.

You did the right thing by keeping all your records. You contacted the right people and even escalated the issue to executives, which is exactly what I recommend when the front-line agents fail. I publish the Swiss and Lufthansa executive contacts on my consumer advocacy site, Elliott.org.

I contacted Swiss on your behalf and asked the airline to look into the missing cash card. Swiss Air conducted a careful review of your case and determined that there had been a  communication breakdown.

“It has become clear that the original complaint was not properly understood, despite the relevant documentation having been provided by the passengers,” a Swiss representative told me. “We deeply regret that the passengers did not receive the correct information from us and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, concern, and frustration this may have caused.”

The airline confirmed there was no record of a cash card being issued and that your compensation was indeed outstanding.

Swiss Air contacted you and offered a refund of $165 for the downgrade, in accordance with EU regulations. It also sent a $200 travel voucher as a gesture of goodwill for the inadequate service.

One of the last things you’d expect at this time of year in a place like Chino Valley, Ariz., is a problem with a freeze. But that’s exactly what Robert Boisvert got when he tried to buy a new car. 

At his request, Boisvert’s Experian credit report had been frozen for the better part of a year. (That’s a security measure that prevents identity thieves from opening new accounts in your name by restricting access to your credit report.) No problem, he figured — just thaw it out, apply for the car loan, and get on with life. 

It worked for Equifax and TransUnion. But not for Experian.

Boisvert, a police officer with a credit score above 800, did everything the law required to unfreeze his account. He sent two certified letters to Experian’s processing office in Texas, each including the identity documents the company demanded: copies of his ID, utility bills, the works. He spoke by phone and text to a representative, then a supervisor, and finally emailed Experian’s CEO. 

His credit report remained frozen solid.

Then he found us.

Boisvert’s case raises several important questions that every consumer who has ever frozen their credit should know the answers to:

• What does the law require Experian to do when you ask it to lift a credit freeze?
• What happens when a company tells you the freeze is lifted — but your bank says otherwise?
• How can you tell the difference between a legitimate Experian customer service rep and someone trying to sell you a protection plan?

We’ll get to all of that. First, let’s let the story unspool a little more, because it gets strange.

The runaround

Boisvert’s story started when he could no longer access his Experian account. He says his account had been hacked and that someone had changed his phone number in the system. Because of that, a representative said, he couldn’t verify Boisvert’s identity digitally — and therefore couldn’t lift the freeze electronically.

The fix? Send proof of identity to Experian via certified mail, which is what Boisvert did.

After the second mailing — this time, addressed specifically to a higher-level representative at Experian — Boisvert heard nothing back. When he pressed for an update, Experian gave him an eight-digit code to use as a login. Wait 24 hours, the representative said, and the system will update.

It didn’t.

But the weirdness didn’t stop there. A separate supervisor, a woman Boisvert was told worked “in a nearby building,” reached out by text. A few messages in, Boisvert figured out she wasn’t actually an Experian employee at all. She was a supervisor for Experian’s Identity Theft Protection Program—a paid product.

Her parting message: “We will assist you in removing the freeze as soon as today or tomorrow.”

Boisvert thought his account hadn’t been compromised, but that Experian was using his access trouble to sell them its “protection program.”

It was a reasonable inference. Every time Boisvert said no to the paid service, the free help evaporated.

That’s when he wrote to my team. My colleague Dwayne Coward took the case and contacted Experian on his behalf.

What does the law actually require Experian to do when you ask it to lift a credit freeze?

The Fair Credit Reporting Act, a federal law that protects consumers, is clear on this. When you request a freeze be lifted online or by phone, the bureau must comply within one hour. If you mail your request — which Boisvert did, twice — the company has three business days from receipt to act.

By the time Boisvert reached out to our team, he’d been waiting three months.

In 2024, the last year for which numbers are available, Americans filed about 2.7 million complaints about credit or consumer reporting, more than 85 percent of the total complaints received by the Consumer Financial Protection Board. Complaints about credit reporting spiked by 182 percent compared to the monthly average for the prior two years—an indictment of how these companies treat the people whose financial lives they control.

Experian had an obligation to lift this freeze promptly. When its own internal processes failed, there should have been a real escalation path. Instead, Boisvert got a mysterious woman hawking a paid subscription, and then silence.

I’ve covered consumer advocacy for a long time, and I’ve developed what I’ll call a complexity tax theory of corporate customer service. The harder a company makes it to exercise a legal right, the more likely it is to sell you a fee-based shortcut. The more calls it takes, the more certified letters you send, the more PINs that don’t work, the more attractive that $19.99-a-month protection plan starts to look. It’s not unique to Experian, but Boisvert’s case is one of the more brazen examples I’ve seen.

Tip: If you’re in Boisvert’s situation, document everything. Certified mail is your friend. And if the company misses the three-business-day window, you have grounds for a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and potentially a lawsuit.

What happens when Experian says the freeze is lifted — but your bank says otherwise?

When we followed up with Experian, it took two weeks to get an answer.

“We looked into this,” a representative told us. Experian claims Boisvert’s credit report was unfrozen successfully the day he asked for it three months ago. 

“We sent him a letter confirming the unfreeze,” the representative added.

Huh?

More than two months of calls, texts, certified letters, and pleading with strangers about his hacked account — all of it apparently moot, because the freeze had already been lifted.

“Sounds great,” Boisvert told us. “But my account is still frozen.”

Hang on. Experian sent him a new PIN, which didn’t work. He tried his original PIN. It didn’t work, either. And he’d never received the letter Experian claimed to have sent.

So what actually happened? 

We started to compare the notes between what Boisvert was saying and what Experian claimed. The letter Boisvert received apparently did not communicate that the freeze had been lifted. Rather, it suggested his account was still inactive. 

Our best guess: Experian had sent the wrong form letter.

Incidentally, the CFPB sued Experian last year, alleging that when handling disputes, it “sends consumers notices that fail to inform them of the investigation results, and instead provides information that is confusing, ambiguous, incorrect, or internally inconsistent.” 

The corporate response that everything was “unfrozen successfully” also didn’t address the fact that Boisvert’s online account was, functionally, broken. A security freeze and the ability to log in to your account are two different things, a distinction that matters more than most consumers realize. 

The freeze controls who else can see your credit. Your account controls your own access. Boisvert’s freeze was gone, but he couldn’t get in the door to prove it.

If you ever find yourself in a standoff with a credit bureau, you need written documentation from a lender confirming they tried to pull your report and were denied. That’s your proof. Without it, Experian can simply point at its own screen and say, “looks fine to us.” With it, you have a paper trail that no form letter can dismiss.

But what about that suspicious salesperson trying to upsell him “protection”?

How can you tell the difference between a legitimate Experian rep and someone trying to sell you a protection plan?

