Tatsuyuki Morishita booked a “quiet” Airbnb in Toronto, only to be jolted awake by noise every night. An Airbnb agent promised a refund if he moved out early, but once he handed back the keys, the company tried to close the case with no refund. Can Morishita get Airbnb to honor its word?

Question

I booked an Airbnb rental in Toronto for a stay of more than two months. The listing description used the words “quiet” and “peaceful” five times, which was exactly what I needed for my stay. 

Unfortunately, the reality was anything but calm. Almost every night, recurring heavy impact noise from the unit above would wake us up at 4 a.m. I didn’t just complain; I documented the disturbance with video and audio recordings. I shared these with the host multiple times, and while they acknowledged the ongoing noise, they couldn’t stop it. 

I also reported the issue to Airbnb within the required 72-hour window. An agent reviewed my evidence and confirmed I was covered by Airbnb’s AirCover guarantee. He gave me a written commitment for a full refund of 12 unused nights and a 30 percent refund for the 20 nights we endured the noise. He even told me he was “currently processing” the request. 

Since we moved out, Airbnb reassigned the file to multiple agents who all contradicted each other. One agent denied our eligibility entirely. Another senior manager claimed the host wasn’t willing to alter the dates, despite the thread showing the host had already approved the early checkout. The agent then tried to close the case without giving us a cent.

I just want Airbnb to honor the written commitment its agent made. Can you help me get them to pay what they promised? — Tatsuyuki Morishita, North York, Ontario 

Answer

Airbnb should have stuck to its word. When an agent confirms AirCover eligibility and provides a specific refund amount in writing, that’s a contract. You relied on that commitment when you packed your bags and left. For the company to play “hot potato” with your case afterward is unacceptable.

AirCover is supposed to protect guests when a listing isn’t what was advertised. Since “quiet” was a central feature of the description, the early-morning noise brigade was a clear violation. 

You documented the noise, notified the host, and got a promise from support before you left the premises. Good job! Many travelers make the mistake of leaving first and asking for money later, but you had the “green light” in writing.

When a company goes silent or starts walking back a promise, you should appeal to an executive. I list the names and email addresses of Airbnb’s leadership on my advocacy site, Elliott.org.

I contacted Airbnb on your behalf. Shortly after that, a member of the senior support team called you. While you rightly insisted on keeping the conversation in writing, they followed up on the platform to apologize. Airbnb honored the original refund of $1,268 and even threw in a $250 coupon for the trouble.

As an active duty member of the military, Zachary Scott may not know where he’ll get deployed next. But he is sure of this: The modem and router he uses to connect to the internet belong to him.

So when the orders came to move from Virginia to Hawaii, he canceled his internet service with Cox Communications and packed his belongings, including the hardware he owned.

Everything seemed fine until he got his final statement. That’s when Cox decided to hit him with a one-time charge of $252 for the modem. When he didn’t pay the bill, Cox referred the bill to a collections agency.

“I would like this removed from my credit report and the erroneous charges removed,” he says.

His case raises several important questions:

• How do you prove you don’t have something that you never had in the first place?
• What are your rights under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act when a utility company needlessly complicates your move?
• How can you force a company to un-report a debt to collections once it realizes it has made a mistake?

“I used my own equipment”

When Scott canceled his account, the “we are sorry to lose you” note from Cox felt more like a threat than a farewell. It warned that to avoid collection costs, he needed to return all their equipment. 

But Scott didn’t have their equipment. He moved to Honolulu, started his new assignment, and assumed the mistake would resolve itself once the company realized its inventory was actually correct.

It didn’t. A few months later, a debt collector was knocking on his digital door. Scott was now facing a $240 “delinquency” on his credit report for equipment he never had.

“I used my own equipment,” he says. “I had none of theirs.”

How do you prove it’s your equipment?

Proving you didn’t steal a modem is like proving you didn’t see a UFO. If the company claims its database says you have the hardware and you can’t show a receipt from 2021, the company wins.

Or does it?

Scott’s situation is a classic can’t-win scenario. He told me the equipment is over five years old. Most of us don’t keep receipts for electronics that long. Heck, most of us can’t find the receipt for the toaster we bought a few weeks ago.

The best weapon in this scenario is your past billing statements. Scott was smart enough to keep those. For years, Cox billed him for internet service but never once charged him an equipment rental fee. If a company doesn’t charge you for a modem for 60 months, it’s a fairly safe bet you aren’t using one of theirs.

When you find yourself in inventory purgatory, don’t just tell the customer service rep “I don’t have it.” Send the last 12 months of bills and highlight the missing rental fee. It’s the closest thing to proof of non-existence you’ll get. 

Tip: If they still insist, ask for the MAC address of the modem they think you have. You can then compare that to the MAC address on the bottom of your actual router. If they don’t match, and you have photos to prove it — you’ve got ’em.

Are there any protections for servicemembers for erroneous billing?

The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act provides a lot of protections for people like Scott, specifically regarding terminating leases and cell phone contracts when they get permanent change of station orders. 

While it doesn’t cover every single utility fee dispute, the spirit of the law is meant to prevent exactly what happened here: a soldier getting distracted by a move across the Pacific only to find his credit trashed by a clerical error.

Companies often have military desks or specialized departments to handle these transitions. But as Scott found out, the left hand rarely knows what the right hand is doing. He was executing military orders to Hawaii when Cox decided to turn his credit report into a battlefield.

When you’re in the military and a company ignores your proof, it’s time to escalate. Every base has a legal assistance office. Sometimes a letter on JAG letterhead is the quickest way to wake up a sleepy corporate billing department. 

Scott tried to handle it himself, but the company just handed the debt to a collector. And once you’re in collections, it mushrooms from a billing error into a financial parasite that’s hard to kill.

How do you un-report a debt you never had?

You can undo an erroneous collection report, but it’s not always easy.

If you find yourself staring at a collection notice for a debt you don’t owe, the first rule is: Don’t ignore it. Ignoring a collection agency is like ignoring a leak in your roof—it’s only going to get more expensive and more destructive over time.

Under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, you have the right to request validation of the debt. You have to do this in writing within 30 days of receiving that first collection notice. In Scott’s case, he needed to tell the agency, “I don’t owe Cox $240, and here’s why.”

When you send that letter—and you should send it via certified mail, return receipt requested—the collection agency is legally required to stop collection activities until they provide you with proof that the debt is legitimate. In a case like this, where the equipment was never rented, the agency will likely come up empty-handed. But you have to start that paper trail to protect your credit score.

If the collection agency refuses to budge, your next move is a formal dispute with the three major credit bureaus: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. You can do this online, but I always recommend the old-fashioned way—on paper, sent through the mail. Provide copies of your final bill showing no equipment charges and your military orders if applicable.

The bureaus have 30 days to investigate. If the company (in this case, Cox) can’t prove you had the equipment, the bureau must remove the negative mark from your report. It’s a tedious process, but it’s the only way to perform a credit exorcism and get that phantom debt off your record for good.

An appeal to an executive at Cox might have helped, too. We list the names, numbers and email address on our company contacts pages.

Scott’s move to Hawaii has made this even more complicated, but the law remains on his side—even from the other side of the world. Just remember: in the world of consumer advocacy, silence is often interpreted as an admission of guilt.

Problem solved?

I reached out to Cox several times to see if it could fix this. A representative got back to me and declared that the case was resolved.

Good news, right? Kinda. Scott checked his credit report and the delinquency was still there. I asked if he’d heard anything from Cox, but he hadn’t.

I’m still optimistic that this will get fixed. The wheels turn slowly in the world of debt collection. Cox has to notify the company and then the company has to update its records, and that can be a process. But I have a written promise from Cox that it’s been taken care of.

Scott needs a letter of deletion or a debt validation response that shows a zero balance and a request to the bureaus to remove the debt. Without that paper, you’re just taking their word for it. And as we’ve seen, their word isn’t worth the $240 they’re trying to collect.

(I’ll update this story when Scott has the letter.)

The travel industry is redefining what it means to get your money back. You’re not going to like it. 

Just ask William Farrer, a retired attorney from San Rafael, Calif., who thought he was booking a refundable room at a full-service hotel in New Orleans.

He typed the hotel’s name into Google, clicked the first result, double-checked the terms — which promised the room was “refundable for a limited period” — and hit confirm. Seconds later, an email arrived from a booking site, informing him that the “limited” time had already expired and that his $3,228 was spent. Wow, that was fast!

It’s the travel industry’s latest shell game. The word “refundable” used to mean you’d get your money back. Now it means something closer to you might get some of your money back, under specific conditions, minus fees you weren’t clearly told about, after a fight that could consume months of your life. 

“In most consumers’ minds, a refundable ticket should provide a full refund to the original form of payment if you cancel before departure,” says Chip Lupo, an analyst with WalletHub. “That’s what you’re generally entitled to. But some travel providers may try to get you to accept a credit or voucher instead.”

Why a refundable booking may not return all your money

When you book a refundable trip through an online travel agency, you’re buying two promises. The airline’s fare rules say refundable, but the agency’s service contract may say something else.

That “something else” often includes a $30 nonrefundable distribution charge—a fee airlines and agencies pass along for using the Global Distribution System, the software backbone that connects travel agents to airline inventory. 

“Some airlines apply a distribution charge,” says Maria Atanasova of Stars Desk, a luxury travel agency. “This fee is typically around $30 and, in many cases, is nonrefundable even when the ticket itself is fully refundable.”

A $30 fee doesn’t sound like much. But you paid for a refundable fare and didn’t get one.

Agencies hide their own fees in the fine print, too. Many online agencies compete on price by discounting fares below what airlines publish, then relying on change and cancellation fees to survive. 

“They rely on service fees for changes or cancellations to offset the loss on sale,'” Atanasova explains. In other words, the bargain fare you found on a comparison site may have a hidden string attached—and that string tightens the moment you try to cancel.

“‘Refundable’ in travel now often means conditional,” says Alen Baibekov, CEO of Economy Bookings, “not complete.”

Some hotels charge fees when they send you a refund

It’s not just the big guys playing this game. Stephen Fofanoff manages the Domaine Madeleine Hotel near Olympic National Park in Port Angeles, Wash.—a small family property that learned a painful lesson during the pandemic.

“We never want to charge any guest unnecessarily,” Fofanoff says, noting that all fees are clearly disclosed when guests book a room. Card processors typically keep the fee from the original sale. Some charge another fee to send the money back.

“We were forced to adjust our policy to cover the costs just to remain open,” he says. That adjustment added about 5% to every cancellation.

His hotel now offers what he calls a “choose your own cancellation” policy. Guests can reschedule for free, but a cash refund, when due, costs something. 

“As a small family-owned hotel, we simply can’t afford the burden that giant corporations impose on us,” Fofanoff says.

Credit card processing fees are an unglamorous and underreported tax on small businesses, and consumers ultimately foot the bill. What’s frustrating isn’t that these costs exist, but it’s that the word “refundable” doesn’t acknowledge them. 

Guests book a refundable rate expecting a full return, but they don’t always get it.

“Refundable,” says Rahul Telang, a professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon University, “does not mean the payment is risk-free.”

How to get a full refund from a booking site

You don’t have to put up with these partial refunds. Here’s what to do.

Take a screen shot. Screenshot the checkout page that says “fully refundable.” Then compare it to the confirmation email that adds fees or credit-only language. That’s the advice of Rene Fornaris, a vice president at a two-way radio retailer, who has watched this pattern play out in his business. “If they didn’t clearly disclose the deduction before you paid, that’s where people actually win,” he says.

Book direct. Online travel agencies are notorious for adding surprise fees or changing the definition of “refundable” to offering a credit or something less than all your money back. “You have more leverage when something goes wrong,” says Joe Cronin, president of International Citizens Insurance. 

Consider travel insurance. “Travel insurance can cover you for prepaid, nonrefundable travel costs,” explains Paul-Adrien Maizener, U.S. CEO of Redion (formerly Generali). That means you’ll get a full refund—but only under certain conditions. (You can also get a “cancel for any reason” policy, but you’ll typically only get between 50 to 75%of your money back.)

“Always read the fine print,” warns Susan Sherren, founder of the luxury travel agency Couture Trips. “Never rely on verbal assurances over the phone—ensure everything is in writing.”