This is where Boisvert’s story gets genuinely unsettling. When Experian first connected with Boisvert, the representative was helpful, attentive, and full of explanations. But in the end, each “problem” came back to the same solution: Boisvert needed Experian’s Identity Theft Protection Program.

Looking back, it’s possible that the helpful Experian employee might not have been an employee at all. The woman who later texted Boisvert “from a nearby building” was confirmed not to be an Experian employee — she worked for the protection plan vendor, not the bureau itself. How many of those calls were genuine Experian support, and how many were sales masquerading as service? Boisvert can’t be sure. Neither can we.

Experian offers a paid product called CreditLock, as well as its IdentityWorks protection service. These are legitimate products. But a lock, unlike a freeze, isn’t governed by federal law — and it isn’t free. Advocates consistently recommend the free credit freeze over paid lock services, because freezes carry legal protections that locks do not.

The tell, in Boisvert’s case, was consistency: every time he said no to the paid product, the assistance dried up. A real customer service representative doesn’t tie resolution to an upsell. If you’re hearing, “there’s nothing more I can do” every time you decline a paid product, you’re either talking to someone with no real authority — or someone whose job is to sell, not to help.

Here’s what to do instead: Hang up and try a different channel. The federal government maintains a free, direct process for credit freeze requests at annualcreditreport.com. Experian also has an online freeze management tool that works independently of whatever customer service rep you reached. And if you genuinely can’t get traction, the CFPB complaint portal at consumerfinance.gov puts your complaint in front of the company in a way that creates a paper trail and a public record.

By the way, you can also find Experian’s executive contacts on this site. A polite, concise email to a senior executive — with your documentation attached — tends to get a different caliber of response than anything you’ll find at the end of an 800 number.

A resolution — and a twist

After our team contacted Experian, the company insisted the freeze had been lifted shortly after the request. But that still left Boisvert unable to access his own account — which, it turned out, was a separate problem from the freeze itself.

Boisvert, to his credit, didn’t wait around for a corporate resolution. He called his bank, explained the situation, and it gave him a direct back-channel number for Experian. An associate there confirmed the freeze was indeed gone — but walked Boisvert through what the problem actually was: He’d also been locked out of his online account, a separate problem. 

They started a case number and began walking him through rebuilding his Experian account from scratch — something the first “representative” apparently had no interest in doing, despite months of phone calls.

Did Experian’s wrong form letter cause three months of unnecessary delay? Almost certainly. Did someone on Experian’s end see a man trying to exercise a free legal right and steer him toward a paid product instead of fixing the actual problem? I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

Boisvert, for his part, was just glad to have a path forward. As of this writing, he expects to create a new account and finally apply for that car loan.

I’ll be honest: I can’t tell you that Experian deliberately tangled this man’s account to sell him a subscription. I can tell you that the incentives to do so are structurally built in, that the CFPB has sued Experian for sending consumers confusing, ambiguous, inconsistent notices, and that nearly three in four Americans already believe credit bureaus intentionally make this stuff hard.

After Boisvert’s case, I’m having a harder time arguing with them.

When Brian Clark budgeted for a recent marathon flight to New Zealand, he braced for the 18-hour time difference. He didn’t expect to pay a $70 entry fee.

“It was a surprise,” says Clark, a medical educator from Provo, Utah. Such a surprise, in fact, that he had to recalculate his travel budget.

New Zealand charges most visitors an International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy of NZ$100 (about $57), plus NZ$23 (about $13) for an electronic travel authority, the NZeTA. That’s NZ$123, or about $70, before he’d booked a room. The levy money is split evenly between tourism and conservation, according to New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.

Governments have figured out that the border is a place to collect money. Britain now requires an Electronic Travel Authorisation from most visa-exempt visitors, including Americans, and it has raised the price twice since launch. The European Union’s ETIAS has been coming for five years and no longer has a start date. Australia charges for one of its two electronic entry permits and not the other. And the United States nearly doubled its own entry fee in September 2025, a detail that tends to get overlooked when Americans complain about paying to cross someone else’s border.

How much money is involved? Air travelers paid an estimated $60.4 billion in specific taxes on their tickets, according to an IATA study of 55 countries published last November. But that figure covers ticket taxes only. The entry and exit fees in this story are charged separately.

Which countries charge entry fees, and how much

• United Kingdom: The ETA is required for travelers from more than 80 countries and territories, including the U.S., at a cost of £20 (about $27) per person. The price went from £10 (about $13) at launch to £16 (about $21), then to £20 on April 8. It’s good for two years or until the passport expires, with multiple entries and stays up to six months. Enforcement is no longer discretionary: carriers have refused boarding to passengers without one since Feb. 25.
  
• European Union: ETIAS is expected to cost €20 (about $23) and cover 30 European countries, with validity for three years or until your passport expires. The €7 (about $8) figure that still appears on some official EU pages is more than a year out of date. No launch date has been set.
  
• Australia: Which permit you need decides what you pay. Travelers from the U.S., Canada, Japan and a handful of other countries use the Electronic Travel Authority, which has a service charge of A$20 (about $14) for the government app. European and British passport holders get the eVisitor instead, and it’s free. You can’t choose between them.

• United States: The Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, went from $21 to $40 on Sept. 30, 2025, under the budget reconciliation law. It now costs $40.27, after a 27-cent inflation adjustment took effect Jan. 1. The fee to get an I-94 at a land border rose from $6 to $30 on Sept. 30, 2025, the same day as the ESTA increase.

Andy Abramson, a communications strategist and seasoned international traveler, has been broadsided by several of these fees.

“What struck me was how normalized these pre-travel payments have become,” Abramson says. “You can’t even board without first paying for digital permission to arrive. It adds another administrative and financial layer to what used to be a fairly frictionless process.”

Exit fees are less common than travelers assume. Indonesia, for one, charges tourists nothing to leave. The money comes out on the way in: 500,000 rupiah (about $30) for a visa on arrival, plus a tourism levy of 150,000 rupiah (about $9), or roughly $40 a head.

What does get expensive is staying too long. When I lived in Bali, my brother overstayed his visa by a single day and paid about $60 for it. Indonesia fines overstayers 1 million rupiah (about $60) per day, and it collects at the airport before you’re allowed to leave.

Why fake government visa sites outrank the real ones

When governments roll out new digital entry systems, scammers follow. Third-party websites built to look like official government portals charge several times the official rate for nothing more than submitting a simple form on your behalf.

“Scammers are experts at purchasing domains that look official,” says Chris Bajda, an e-commerce entrepreneur who studies digital consumer behavior. “People who have experienced this know these websites mimic the official government portals closely.”

That’s what happened to a colleague of Clark’s. He clicked the first search result instead of going to the official government portal.