You can also ask for help. That’s what Farrer, the attorney from California, did. He asked me about his nonrefundable “refundable” room, and I asked his online travel agency. After seven months of chasing his booking site and the hotel through a maze of noreply email addresses and dead-end phone trees, he finally got his money back.

He had a four-word verdict: “This is complete BS.”

How to spot a booking site posing as the hotel

Impostor sites can show up at the top of your internet search results. They look like a hotel and maybe even use the hotel’s logos. But check the actual address: If it’s not the company’s, you’re dealing with a third party, which may not give you a full refund when you ask.

The worst of them are amateur jobs, without proper security credentials. If your browser has the right settings, it will stop you before you can even make a booking.

Always, always, check the confirmation email immediately and compare it to what you saw at checkout. Any change in refundability terms is your signal to act fast. Agencies sometimes have a short grace period to cancel even a nominally nonrefundable booking, but don’t count on it. 

The word “refundable” used to mean only one thing. You could get all your money back. Now it’s a contract term buried inside a contract term, wrapped around a processing fee, owned by a subsidiary of a booking platform.

Efforts are underway to stop the shady operators who impersonate hotels. Illinois lawmakers introduced bills in 2026 requiring those sites to disclose that they aren’t affiliated with the hotel. A Georgia proposal would make that kind of misrepresentation an unfair and deceptive trade practice.

Until regulations catch up, treat “refundable” the way you’d treat a “lifetime guarantee” from a company that’s only been in business for six months — which is to say, be skeptical. And get everything in writing.

If you’ve checked airfares for the holidays, you probably already know this: It’s expensive. Really expensive.

Domestic round-trip fares for Thanksgiving average $402, up 31% from last year. Christmas fares average $452, a 23% jump. Both are the highest in a decade. 

Fly home on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and you could pay more than $600 roundtrip. Yikes.

This isn’t the usual holiday markup. Fares were climbing long before anyone started shopping for a seat home. The government’s Consumer Price Index shows airline fares up 23% in August compared with a year earlier. In May, the average ticket sold through travel agencies cost 18% more than a year before, even though the number of trips didn’t budge, according to Airlines Reporting Corp. 

So are you being fleeced? Or have airline costs really gone up that much?

What’s driving fares higher?

Many factors are to blame, according to experts.

Fuel costs are up. The war in the Middle East shut down nearly all Gulf airspace when it began, and oil prices soared. The International Air Transport Association expects jet fuel to average $152 a barrel this year, almost 70% more than in 2025. Fuel accounts for nearly a third of an airline’s operating costs. U.S. carriers have largely stopped hedging fuel, so IATA expects them to pass those costs on to passengers quickly.

Then there’s demand. Consumers are gloomy. The University of Michigan’s sentiment index fell to 48.1 in September, near a record lows. They’re flying anyway. “We haven’t seen elasticity,” Delta CFO Erik Snell told analysts in July. Allow me to translate: Delta raised prices and people kept buying. The airline says more than 60% of its fourth quarter is already booked.

There are also fewer seats to go around. Delta’s third-quarter revenue rose 16% while its capacity stayed essentially flat. Spirit Airlines shut down in May, and no low-cost carrier has filled the gap. Delta CEO Ed Bastian says the industry may need to grow even less in 2027. “In a high-cost environment you cannot grow your way out of it,” he said earlier this month. In other words, expect fewer flights and fuller planes.

Is an algorithm setting your fare?

Delta uses an AI pricing tool built by an Israeli company called Fetcherr. In July 2025, the airline said the tool covered about 3% of its domestic fares, with a goal of 20% by the end of that year.

Congress wants to know more. On Aug. 11, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), sent letters to eight airlines asking whether they use personal data to set prices. He cited a study estimating that one airline raised its revenue by up to 6% through AI pricing based on consumer data. Delta President Peter Carter replied that “the fares we file do not take any customer’s personal data into account.” He called the tool a “decision-support tool” and said human analysts still set fares.

Regulators aren’t taking anyone’s word for it. The Federal Trade Commission voted 2-0 on Aug. 19 to propose a policy statement that would require companies to clearly disclose when a price is personalized and what data are behind it. New York and New Jersey have already passed laws aimed at regulating personalized pricing.

Wait, aren’t airlines just covering their costs?

That’s the industry’s argument. Delta expects to spend about $6 billion more on fuel this year, and it cut its earnings forecast. IATA projects that North American airlines’ profit margins will slip to 2.5% this year from 3.5% in 2025.

Now listen to how Bastian described the year. On the Oct. 9 earnings call, he praised “the ability of the industry to get much greater value for the product that we offer” and said “it took a fuel spike in a short order to move people in that direction.” 

Delta raised fares about 20% this year, and Bastian pointed to “the limited amount of resistance that we see.” The airline still expects about $4.5 billion in pretax profit, roughly level with last year. 

Thanks for paying, everyone.

If you voted yes:

• Avoid the Sunday after Thanksgiving if you can. Return fares that day top $600, according to Hopper.
• Set a fare alert now and track your route. Prices change daily, and waiting for a holiday sale is a gamble this year.

If you voted no:

• Tell us why the fares look fair to you. Are you using points, flying off-peak or simply willing to pay?
• You’re the passenger Bastian is counting on. (He’ll thank you on the next earnings call.)

My take

I’m constantly on the road, and I’ve been monitoring one-way fares between Spokane, Wash., and Auckland, New Zealand, for the last few weeks. The prices have been volatile, fluctuating between $500 and $700. It feels like the revenue managers at American, Delta and Air New Zealand keep trying to raise ticket prices, only to pull back when people stop buying. 

I’ve seen this before. In May 2008, with oil at $130 a barrel, American Airlines announced a $15 fee for the first checked bag. CEO Gerard Arpey blamed “the current reality of slow economic growth and high oil prices.” Oil prices collapsed later that year, but the bag fee never went away.

In 2015, jet fuel fell from more than $3 a gallon to under $1.70. Airlines kept the fuel surcharges anyway, including $458 per passenger on flights between New York and London. That summer, the Justice Department sent letters to the four largest U.S. airlines as part of an investigation into whether they had coordinated to limit seats.

Economists who study this say fares do follow fuel prices down over time. The average domestic fare fell 8% in the fourth quarter of 2015. But one study found fares dropped only about 12% after crude oil fell 57%, and oil prices couldn’t explain the gap. “Over time” is cold comfort when you’re buying four tickets home for Christmas.

Airfares are too high, but the real test is what happens when fuel costs come down. Bastian has already said passengers aren’t pushing back, and analysts say holding fares at their current levels is the key to higher airline margins in 2027. (Of course they’d say that.)

If fuel falls and fares don’t, we’ll know the industry used a war to reset what it charges, and every carrier that follows Delta’s lead will be counting on you not to notice.

Your turn

What do you think about the high holiday fares? Our comments are open.

You don’t have to be a frequent traveler to know that the rules of flying now favor the airline. 

You can feel it at the gate when your flight is delayed for the third time and nobody offers you anything, not even an explanation. You see it when an airline advertises a fare that bears little resemblance to what you actually pay for your ticket. 

Your suspicions are correct. In the United States, passenger rights are shrinking.

Elsewhere, they’re growing. Europe, Britain, Australia, Canada and India have all moved to protect air travelers this year. But here in the U.S., the Department of Transportation (DOT) has spent the better part of the last two years dismantling the few rules that existed.

What the U.S. is doing for airline passengers

The government dropped a plan to require cash compensation for long delays within an airline’s control. It also abandoned a proposal that would have required airlines to cover meals and hotels during major disruptions. 

This summer, the DOT formally removed a 2024 fee-disclosure rules. It also proposed an elimination of the full-fare advertising rule, reopening the door to the old “$49 fare (plus taxes and fees)” ad.

The government also extended its pause on refund enforcement for “renumbered” flights through next summer. That creates a loophole allowing airlines to simply renumber a delayed or canceled flight and avoid paying any kind of compensation or refunds to passengers. 

No more airline fines?

Enforcement has collapsed along with the rules. I reported in August that the government hadn’t assessed a single civil penalty against an airline for violating consumer protection rules this year. 

Instead, it has forgiven nearly $28 million in fines since December. Southwest got the last $11 million of its penalty waived for the December 2022 holiday meltdown. American had nearly $17 million of its wheelchair-handling penalty released. Under a policy DOT adopted in January, an airline that breaks the rules now generally gets a warning letter first. Fines are reserved for conduct the department considers “widespread, systemic, egregious or intentional.”

The department’s position is that it will enforce every protection Congress requires, including refunds for canceled flights. It argues that some Biden-era rules went further than the law demands. 

To be fair, DOT did finalize a rule in April requiring every airline to post a one-page summary of passenger rights. The trouble is that the list of rights it summarizes keeps getting shorter.

What everyone else is doing

Let’s start with Europe. On July 7, the European Parliament approved a long-delayed overhaul of its air passenger rules by a vote of 646 to 12. Airlines had lobbied for years to push back the point at which delay compensation begins. They lost. 

Passengers receive compensation ranging from 250 to 600 euros (about $280 to $672) for delays of three hours or more. Fixing a misspelled name will be free of charge. Fares on booking sites must include a carry-on bag from the first search screen, although airlines may still offer a discount to passengers who travel without one. The rules take effect in 2027.

Britain is next. On October 1, the U.K. Department for Transport announced plans to ban charges for seating children under 14 next to an accompanying adult. It would also end fees for correcting spelling errors on a ticket, as the EU’s new rules will.

The department’s own numbers show what’s at stake: up to 104 British pounds (about $138) per round trip for family seating, and up to 40 pounds (about $53) to fix a typo. The changes depend on the Civil Aviation (Consumer Protection and Regulatory Reform) Bill, which is still working its way through Parliament.

Australia introduced its Aviation Consumer Protection Bill on April 1. It would replace the industry-funded Airline Customer Advocate, which the minister described as widely considered ineffectual, with an independent ombudsperson. A charter would set minimum standards for airlines and airports. Carriers would have to report the reasons for delays and cancellations. A new authority inside the Department of Infrastructure would enforce it all. The bill doesn’t include European-style cash compensation for delays. 

Canada has plenty of rules on the books. Its problem is enforcement. In May, the government said more than 97,000 passenger complaints were stuck at the Canadian Transportation Agency. It promised to bring in an outside dispute-resolution group to clear them and to stop requiring passengers to keep the process confidential. It also noted that fines for systemic violations can reach 1 million Canadian dollars (about $700,000).

India also moved to protect air travelers this year. As of March 26, passengers who book directly with an airline can cancel or change a ticket within 48 hours at no charge, provided the flight date is far enough out. Name corrections reported within 24 hours are free. Refunds are due within 14 working days. 

None of these systems is perfect. Each one, though, is moving toward the passenger.

What happened to the watchdogs?

How could this unfold in the last two years without anyone noticing? Well, it didn’t all happen at once, so unless you’re a beat reporter for a major news organization, you probably wouldn’t have noticed this gradual erosion of consumer rights.

But even if you were, you might have your reasons for overlooking it. After all, you wouldn’t want to incur the wrath of this highly litigious administration. But a certain newspaper of record finally caught up with this story earlier this month. It called two consumer advocates at the top of its Google search results for a comment and then called it a day. Nice work.

This story has been unfolding for months, and readers of this column have watched the rollbacks pile up one at a time. But you don’t need to ask a consumer advocate if things are bad. Just pay attention to the Federal Register. Or just book an airline ticket.

What you can do about it

American travelers can’t vote in the European Parliament. You can take advantage of its rules, though. EU protections cover any flight departing from an EU airport and any EU airline flying into or out of an EU airport. If you have a choice of carrier, that coverage has value. 

Ask for compensation for long delays and flight cancellations. Pay with a credit card so you can dispute a charge for a flight you didn’t take. File complaints with DOT even if enforcement is slow, because those numbers show up in the monthly Air Travel Consumer Report and go on an airline’s permanent record. 

When DOT opens a rule for public comment, file one. Airlines always do.

Most importantly, vote. Find candidates who believe in stronger consumer protections and support them in this midterm election.

I’ve never heard a pet ask to go on vacation, and unless you’ve been taking hallucinogenic drugs, neither have you.