“He assumed the higher price meant expedited approval,” Clark says. He paid a markup and waited the same 72 hours as everyone else.

If it happens to you, dispute the charge with your card issuer. A billing dispute on a service that was never rendered as described is one of the few consumer protections that reliably works, and you can find your issuer’s escalation contacts in our company contacts directory.

Are these fees funding conservation or general revenue?

Jason Boertje, an expert on outdoor tourism and frequent international traveler, has a test he applies. Legitimate fees are locked to a purpose by law. Someone audits them. You can see what they paid for: trails, rangers, waste systems.

“You should be able to see a public breakdown of allocations, a named agency in charge, and audits or third-party oversight,” Boertje says. “When revenue disappears into a general budget and reporting is vague or nonexistent, it reads like a cash grab.”

Antoinette Leon, chief operating officer at ItsEasy.com Passport & Visa Services, says these small fees multiplied by millions of visitors generate steady income, and foreign visitors don’t vote.

“That makes tourism micro-taxes politically attractive,” Leon says. “In some countries, the funding is legitimate and transparent. In others, the money simply flows into general revenue.”

Robert McIntosh, managing director of Interski Holidays, a U.K.-based group tour operator, has watched pay-to-play spread in Italy, where several cities raised their overnight tourist tax again this year.

“We ultimately see it all as little more than stealth taxes,” McIntosh says.

Countries can fairly charge for checking passports and running a border. Some of them fund real conservation work with the proceeds. New Zealand publishes the accounting to prove it. But when a fee disappears into general revenue with no public accounting, a traveler has no way to know what the money bought.

Before you write off the whole practice, look at your own country’s numbers. A visitor from Madrid or Tokyo now pays $40.27 for permission to fly to Chicago, up from $21 a year ago, and $250 more if a visa is involved. The border has become a revenue line almost everywhere. You’ll probably notice it first when someone else charges you.

ETIAS has no launch date. What that means for your next Europe trip

ETIAS was supposed to start in the last quarter of this year. The European Union removed that window from its official site over the summer, and eu-LISA, the agency building the system, has concluded internally that a 2026 launch isn’t feasible. The EU says it will announce a specific date several months ahead of the launch.

Nobody is collecting ETIAS applications right now. Any site accepting one today is a fraud.

What to expect when it starts:

• The €20 (about $23) fee is expected to be waived for travelers under 18 and over 70, though both would still need an approved authorization.
• Most applications will be decided within minutes. Some take up to four days, and longer when the EU asks for documents.
• Nobody will be turned away for lacking an ETIAS during the first six months, and first-time arrivals stay exempt for six months after that. Full enforcement is unlikely before late 2027.
• Apply before you book anything you can’t cancel. Your name, passport number and birth date have to match your booking.

One European requirement is already live, and travelers keep confusing it with ETIAS. The Entry/Exit System has been running at every Schengen border since April 10. It’s free, but it takes your fingerprints and a facial image the first time you enter.

I remember F-Bomb Girl. How could I ever forget her?

She claimed she’d suffered an injury on a shopping trip. No one from the grocery store chain would respond to her complaint.

When our advocacy team shared the company’s contact information and offered to walk her through the complaint process, she replied: “F**K YOU USELESS PIECES OF S**T!!!!”

We usually won’t go near a case with gratuitous profanity and writing in uppercase, which is yelling online. So her case went directly into our F-Files. 

There are seven phrases that all but guarantee your case will fail. Dropping F-bombs is just one of them. I’ll get back to F-Bomb Girl’s case in a moment. But first, let’s have a look at the other phrases that will doom your case. I’m featuring five of them in this story. The other two are in this week’s podcast.

WARNING: This episode contains material that may not be suitable to a younger audience. Listener discretion is advised.

(Also, we’ll have your comments from our last podcast at the end.)

Our advocates read every request that arrives through the help form. Most are fixable. But a discouraging number show up pre-broken, sabotaged by the person who wrote them, usually in the first paragraph, and usually with a single word.

“I’ll Sue”

The instant you threaten litigation, the people who could help you go silent, Your file goes directly to the legal department — and lawyers don’t issue goodwill refunds.

A customer service supervisor can bend a rule, waive a fee, or hand you a credit. In-house counsel doesn’t play that game. The safest response to a threatened lawsuit is no response at all.

There’s a second problem. You probably can’t sue. Most consumer contracts contain an arbitration clause paired with a class-action waiver, and federal courts enforce those under the Federal Arbitration Act. (The Supreme Court settled the question in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion in 2011.)

What’s left? Small claims court. If you have a real case and can afford the filing fee, that’s your venue. But making threats won’t help your case. File the paperwork, mail the notice, and let the summons do the talking.

“F**k you”

You’d be amazed how many complaints arrive with the F-bomb in them, or perhaps I should say bombs. They just keep dropping ’em like it’s World War III. A recent submission about undelivered packages used it in nearly every sentence, including the field where we ask what resolution the reader wants.

I understand the impulse. What I don’t think people understand is the paper trail they’re building. Profanity can trip a spam filter and keep your email from arriving at all. What does arrive goes into your customer record, and everyone who touches your case afterward reads it before deciding how hard to work for you. The agent you cursed at isn’t the person who approves your refund. The person who approves your refund gets a summary, and your profanity will be in it.

The people on the other end of that email are already having a rough time. Perceptyx, a technology company, surveyed 21,000 front-line employees in early 2025 and found that 53% had recently dealt with customers who were verbally abusive, threatening or unruly. Axonify, a workplace training company, polled 500 U.S. retail, hospitality and food service workers and found that 72% encounter incivility daily or weekly. Rude people get tuned out.

There’s also a contractual risk that readers rarely see coming. American Airlines rewrote its conditions of carriage in 2021 to require that passengers behave appropriately and respectfully toward other passengers, crew and any American team member. The previous version covered airport employees only. Violate the rules and you could get banned from flying on the airline.

So what happened to our F-Bomb Girl? She kept sending brief, profanity-laced messages until we blocked her. We still don’t know what her injury was. I’d hate to guess.

“Never again”

We see it weekly, sometimes in capital letters: “I will never fly your airline again.” It’s the most self-defeating sentence in consumer advocacy.

When an agent decides whether to refund your $340 — particularly as a “goodwill” gesture — the calculation involves what your future business is worth. Tell the company you have no future business, and you’ve answered the one question the agent was weighing.

One reader told us Frontier Airlines had wrecked a once-in-a-lifetime trip by bumping her daughter. She demanded cash instead of a credit because she’d “never fly Frontier again.” (Details are in the podcast.) She was owed the cash anyway, which she’d have discovered if she’d looked up the rule instead of writing the letter. (Details on this case in the podcast.)