To be sure, some animals must travel, such as guide dogs or pets that are moving with their owners. 

But taking Fifi on vacation with you? That’s a terrible idea.

In this week’s Elliott Confidential podcast, we revisit our most spectacular failures — we call them the F-Files — and talk about our pet cases with wild endings. (Warning: This episode contains gratuitous references to cats, small dogs eating deadly Mexican street food, and pets overdosing on drugs. Listen discretion is strongly advised.)

One of our readers wanted $11,000 after something terrible happened to his cat. Another demanded all her money back for an all-inclusive vacation in Cancun after feeding her doggie Mexican street food. You can probably guess what happened next.

My perspective won’t make me popular at the dog park. But here goes, anyway: Pets don’t travel well. The travel industry isn’t built for animals, no matter what its marketing says. If you think your pet can’t survive a week without you, maybe the problem is you.

It keeps happening

The latest case to make headlines happened last month. Last month, a large dog named Bubble flew in the cargo hold of Korean Air Flight 868 from Guangzhou, China, to Incheon, South Korea. 

She arrived dead in her crate. 

Her owner, identified only as Jennifer, says a panel inside the crate had flipped up onto her. Korean Air says its environmental control systems worked normally throughout the flight and that the other pets on board arrived safely. Jennifer says the airline has refused to give her its footage or records. 

“Korean Air, I handed you my little girl alive,” she says. “You returned her body to me.” 

In February 2024, Michael Contillo paid an extra $100 per dog to keep his two French bulldogs with him in first class on an Alaska Airlines flight from New York to San Francisco. Right before takeoff, the crew moved him and his father to the main cabin “for safety purposes,” according to the lawsuit he later filed. Ash, who was almost 4, started breathing fast and hard. By the time the plane landed, the dog was in rigor mortis. 

Contillo sued Alaska in October 2024. He dropped the case in January 2025.

The case most people remember happened in March 2018. A flight attendant on a United Airlines flight from Houston to New York insisted that a family put a pet carrier in the overhead bin. Inside was Kokito, a French bulldog puppy. He didn’t make it.

A necropsy later found that he suffocated. United says the attendant didn’t know a dog was in the bag. It settled with the family on undisclosed terms. That May, it banned more than 20 short-nosed and strong-jawed breeds from its cargo hold.

The federal numbers look small. U.S. airlines reported eight animal incidents to the Department of Transportation in 2025, including three deaths, four injuries and one lost animal. Alaska accounted for two of the deaths. One was Meli, a 3-year-old golden retriever flying from Honolulu to Charleston, S.C., with an overnight stop in Seattle. On Dec. 5, ramp workers found her unresponsive in her kennel before loading. The cause of death was never determined. Alaska reported no corrective action. Those figures only cover what carriers are required to report. A dog that lands alive but dehydrated and panicked doesn’t count.

Other passengers pay a price too. On Memorial Day 2025, Delta Air Lines Flight 694 from Detroit to Los Angeles diverted to Minneapolis because a dog got sick in the cabin. Its 181 passengers landed 2½ hours late. The captain told them the dog would be fine.

Your dog is luggage

If something goes wrong on an international flight, the law won’t do much for you. In 2019, a passenger’s dog escaped while workers carried it to an Iberia plane in Buenos Aires bound for Barcelona. Nobody ever found it. The passenger asked for 5,000 euros. 

Iberia accepted liability but offered only the limit for checked baggage. In October 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union sided with the airline. It ruled that pets count as “baggage” under the Montreal Convention, which caps what an airline owes you for a lost bag. The only way around the cap is a special declaration of interest at check-in. Most travelers have never heard of it.

What’s in our files

Our advocacy team hears from pet owners regularly. Take the two cases from the podcast. A reader we’ll call Walt took his cat, Rajah, on a string of RV trips to see the national parks. At Zion National Park, Rajah ate something off the ground and needed a vet. A year later, he hurt his leg in a fall on a hike. A few months after that, he got sick on the drive to the Grand Canyon and needed emergency surgery. In the podcast, I’ll reveal the tragic reason Walt wanted $11,000.

A reader we’ll call Daisy flew Frontier Airlines to Cancun with her Chihuahua, which she says was her emotional support animal. The dog showed signs of a respiratory infection on the flight to Mexico but appeared fine once they landed. She kept it by her side at her all-inclusive resort and on the streets of Cancun, where she shared her street food with it. On the trip home, the dog began convulsing and vomiting. I’ll explain why Daisy wanted a full refund for her vacation in this week’s podcast.

Hotels don’t come off much better. In August, we published Terry Reilly’s story about the Westin Hilton Head Island Resort & Spa. Reilly’s wife is allergic to dogs. The resort’s website says it welcomes pets up to 40 pounds, with a limit of two per room. 

Reilly found German shepherds and collies well over that limit. He saw a 100-pound Doberman in the hallway at 3 a.m. One pet soiled the carpet. The mess stayed there for 24 hours. The general manager never answered his letter. After we got involved, Westin admitted it had failed to enforce its own pet policy and refunded his $525.

Our unpublished files tell the same story.

• A family that booked a month long Airbnb in Guthrie, Okla., in July says the rental was infested with fleas. Family members came away with welts. Their pet needed $149 in veterinary care, plus $484 for a hotel quarantine during treatment. The host admitted in writing that a previous guest brought the fleas.
• A traveler from Taiwan with severe allergies and asthma booked two business-class seats on Korean Air for herself and her daughter. After an aircraft swap, the airline split them up and seated her next to a designated pet area. Korean Air’s solution was to seat them together “in the pet section.” It refused to issue a full refund.
• Cunard denied boarding to one couple because UPS lost their dog’s veterinary certificate. They put their losses at $14,000.

None of these animals should have taken a vacation. Not a one. 

The industry tolerates pets and collects your money

Look at how travel companies treat animals. An airline charges you to bring a pet into the cabin. Those fees are climbing. In April 2025, Delta raised its in-cabin pet fee on U.S. flights from $95 to $150 each way, a 58% increase. American also charges $150 per kennel each way. After that, your animal is cargo to the airline and baggage to the courts. 

A hotel calls itself “pet friendly,” but in practice, it often just collects a nightly fee. The Westin Hilton Head, where Reilly stayed, charges $50 a night per pet, and that fee is nonrefundable. An analysis of 1,000 pet-friendly hotels by Roch Dog, a company that certifies dog-friendly hotels, found that more than 80% charge extra for dogs. Fees ran from $50 a night to $250 a stay. Nearly a third of the hotels that charge offered two or fewer basic amenities, such as a bed or a water bowl. 

Airbnb lets hosts add a pet fee as high as the nightly rate. 

Allowing pets also pays. KeyData, which tracks vacation rental performance, found that pet-friendly rentals earned 24% more revenue per available night than other rentals in 2022. Then the next guest inherits the fleas.

A dog doesn’t know it’s on vacation. The animal gets a cramped carrier and hours without a bathroom. You get a photo for Instagram.

When it makes sense to bring your pet

I see two legitimate exceptions. If you’re moving, the animal has to come with you, so plan carefully. Book nonstop flights when you can and ask about that special declaration. If you rely on a trained service dog, federal law protects your right to fly with it. In 2021, the Department of Transportation stopped treating emotional support animals as service animals. That rule ended a lot of abuse.

Everyone else should leave the pet at home. 

If your pet can’t live without you

Most dogs and cats do fine for a week with a good caregiver. If you can’t leave yours behind, ask who the trip is for. Usually, it’s for you. The animal pays for your vacation in stress and risk. So does the passenger in the next seat whose allergy medication wears off over the Atlantic.

The travel industry won’t take care of your pet. It’ll charge you a fee, then classify your dog as luggage. Rajah saw some of the most spectacular scenery in America. I suspect he would have traded all of it for the couch. 

Sadly, that’s not possible. We’ll explain why in the podcast.

(Note: For those of you offended by this story, don’t worry — I’m working on an article about why and when you should bring your pet on vacation. I have to give the pet owners their say, after all.)

Nala Fox assumed she was safe at her five-star resort in Negril, Jamaica. The postcard-perfect beach, the friendly staff, and the high price tag all implied that security was included.

One afternoon, before she took a nap, she left her sliding balcony door cracked open.

It was a simple lapse. When she woke, her carry-on bag was gone, passport inside.

“The security desk shrugged, saying this sometimes happens,” says Fox, who runs an online educational platform.

The thieves weren’t master criminals rappelling from the roof. They were opportunists walking through an open door.

Fox was suffering from resort security amnesia. This condition affects otherwise street-smart travelers the moment they smell the signature scent of a luxury hotel lobby. They assume that because they paid a premium, they’ve entered a fortress. 

They haven’t. They’re in a high-traffic public space where the wealthy and the opportunistic brush shoulders.

As the busy travel season kicks off, a wave of resort security amnesia is sweeping through hotels, turning savvy travelers into easy marks. From cloned key cards to the false security of a second-floor room, your favorite vacation spot comes with hidden vulnerabilities. Knowing about them can help you avoid becoming a statistic.

Why we drop our guard

Why do we get so careless? Experts say it’s baked into the vacation experience. We pay to relax, and that includes letting our guard down.

“The biggest danger isn’t what’s happening outside the resort. It’s typically what guests assume about safety inside,” says Joe Orsak, president of 24 & 7 Security & Investigations. “Most travelers let their guard down once they check in. They’ll leave balcony doors unlocked or toss key cards on pool chairs, thinking they’re in a secure bubble.”

Orsak calls resorts “soft targets.” They have predictable routines and porous perimeters. Many rely too heavily on visible security cameras—”security theater”—that comforts guests without stopping crime.

“Resorts may feel like safe havens, but that sense of comfort can sometimes lead travelers to let their guard down,” says Raymond Yorke, a spokesman for Redpoint Resolutions. He says more people than ever are suffering from resort security amnesia—forgetting the basics once they’re in vacation mode.

“Common slip-ups include leaving valuables unattended by the pool, failing to use in-room safes, propping open balcony doors, or oversharing location details on social media,” Yorke says.

The key card trap

That plastic rectangle in your pocket is often the weak link. Complacent guests treat key cards like disposable coasters.

“The person holding the key card is the biggest vulnerability,” says Dave Meister, a cybersecurity expert at Check Point Software. “People treat them like they’re disposable, but they’re access tokens. If someone else gets hold of it, they have direct access to your room.”

Meister warns that magnetic stripe systems—still widely used at older properties—are also vulnerable to cloning. A thief can brush up against you or swipe a card left on a table and create a duplicate in seconds.

But the real risk isn’t just high-tech cloning—it’s human behavior. Most hotel room compromises stem from low-tech carelessness or simple social engineering, like someone convincing staff to reissue a key, tailgating into secure areas, or taking advantage of a guest who misplaces their card and doesn’t report it.

“I’ve watched travelers hand their key sleeve to someone helping with luggage without realizing the room number is printed right on it,” says Daniel Loo, a principal security-risk consultant at North Star Group. “A stranger doesn’t need to steal a wallet—they just need the room number and 30 seconds when you’re at the pool.”

This is why Anna Greenberg, a personal injury attorney who has represented victims of sexual assault in hotels, advises extreme caution. She says the number one cause of hotel sexual assaults she sees involves employees playing fast and loose with keys.

“All that stands between you and a predator on the other side of the hotel door is a keycard—something that can be obtained easily from poorly trained hotel staff,” Greenberg says.

Steven Lambert, a seasoned hotel general manager, advises guests to take control of the check-in process.

“Do not ask or share a specific room number when booking,” Lambert says. If a clerk announces your room number to the lobby, Lambert suggests asking for a different room immediately.

The open flank

If the front door is the first line of defense, the balcony is the open flank, as Nala Fox found out in Jamaica.

“I’ve handled cases where intruders bypassed hallways entirely by moving across connected balconies at night,” says Loo. “Most guests don’t even consider that angle.”

Even when you think you’ve locked up, the hardware might fail you. Matt Goodwin, now the president of Viper Security, became an expert only after being victimized at a resort.

Security cameras captured a ghostly figure walking into his room and leaving with his cooler, which the thief used to transport Goodwin’s stolen belongings.