Which brings up the better approach. Stop asking for kindness and start asking for compliance. If an airline cancels your flight or changes it significantly and you decline both the rebooking and the voucher, it owes you a cash refund to your original form of payment under the Transportation Department rule that took effect in 2024. A “significant” change means arriving three or more hours late domestically, six internationally. If you’re involuntarily bumped from an oversold domestic flight, federal regulations entitle you to 200% of your one-way fare, capped at $1,075, or 400%, capped at $2,150, depending on how late the airline gets you there. It has to pay by cash or check the day it happens. And that’s true whether you intend to fly on the airline again or not.

“Pain and suffering”

This is a tort phrase wandering around inside a contract dispute. It doesn’t belong there. One reader asked for $5,000 after her flight to Tel Aviv was canceled. What she was owed was the fare.

The law here is settled and unkind. In Eastern Airlines Inc. v. Floyd, the Supreme Court held in 1991 that passengers on international flights can’t recover for purely mental injuries unaccompanied by physical injury, and courts have applied that logic ever since. Domestically, federal rules cover your ticket and your fees. They do not cover your ruined week, your missed wedding, or your sleepless night in an airport chair. The United States has no equivalent of EU 261, the European delay-compensation rule. But even the EU doesn’t have a clause for pain-and-suffering compensation.

By the way, attorneys do this too, and they should know better. Every so often a reader tries to bill and then bully an airline for the hours spent on the complaint. That invoice goes into the shredder.

Here’s what you can collect: documented out-of-pocket costs. The hotel you had to book, the rental car you had to extend, the meal you had to buy. Attach the receipts, total them at the bottom, and ask for that number. A specific, provable figure might get paid.

“This is illegal”

Readers reach for this word when they’re furious and running out of vocabulary. It costs you the case twice over. You’ve made a legal accusation you can’t support, which routes your file straight to the lawyers. And you’ve told the company you don’t know what your own contract says, because most of what enrages travelers is perfectly lawful.

Overbooking is legal. A nonrefundable ticket is legal. Change fees are legal — whether you read the contract before you booked or not.

It’s better to read the contract and use it as leverage against a company that’s done you wrong. Cruise lines have a ticket contract, rental car companies have a rental agreement, and hotels answer to state lodging law. All of it is published, and companies move faster when you catch them breaking their own rules than when you accuse them of breaking the government’s.

And when a law does apply, name it. A sentence containing “14 CFR 250.5” reads very differently from one containing “THIS IS COMPLETELY ILLEGAL!!!!” One of them is far likelier to get escalated. The other gets a form letter about how much the company values you.

The two words I left out

There are seven phrases on our list, and the last two aren’t in this article. Neither one contains a syllable you’d need to censor, but both can sink a case. One of them is a refusal dressed up as a personality trait. The other is a single adjective that tells us, usually by accident, that we’re the wrong people to call.

Both are on this week’s episode of the Elliott Confidential podcast, along with your enlightening comments from the last podcast.

In the meantime, the letter that works is short and specific about both what went wrong and what you want. It contains no adjectives you’d be embarrassed to read aloud and no estimate of the value of your suffering. Write that email, attach the receipts, and you may not need us at all.

The difference between the airfare you see and the airfare you pay has become the most dependable — and maddening — feature of American air travel.

You know the routine. A cheap price catches your eye, you click, and the boxes start popping up. There’s an extra $40 for your checked bag, another $25 for a seat assignment. 

The average airline passenger last year paid a base fare of $166 and then handed over another $21 for extras, a 13% increase. As a share of the fare, those extras have more than doubled in the last decade.

In the case of many carriers, this is a feature, not a bug. Ancillary fees, the industry’s euphemistic term for everything that isn’t the fare, accounted for 60% of Frontier Airlines’ revenue last year.

No surprise, then, that whenever anyone suggests showing the whole price up front, airlines find a creative excuse to decline. No, they say, it would confuse travelers and raise airfares for everyone. 

Not so fast. Airbnb and the other vacation rental platforms tested that claim recently, and guess what? The airline claim is dead wrong. Even so, the Transportation Department is preparing to bet against the evidence.

These ticket pricing games have gone too far

The airline industry claims luggage is optional, so it doesn’t belong in the advertised fare. Come on. Who flies without at least a carry-on bag? And yet airlines are trying to monetize every aspect of your flight, including the carry-on bag with your laptop and medications. 

The airline industry also argues that a seat assignment is a choice. It’s not. If you have a ticket, you get a seat. All the airlines have really done is make their passengers deeply insecure about their ticket status (“Wait, do I need to buy a seat assignment to get on the plane?”). 

The money involved is not incidental. U.S. airlines collected $2.1 billion in checked bag fees in the second quarter of this year, the government reported September 15. Baggage fees have more than doubled since 2010, from $3.4 billion to $7.4 billion last year.

The Airbnb test

Airbnb switched to total-price display worldwide in April 2025, three weeks before the Federal Trade Commission’s new rule on unfair and deceptive fees took effect. The nightly rate, the cleaning fee and the service charge became one number in the search results. Vrbo and Booking.com did the same thing.

Then look what happened to the company that supposedly couldn’t survive showing you the real price. In the first quarter of this year, Airbnb’s revenue rose 18%, to $2.7 billion, and gross booking value rose 19%. In the second quarter, revenue hit $3.6 billion, up 17%, on $27.2 billion in bookings, with net income of $816 million. Management called it some of the company’s strongest results in years.

Did honest pricing do that? I’m a consumer advocate, not an economist, and the earnings report is largely silent on that question. But one thing I can say: It sure isn’t hurting. Guests didn’t scatter at the sight of a bigger number, and bookings didn’t stall. The company that used to bury a cleaning fee now leads with the total and keeps growing. 

Let us uncheck the box, please

The fix isn’t complicated. Quote the fare with what people take on a plane: a carry-on, a checked bag, a seat assignment. Put a checkbox next to each one. Traveling light? Uncheck the box and watch the price fall. Don’t care where you sit? Uncheck the seat and save a few dollars more.

Opt-out savings instead of opt-in fees.

It’s fine to unbundle an airfare, but let us do the unbundling after showing us a realistic and bookable price. Stop hiding the total from customers by creating a fare almost nobody buys

What Washington should do

The European Union gave final clearance this summer to rules requiring airlines to display “air fares including allowance for a piece of hand baggage before the start of any booking process,” and guaranteeing every passenger a free personal item of up to 40 by 30 by 15 centimeters (about 16 by 12 by 6 inches) or one that fits under the seat in front. Those rules take effect in 2027.

We’re going the other way under the current administration, which favors a more deregulatory approach. The Transportation Department’s flexible pricing proposal would let carriers break the fare into pieces displayed as prominently as the total, and asks whether its Full Fare Rule should be scrapped altogether. That rule is why the advertised airfare has been honest-ish since 2012. 

The National Consumers League and six other groups filed comments against it in late August and asked for a public hearing on the matter. The department hasn’t answered.

Washington should keep the Full Fare Rule and add the opt-out default. Then it should require carriers to publish the share of passengers who pay each fee. If bags really are optional, the number will say so. Airlines know it to the penny and have never printed it.

Honest pricing has worked for Airbnb and the other vacation rental platforms, and it is about to work in Europe. Why not here, too?

The sun glints off the uneven surface of the Shotover River as Donald Boyer gestures toward the dock below him. It’s a scene of controlled chaos. 

Passengers in bright orange life jackets pile into sleek, low-slung vessels that look more like fighter jets than boats. The engines roar to life with a deafening, mechanical scream that echoes off the canyon walls. 

In a spray of whitewater, a boat rockets downriver, skimming over shallows that would gut a normal craft. Moments later, it streaks back toward the dock at nearly 60 miles per hour before the driver cranks the wheel. The boat whips into a 360-degree spin, tilting so precariously it looks certain to capsize—and drenching the screaming riders in a wall of glacial water.

Now imagine if that bone-shaking roar disappeared. What if the only sound you heard was the wind and the rushing river?

“What if we could electrify everything?” asks Boyer, business manager for Shotover Jet, which runs high-speed river tours on New Zealand’s South Island. 

Queenstown, the Southern Hemisphere’s adventure capital, now wants to add a qualifier to its title: green adventure capital. From boating to bungee jumping, it sees sustainability as its next big adventure. 

But it won’t be easy, according to Boyer.

 “You don’t realize how high the mountain is until you start climbing it,” he says.

Jumping toward sustainability in Queenstown

Across the gorge, the crew at AJ Hackett Bungy is taking that climb seriously. They aren’t just tossing tourists off bridges anymore. They’re aiming for a carbon-neutral finish line by 2030, along with the rest of Queenstown’s tourism sector. 

To get there, the company is slashing emissions and leaning into renewable energy. It has a sustainability committee that meets every quarter to make sure they aren’t just talking trash, but actually reducing it.

AJ Hackett is on a mission to shrink the company’s resource appetite while finding new ways to reuse and recycle what’s left over. It’s a ground-up approach to waste management that takes a discarded soda can as seriously as a frayed bungee cord. It’s also keeping a tight eye on the books, constantly monitoring the company’s performance so it doesn’t drift off course.

There’s a growing realization in places like Queenstown that without a sustainable environment, adventure tourism has no future. Through a partnership with a local nonprofit, AJ Hackett is funding predator-free traps throughout the Southern Lakes region, a move designed to protect native bird populations from the non-native pests.

All of this fits under the Tiaki Promise, a local commitment to act as guardians for New Zealand for the sake of future generations. For the bungee team, that means respecting Māori culture and giving back to the communities that host their adrenaline-fueled adventure. (It turns out you can care about the planet and still scare the living daylights out of people for a living.)

A deep connection to the land

Back at the Shotover, the push for change comes from the top—specifically from the Ngāi Tahu people, the Māori iwi (tribe) that owns the operation. 

While Boyer admits they are currently “not shy about admitting we burn a lot of fossil fuel,” the Māori owners have insisted the operators move away from the pump. He says the iwi is willing to shoulder the massive research and development costs of electrification because “burning fuel simply isn’t looking after the land.”

The technical hurdles are steep. Shotover Jet has already built a prototype electric boat, but the challenge remains shedding enough weight to keep those signature 360-degree spins sharp. 

“The prototype is about three and a half tons,” Boyer says. “We need to get it down to about two and a half tons to deliver the same experience our customers expect.”

The infrastructure requirements are equally daunting. Charging a fleet of electric boats requires a megawatt of power—enough to make any local utility company blink. Boyer notes that because the river can flood up to 16 times a year, the charging stations must be movable. 

“I don’t know how we’re going to do it yet,” Boyer admits. “Maybe it’s a gantry that swings out, or a mobile battery bank in a shipping container.”

The weight of the future

Queenstown’s transition to sustainability is a lesson in patience and persistence. While the electric dream develops, Shotover has already converted its fleet to more modern V-8 engines that use 30 percent less fuel than previous models. 

It’s also looking at its terrestrial footprint, with plans to procure an electric shuttle bus by late 2026 or early 2027.

For the Ngāi Tahu, sustainability is an ancestral mandate. 

“Values outweigh some of the commercial aspects,” Boyer says. The iwi views itself as a custodian of the Kimiākau (Shotover River), a connection that spans centuries. In its view, the pursuit of profit can’t come at the expense of the awa (river) that defines them.

Queenstown’s shift toward a green adventure model suggests a fundamental change in how New Zealand perceives the great outdoors. For decades, the thrill was about what visitors could take from the landscape—the rush, the photos, the videos of people jumping off a bridge. 

Now, the industry is asking more profound questions about its legacy.

The mountain Boyer describes is not a physical peak in the Southern Alps, but the monumental task of preserving the environment. If the world’s adventure capital can show that a heart-pounding 360-degree spin can be powered by the sun and the wind rather than a combustion engine, it will have achieved its greatest thrill yet.

Laura Bartholomew’s new GE Spacemaker washer didn’t just wash clothes—it also rocked, banged, and hit the walls like it was trying to escape her home. After five technician visits and 10 phone calls, the company dismissed her case because its experts couldn’t duplicate the problem. Is it time for a replacement, or is she stuck at the laundromat forever?

Question

I bought a GE Unitized Spacemaker washer/dryer for $1,856 to replace an older unit. Ever since it was installed six months ago, the machine has rocked and banged so violently during spin cycles that it hits the surrounding walls. I’ve contacted GE at least 10 times, and technicians have visited my home five times.

The problem is that the technicians run controlled tests that don’t match how I actually use the machine. One tech ran a test with no water and no clothes. Another used four identical towels. They all reported the machine was “working properly,” even though it fails nearly every time I do a real load of laundry. 

Because they can’t duplicate the banging, GE dismissed my case. At one point, a technician found broken clips on the balance springs, likely caused by the machine not being leveled at installation, but no one will take responsibility.

I’ve been forced to go to the laundromat, and the $75 debit card GE sent doesn’t even cover my costs. I’ve asked for a replacement or a refund, but I keep getting told the case needs “review.” I even sent videos of the machine shaking, but nothing has changed. 

I’m a retired teacher on a fixed income, and I can’t afford to throw away nearly $2,000 on a machine that doesn’t work. Can you help me get GE to honor its warranty? — Laura Bartholomew, Ventura, Calif.