“A simple piece of steel over the door latch that I’ve seen a million times at other commercial buildings was never installed at the resort we stayed at,” Goodwin says. “After testing it, I found I could actually get in faster with a butter knife than I could with the key.”

The predator at the bar

Resorts are social places. You make friends. You trust the staff. But predators rely on this trust.

Lindsay Dollinger, a network marketer attending a conference in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, took a staff golf cart shuttle back to her room. 

“A man took me and of course asked my room number and if it was just me,” Dollinger recalls. “I told him yes.”

On her second night, someone used a key to try to enter her room. Dollinger had engaged the security latch—a move that likely spared her from a physical confrontation.

“The man wouldn’t go away and kept trying to push into the room forcefully, speaking Spanish to let him in,” she says.

The hotel later claimed it was a security guard doing a welfare check, but Dollinger hadn’t called for one. The incident changed how she travels.

“From that point on, we did not tell any of the golf cart drivers our room number and in fact had them drop us off near our room,” she says.

Liability and the fine print

When things go wrong, guests often assume the resort—or their travel insurance—will make them whole. That is a faulty assumption.

Chrissy Valdez, senior director of operations at Squaremouth, warns that insurance coverage often hinges on whether the traveler took “reasonable care.”

“Leaving an expensive piece of technology, like a camera, unattended at the pool could be deemed negligence, making it hard to claim reimbursement, even if you bought an insurance policy,” Valdez says.

Resorts themselves are often protected by liability waivers and local laws that limit their responsibility for theft. If you leave your sliding door open, the loss is usually on you.

Where does the blame lie?

Is it the guest’s responsibility to be paranoid, or the resort’s responsibility to be impenetrable?

Ideally, it’s both. But experts say resorts are failing to communicate the risks because they don’t want to spoil the paradise illusion.

“Resorts generally fall short in communicating security risks effectively, often prioritizing a welcoming atmosphere over candid warnings,” says Michael O’Rourke, CEO of Advanced Operational Concepts, a security consulting firm. He calls for resorts to provide “transparent, reassuring info packets” at check-in.

Lucinda Faucheux, co-founder of Travel Support Circle, agrees. 

“A simple briefing at check-in would help out a lot,” she says. “A reminder to keep passports locked away and to keep an eye on anything left on sunbeds already changes how people move around the property.”

Terence Leung, a manager at LodgeLink, suggests “small nudges” like key card reminders by the pool or door sensors that chime when a balcony is unlocked.

“Informed guests create their own safety without costly monitored access systems,” Leung says.

Who is responsible?

Guests can’t force resorts to upgrade their locks. But they can cure their own complacency. It starts with attitude.

“I love a slightly paranoid traveler,” says John Rose, the chief risk advisor to Altour. “Not afraid to travel but also not an easy target for bad things to happen.” 

Here is how to lock down your next trip:

• Audit your room. “Simply making sure the door fully latches every time is one of the strongest, simplest forms of security,” says Darien Long, a senior vice president at dormakaba, a security access firm. Don’t just let it click; give it a tug.

• Use your hardware. Jesse Singh, founder of a supply chain company and a frequent hotel guest, advises using the deadbolt or chain every time you are inside. “The physical deadbolt is the last line of defense that can be guaranteed to work,” he says.

• Zip your lips. As etiquette expert Lisa Mirza Grotts advises, treat your room number “like your Social Security number: private and never shared.”

• Be boring. Don’t flash cash. Don’t wear the Rolex to the pool. Alyse Race, author and founder of The Invisible Tourist, suggests blending in. “Visitors commit security breaches by keeping jewelry in open luggage,” she notes.

The goal isn’t to spend your vacation looking over your shoulder. It’s to secure your perimeter so you can actually relax. A few seconds of paranoia at the door allows for hours of peace by the pool.

The intruder doesn’t always need a key

You can take every precaution, but security is never guaranteed. Alessandro Foti, owner of Bretton Woods Vacations in New Hampshire, warns that in remote areas, nature is watching.

Once, a bear saw a propped-open door and ran in to steal a bag of trash.

“We had a mother bear who made it all the way to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and helped herself to leftovers,” Foti says.

The lesson is universal: Lock your door. When you treat your room like a fortress, you can keep those uninvited guests out—even the wildlife.

Hugh Fuller buys the wrong warranty for his HP Pavilion laptop. The company promises a refund, but then sends the money to the wrong bank account. Now HP says the case is closed. Is it?

Question

I have a problem with a warranty I purchased from HP. It started when my HP Pavilion wouldn’t connect to the internet, though my other devices worked fine. I called HP Smart Friend, a service I was paying for, but its technicians were out of their depth. They kept trying to reinstall my operating system, which didn’t fix the connection and actually messed up my files.

Eventually, I figured out the problem was my internet provider, not the laptop. But before I realized that, a Smart Friend representative convinced me my laptop was failing and sold me a Care Pack hardware warranty for $40. I bought it on the last day of my eligibility because I was worried. 

When I later contacted the actual HP warranty department, they told me that Smart Friend had sold me the wrong type of warranty for my machine. They even said my laptop didn’t need replacing. Since then, I’ve been caught in a loop of useless phone calls. I’ve contacted the HP support community, but no one seems able to make a decision. 

HP finally agreed to a refund, but then the situation grew even more absurd. An executive in the escalations department, claimed they sent the $40 to a Bank of America account. I don’t bank there.

HP now claims the matter is resolved, but I don’t have my money. They need to cancel whatever they think they sent to the wrong bank and just mail me a check.  Can you help me get my $40 back? — Hugh Fuller, Portland, Ore. 

Answer

HP should have diagnosed your problem correctly, which would have avoided this entire absurd mess. Sending money into the void of a nonexistent account and then declaring the case “resolved” is not the kind of customer service you should expect.

Your experience highlights a common problem in corporate America. Companies often silo their support services, meaning the people selling you a “Smart Friend” subscription might not have a clue as to what the warranty department is doing.

You did the right thing by trying to resolve this through the HP support community and case managers. But you should have stopped the useless phone calls much sooner. When you’re dealing with a giant like HP, phone conversations are like mist—they vanish as soon as you hang up. You need a paper trail. Always move your dispute to email so you have a written record of who promised what and when. 