Answer

GE should’ve fixed your washer the first time it tried to make a break for the hallway. When a customer reports a machine is hitting the walls, a technician shouldn’t just run a cycle with four towels and call it a day. That’s like a mechanic saying your car is fine because it idles perfectly in the garage while you’re telling him the engine falls out at 60 mph.

Under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, if a manufacturer can’t repair a product after a reasonable number of attempts, it must provide a replacement or a full refund. Five visits for the same rocking and banging issue is well beyond reasonable. Your warranty covers excessive noise or vibration if it indicates mechanical failure, such as the broken balance spring clips your technician discovered.

You did the right thing by starting a paper trail and capturing video evidence. In the future, don’t let a technician leave until they’ve at least documented that the machine is physically unstable. You were also smart to escalate your complaint to GE’s executives. I maintain a list of GE executive contacts on my consumer advocacy site, Elliott.org, for exactly this reason.

I’ve dealt with similar GE appliance disasters before, and usually, a few videos of a wandering washer are enough to get someone’s attention. 

I contacted GE on your behalf to see why it was ignoring your evidence. Shortly after that, a supervisor reached out to you. GE agreed to replace the unit entirely. You’ve since received the new washer/dryer, and after five loads, it’s staying put. It’s a shame it took a small army of technicians and an advocate to get a working appliance, but I’m glad you’re finally out of the laundromat.

Michael Hughes thought he was being smart by paying for his European tour in full to lock in the price. But when his airline canceled his flight, his tour operator sent him a new bill for $670. Can a company really ignore its own price-lock guarantee because of an error?

Question

I paid in full for an Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) trip to Spain and Portugal almost a year in advance. I did this specifically to take advantage of the Good Buy program, which OAT advertises as a way to “secure your trip’s price and protect yourself from cost increases.”

A few months later, Air France canceled our original flight. OAT rebooked us on Delta, but then it mailed me an invoice for an additional $670 for customized air cost. I called and spoke with a representative who told me the fee was for a seating upgrade to Delta Comfort+. Since I wanted the extra legroom, I paid it.

When we got to the airport, the gate agent told us we were in standard coach. No Comfort+ seats were ever reserved. When I returned home and asked for a refund, OAT changed its story. First, it said the $670 was an “excess” charge. Then, it admitted its agent gave me “incorrect information” about the seat upgrade, but claimed the $670 was actually to cover the cost of the more expensive Delta flight.

I pointed to Section 7 of OAT’s own terms and conditions, which says the company cannot increase airfare costs for Good Buy customers who have paid in full. OAT told me that clause applies to “other things” but not airfare, and that the $670 was simply “correcting an error.” 

OAT offered me a $670 credit toward a future trip, but after this experience, I don’t trust the company. I want my money back. Does the Good Buy plan actually mean anything, or can OAT charge me whatever it wants? — Michael Hughes, Burnsville, Minn.

Answer

Overseas Adventure Travel should have honored its contract with you. When a company offers a price lock as an incentive for customers to hand over thousands of dollars months—or even years—in advance, that agreement isn’t a suggestion. It’s a binding promise.

Section 7 of OAT’s agreement says the company reserves the right to increase the trip price due to changes in airfares “unless you pre-paid according to the terms of the Good Buy Plan prior to the cost increase going into effect.” You paid in full 10 months before your departure date. OAT shouldn’t have passed that cost on to you.

Beyond the contract, there are federal protections to consider. The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) is very clear: once a ticket is fully purchased and the transaction is complete, an airline—and by extension, the agent acting on its behalf—is generally prohibited from increasing the price.

You did the right thing by keeping a meticulous record of your correspondence. When a company agent tells you a fee is for a seat upgrade and it turns out to be for a price hike it wasn’t allowed to charge you in the first place, “oops” isn’t a valid defense.

When you hit a wall like this, you should always appeal the initial rejection to an executive. I list the OAT executive contacts on my advocacy site, Elliott.org. A polite, firm email to an executive often works better than a dozen frustrating calls to a front-line agent who is just reading from a script.

The company conducted a full internal review after I made them aware of your case. A spokesperson for OAT told us that the team processed a refund of the $670 in question. It also apologized to you for the “confusion.”

Robert Logan couldn’t wait to see Daryl Hall perform in Denver, but apparently Denver wasn’t on Hall’s list. After Logan paid $489 for a pair of tickets from StubHub, Hall canceled his performance. 

And then Logan did what any sensible person would do: He asked for his money back.

He called. Then he called again. And again—six times in total. Each time, StubHub gave him the same corporate song and dance: “We will escalate the refund. Give us 4 to 5 days to resolve.” 

But Stubhub, a ticket broker, was apparently out of touch with reality. The refund never materialized.  

“I’m stuck,” says Logan. “StubHub will not and does not plan to refund my tickets.”

His case raises several important questions about ticket refunds:

• Does the Fair Credit Billing Act really have a 60-day expiration date for refunds?
• How does the FanProtect Guarantee actually work when a show is cancelled?
• Can a bank chargeback actually hurt your chances of getting a voluntary refund?

“I just want a full refund for my tickets”

A Daryl Hall concert is an “iffy” proposition. The half of the 80s group Hall & Oates had canceled previous shows because he tested positive for COVID and has struggled with Lyme disease. 

But nostalgia is a funny thing. If you grew up in the 1980s, you probably remember the Hall & Oates hits like “Private Eyes” and “Maneater,” and if you like that kind of music, you’d take a chance. I know I would.

Logan’s concert wasn’t meant to be. Hall canceled the concert and didn’t reschedule it. The rules were clear: Logan was entitled to a full refund.

“I just want a full refund for my tickets,” he says.

After his calls failed, Logan tried his bank. But he ran into a wall there, too. Because he’d bought the tickets in June and the cancellation happened in October, his bank claimed federal laws prevented a refund since more than 60 days had passed since the purchase.

Logan didn’t go for that, so he contacted my advocacy team for help.

Is the 60-day dispute window a hard limit?

Logan’s bank said that because 60 days had passed from the date of purchase, “federal and governmental laws do not allow them to give me my money back.” This is a common point of confusion involving the Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA). Under the FCBA, you generally have 60 days from the date you receive the first bill containing the error to dispute it in writing.

However, the “error” in Logan’s case wasn’t the original purchase in June; it was the failure to provide the service (the concert) in October. Many banks interpret the 60-day rule strictly from the transaction date, but the law is meant to protect you when services are not delivered as agreed.

In other words, Logan’s bank was wrong.

In Logan’s situation, the service was only officially “not delivered” once the cancellation was announced. While the FCBA provides a legal floor for protections, many credit card issuers have internal policies that allow for disputes much later than 60 days, especially for future-dated events like concerts or cruises. 

Logan’s bank was being particularly rigid, perhaps hoping he’d just go away. But when a company takes your money for a show that doesn’t happen, it’s not just a billing error—it’s a breach of contract.

But that wasn’t Logan’s only protection.

What is the FanProtect Guarantee?

StubHub makes a lot of noise about its FanProtect Guarantee. It promises that if an event is canceled and not rescheduled, you’ll receive a full refund or a 120 percent credit. Looks great on paper, but as Logan discovered, the execution leaves something to be desired.

StubHub told me that its ability to process these refunds depends on receiving formal confirmation of the cancellation from the organizer or venue. Until that happens, the event might be stuck in a “postponed” limbo, which limits your options. Once the event is officially dead, StubHub sends an email with instructions on how to get the cash.

The problem for Logan was the escalation loop. He’d requested the refund, but the company’s internal gears weren’t turning fast enough. This is where the gap between a marketing promise and actual customer service becomes a chasm. A guarantee is only as good as the execution, and if the agent says “4 to 5 days” but the system can’t support it, what’s the point?

That’s how the trouble started.

The credit card chargeback trap

Here’s where things got messy. Logan, frustrated by StubHub’s delays, filed a chargeback with his credit card. StubHub later pointed to this as the reason for the delay, noting that it has a policy against issuing duplicate refunds when a chargeback is active.

When you dispute a charge under the Fair Credit Billing Act, the merchant often stops all internal refund processing because the money is now tied up in a legal tug-of-war between the financial institutions. StubHub’s representative told me the open chargeback was delaying the resolution.

That’s a classic Catch-22. You dispute the charge because the company won’t pay, and then the company says it can’t pay because you disputed the charge. 

While it’s tempting to hit the nuclear option of a chargeback, it can sometimes move you to the back of the line while the lawyers and bankers sort it out. In Logan’s case, the bank initially told him it couldn’t help, but behind the scenes, the process was still churning.

A resolution—at last

After I contacted StubHub, it eventually confirmed that the bank had actually resolved the case in Logan’s favor. StubHub’s records showed the refund had been processed through that channel, which is why their internal system hadn’t issued a separate check.

Logan confirmed he received the full $489 he paid for the tickets.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, my advice is to skip the phone calls. Start a paper trail immediately and, if the company stalls, reach out to an executive. And maybe listen to a little Daryl Hall while you wait—he had it right when he said “watch out, boy.”

Celia Dunlap thought she had bought a little certainty when she paid an extra $805 for travel insurance before her Southeast Asia tour. But when her operator slashed a 40-day itinerary down to just 10, she found herself holding a nonrefundable airline ticket worth $4,500.

“My insurance policy didn’t cover my cancellation,” said Dunlap, a retired attorney from Littleton, Colo. “The policy was worthless.”

Travelers keep buying protection, and this year they’re buying it despite all the terms and conditions that sometimes make it unusable — and even though there’s less to protect you from. 

It’s been the quietest Atlantic storm season on record. The Atlantic passed Sept. 11 without a hurricane, breaking a mark that had stood since 2002. Five tropical storms formed but none turned into a hurricane. By accumulated cyclone energy, a measure of how much storm power a season generates, 2026 is running more than 90% below normal. A strong El Niño has been tearing apart thunderstorms before they can organize.

The selling hasn’t slowed. The global travel insurance market is still on track to grow from $22.1 billion in 2025 to $56.5 billion by 2034. Caribbean bookings placed through the insurance marketplace Squaremouth are running 21% ahead of last hurricane season.

“This reflects a shift in traveler behavior, showing that they are seeking additional flexibility—just in case,” says Lauren McCormick, a spokeswoman for Squaremouth.

Travel insurance only covers specific circumstances, such as a trip interruption or a medical emergency, as Dunlap discovered. Insurance isn’t the only product being sold to nervous travelers. Hotels, cruise lines and ski resorts are writing promises of their own.

How do you “guarantee” your vacation?

These are the promises that show up most often:

• Hurricane guarantees. Caribbean resorts waive cancellation fees when a storm threatens your dates. Baha Mar, which houses Grand Hyatt, SLS and Rosewood, will refund or reschedule if NOAA issues a hurricane watch or warning within seven days of your departure. Direct bookings only, and it doesn’t cover your airfare.
• Northern Lights promises. Hurtigruten, the Norwegian coastal line, promises you’ll see the aurora on your Norwegian cruise or your cruise is free (conditions apply). Havila Voyages offers a similar guarantee.
• Weather and snow guarantees. Some ski resorts now back their snow with a refund instead of an elevation chart. Val Thorens in France has famously issued snow guarantees. If rain is the worry, companies like Sensible Weather partner with hotels to offer weather guarantees that pay out automatically based on the forecast.

Insurance is still the product most travelers reach for, but even expensive “cancel for any reason” policies often only provide partial reimbursements, typically 50% to 75%, and sometimes exclude taxes and specific fees from the payout.

One newer coverage option is called parametric insurance. The coverage provides for flight disruptions and luggage issues and pays out automatically when a clearly defined event occurs. 

“Travelers aren’t naive,” says Márcio Spínola, chief product officer at AirHelp, which offers a parametric policy called AirHelp+. “They know disruptions are inevitable. What they’re rejecting is the idea that protection should come with friction, loopholes, or months of waiting.”

Why travelers want a sure thing

“The lack of predictability is what worries many travelers,” explains Daniel Price, co-founder of WeatherPromise. “Travelers consistently report that weather is the top concern that they can’t control.”

The worry is outrunning the weather. Bookings to the Caribbean are up while the storms stay away, and travelers are still paying to protect trips against hurricanes that never formed.

“The world seems unsafe and our well-being is threatened,” says Thomas Plante, a psychology professor at Santa Clara University. “This is a perfect recipe for costly insurance. It helps people to ease their anxiety.”

Anxiety has turned travel into a financial product. Nobody booking a $50,000 trip to Antarctica is chasing spontaneity. They want to know  what happens to the money when something goes wrong.

Phil Lockwood, a luxury travel broker, tells me his clients aren’t trying to guarantee perfection. “They’re trying to limit regret,” he says.

Do the guarantees work?

Whether the extra money is worth it depends almost entirely on the conditions attached.

• If you’re buying travel insurance, read the exclusions before you buy. Standard travel insurance is filled with exceptions. Even a “cancel for any reason” policy has limits. “It comes with very specific requirements that must be followed,” explains Terry Boynton, president of Yonder Travel Insurance. “it’s important not to make assumptions about it to ensure your coverage actually works when you need it.”

• Weather guarantees also have specific conditions. A typical WeatherPromise might be: “We promise to pay you $3,000 if you have more than two rainy days during your vacation.” It defines a “rainy day” as any day with more than two hours of rain between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Read those definitions closely, because they’re where the payout lives or dies. 

• For hurricane and northern lights guarantees, the same rules apply. (I run a consumer advocacy organization, and we haven’t received a single complaint about any of these guarantees in the past year.)

Before you decide to skip coverage, remember that hurricane season isn’t over. It runs through Nov. 30. Jeff Masters, the hurricane scientist who co-founded Weather Underground, puts the odds of at least one Atlantic hurricane this year at about 80% and says not to be surprised by one or two from late September on. Remember, once a storm has a name, standard trip cancellation and interruption coverage won’t apply to it.

The guarantees pay out when the conditions are met, but the conditions are narrow.

“Review your travel insurance documents to understand what is covered and what is not covered,” says Daniel Durazo, director of external communications at Allianz Partners USA.

The human safety net

You may not be able to eliminate all the risk, but you can manage it better with a human travel advisor.

“I set expectations for my clients that there are no guarantees your trip will go exactly as planned,” says Jennifer Fernandez, a Fora travel advisor. “There is inherent risk in any form of travel, but being prepared—like having an emergency plan—can help.”

Fernandez says the person who rebooks you at midnight is worth more than the document. She points to the Caribbean airspace closures in early January, when U.S. military action against Venezuela stranded travelers across the region.

Insurers went to their exclusion clauses, she says. Advisors went to work rebooking flights, and some chartered ferries and yachts to move clients out.

Maybe you should embrace the unknown instead

There’s an argument that chasing a risk-free trip ruins the trip. Amanda Persi, founder of The Getaway Co., recently led a northern lights trip to Norway. She told her guests upfront that the lights might not show.

“We were very clear with our guests upfront that the aurora borealis can’t be guaranteed,” Persi says. “What surprised me was how relieved and receptive people felt once that pressure was removed.”

Persi argues that we’ve started to conflate peace of mind with certainty. By chasing a specific outcome, we miss the point of being present in a remote place. When her group finally saw the northern lights, it felt like a gift rather than something they were owed by a contract.

“Travel doesn’t need to be risk-free to be meaningful,” she says. “More often than not, it’s the uncertainty that makes a trip truly feel unforgettable.”

Step into the TSA PreCheck lane at Los Angeles International this week and the person ahead of you might not be flying anywhere. 

Since early this month, the Transportation Security Administration has allowed vetted travelers without tickets to clear the checkpoint and walk to a gate to meet an arriving grandmother or see off a college kid. 

The program is called Gateside by TSA PreCheck. It costs nothing and is currently running at 13 airports. And the agency’s pitch for it is sentiment, not security. 

Gateside, it says, brings back “the moments that once defined air travel.”

Those moments ended on a Tuesday morning 25 years ago. Gate passes were among the first things to get jettisoned. Now they’re back, the shoe rule is gone, the liquids limit is under review, and the job of screening you may soon belong to a private contractor. Each piece has a reasonable-sounding explanation. 

But put them on a timeline and things look a little different.

What the TSA has handed back

The restrictions on shoes went first. On July 8, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security ended the removal requirement that had been in place nationwide since 2006, a rule born from Richard Reid’s attempt to light a bomb in his sneaker on a Paris-to-Miami flight in December 2001.

The liquids rule is next in line. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in July 2025 that the 3-1-1 limit was under review, and TSA officials told reporters around the September 11 anniversary this year that airports with CT scanners may eventually let you carry a full water bottle through. No formal change has been announced. 

Screening itself went on the block. In 2026, the agency rolled out Gold+, a model in which private contractors would run both the screening workforce and the checkpoint technology while it supervised these activities. Des Moines, Charleston and Tampa signed up.

In late August, after roughly three months, the agency scrapped Gold+ but didn’t give up on the idea. David Cummins, the new administrator and a former senior vice president at the British contractor Serco Group, is replacing it with an expanded version of the older Screening Partnership Program under a plan called Horizon 25. Private screeners are already in use by 20 airports. About 47,000 federal screeners are watching to see what happens to their jobs.

All of this is happening while the agency has less capacity than it used to. The Homeland Security shutdown earlier this year had screeners working without pay and produced hours-long lines at some airports in March. 

Its own record isn’t reassuring either. A 2019 GAO audit found that of nine vulnerabilities identified through covert testing since 2015, none had been formally resolved as of September 2018. In 2024, TSA screeners intercepted 6,678 firearms at checkpoints, and 94 percent of them were loaded. Those guns were stopped by a person watching a screen.

And now you can walk to the gate

The agency’s argument for introducing Gateside is that it’s safe. Computed tomography scanners produce a three-dimensional image a screener can rotate, which the agency says makes shoe removal and the small-bottle rule unnecessary at equipped checkpoints. PreCheck members submit fingerprints and submit to a background check, so extending the lane to a vetted person without a ticket adds no unvetted body to the secure side. 

Real ID enforcement closed the identity loophole. Cockpit doors are hardened. And the layered-defense argument carries real weight: RAND researcher Kelly Klima notes there hasn’t been a successful attack on a screened U.S. commercial flight since 2001, and credits the agency for it. Her colleague John Hollywood makes the case for layers working together, while cautioning that the goal is to “stay vigilant but not overreactive.”

But have we gone too far?

The poll

If you answered yes:

• Which change worries you most: shoes, liquids, gate passes or private screeners?
• Would you accept longer lines in exchange for the old rules?
• Have you seen something at a checkpoint that made you doubt the screening?

If you answered no:

• Do you think the scanners are good enough to replace the rules, or do you think the old rules never did much?
• Would you use a Gateside pass to meet someone at the gate?
• Does it concern you that a contractor may screen you next year?

My take

The TSA is shedding procedures faster than it’s installing new equipment.

Peter DiDomenica, the former Massachusetts State Police sergeant who helped write the original shoe rule at Logan, didn’t ask for it to stay forever. He asked for it to stay random, X-raying shoes maybe 1 percent of the time, because a deterrent works on what someone planning an attack believes is possible. The agency deleted the entire rule instead. 

I’d feel better about all of it if someone would publish the threat assessment. Ask the agency why shoes came off the list and you get a line about technology. Ask which airports have the scanners that justify it and the answer gets vague. Ask what happens to accountability when a contractor misses something and there’s no answer at all.

I’m not suggesting we should go back to the days of humiliating pat-downs and unpacking toiletry kits in a bin. But it would be reassuring to know who decided the risk changed. What did they look at? What did they find? I don’t need another press release about bringing back the Golden Age of Travel. I just wonder if we’ve forgotten the lessons of 9/11. 

Your turn

If you remember what it was like to fly before 9/11, you’ve probably noticed the recent changes at the screening area. What do you think? Are the scanners good enough, or are we trading safety for a shorter line and a nicer goodbye at the gate? And if you’ve used a Gateside pass already, I want to hear how it went.