When a company gives you the runaround, you can also escalate your complaint to an executive. I publish the names, emails, and phone numbers of the HP executives on my advocacy site, Elliott.org.

I contacted HP on your behalf. I pointed out that while its records might show a payment was initiated, you never received it. 

HP finally took a second look at its accounting. After our intervention, the company confirmed it had finally resolved the matter and has refunded the $40—this time to the correct account. Next time, skip the Smart Friends and stick to your own tech instincts.

Charles Marcus books two rooms at a Hampton Inn through Priceline, but the site cancels them without his permission. When he rebooks the same rooms, the price jumps by $360. Can he get his money back?

Question

I booked two rooms at the Hampton Inn in Islandia, N.Y. through Priceline.com for a stay over the holidays. The total cost was $502. A few days later, Priceline canceled the rooms without my knowledge or consent and issued a refund.

I immediately called Priceline to ask for a rebooking at my original rate. An agent told me no and said Priceline would not offer anything. I then rebooked the same rooms on the same website for the same dates, but this time I was charged $862.

I’ve spent weeks calling and emailing Priceline. During these conversations, a Priceline agent actually confirmed that my original reservation was canceled by an agent without my consent. Despite admitting to the error, the company refused to refund the $360 price difference.

I have been very diligent and honest. I provided a full log of my calls and the original receipts. I even filed complaints with the California and New York attorneys general to try to get some movement. I even had an attorney send a demand letter for the refund. Priceline kept telling me that the matter had been escalated to a management team and asked for my patience, but nothing has happened for months.

I did not cancel this trip, and I should not have to pay for a mistake the company admitted it made. Can you help me get my money back? — Charles Marcus, San Francisco

Answer

Priceline should have honored your original rate. If its own agent canceled your reservation by mistake, the company is responsible for making it right—either by restoring the original booking or covering the cost of the new one.

You did the right thing by trying to resolve this through the official channels, but when a company admits it made an error and still holds on to your cash, it’s time to escalate. You can avoid a lot of this frustration by keeping a meticulous paper trail, which you did. If the front-line agents are stuck in a loop of “we’re looking into it,” you should send a brief, polite email to an executive. I publish the names and email addresses of the Priceline executives on my advocacy site, Elliott.org.

In hindsight, though, I think it might have been better to wait for a resolution instead of booking a replacement room. Generally speaking, online agencies are reluctant to refund customers who book on their own and then bill the company. But getting something in writing—not a confession by phone—that promises to fix the problem, that’s usually a sure thing.

I contacted Priceline on your behalf. Priceline asked you for more evidence, including phone logs and previous email where Priceline admitted its error.

Priceline finally did the right thing. You received an email authorizing a full refund of the $360 difference. It’s a reminder that persistence pays off, especially when you have the receipts to prove the company is wrong. 

John Curtin had everything on his Microsoft email account: his banking information, his mortgage paperwork, and a folder with his family’s addresses and numbers. He was a paying customer, too, shelling out $84 every year for an Office 365 subscription.

But apparently his money meant nothing to Microsoft, which locked him out of his account for what it called “unusual activity” and wouldn’t let him back in, no matter what he did.

“I need to get back into my account,” he told me. “I’m lost without it.”

Let’s pull back the curtain on this case:

• Can a company legally lock you out of a service you’re paying for without a human review?
• How do you get your account reinstated?
• What’s the best way to avoid a lockout?

“I’ve had this address for 20 years”

Curtin is no ordinary Microsoft customer. As an IT technician, he’s spent his career navigating the back alleys of technology. 

But one day, for reasons he can’t explain, he found himself on the wrong side of Microsoft’s automated security gates. That’s when he discovered that his status as a paying customer and his expertise in IT didn’t mean anything.

“I’ve had this email address for 20 years, and I have a lot of personal information that I need to get back,” Curtin told me. 

Before we go any further, let’s pause to note that storing all of your personal information in the cloud, without any kind of redundancy, is problematic. Your email provider could easily decide to lock you out, which would render it impossible for you to retrieve your data.

Curtin’s Microsoft account was the cornerstone of his digital life. It held everything, including a visa application that needed his immediate attention. 

His nightmare started about a month ago when Microsoft notified him that it had detected “unusual activity” on his account. Suddenly, he went from a valued customer to a digital trespasser. Despite providing the exact payment details and dates for his subscription, the automated “recovery” bots remained unimpressed.

Can a company lock you out of your account?

We get questions almost every day from people who are trying to get into their disabled accounts. These companies have completely outsourced customer service to algorithms that lack common sense, creating a kind of doom loop for their customers.

That’s what happened to Curtin. He submitted multiple “account recovery” forms, only to be told the information—including his payment history—was not sufficient. 

When he tried the account reinstatement route, he was initially met with silence or redirected back to the same recovery forms that had already failed him.

“Microsoft is being unreasonable,” he says. “They were asking me for account details that I couldn’t remember.”

Is this legal? Yes it is. Buried in the terms of service for your account is the language that gives a company like Microsoft the license to do this.

I’ve been stuck in Microsoft’s account recovery process before, and it’s no fun. The system asked me to recall old passwords that I couldn’t have possibly remembered and ultimately prodded me into setting up a new account recovery process with an authenticator app. And to be honest, I’m worried that I might get locked out of my own Microsoft account because I had to save the authenticator backup information to my laptop, and I’m not sure where I stored it.

So, bottom line, I feel Curtin’s frustration. I think maybe we all do.

What can you do if you’re locked out of your Microsoft account?

While these cases are notoriously difficult, there are a few known remedies:

The account recovery form. This is the first line of defense. It uses knowledge-based authentication to verify you. Tips from Microsoft include using a familiar device and location and being as specific as possible with email subject lines.

The account reinstatement/appeal form. This is a separate process for accounts suspended for activity or security reasons. Unlike the recovery form, this sometimes reaches a human safety or online safety team.

Social media callouts. Sometimes, tagging a company’s official support handle on X can trigger a manual review.

We also maintain a database of executive contacts for major tech firms on this site. While they won’t always override a security lockout, they are a vital part of creating the paper trail I need in order to get involved.

NOTE: As a general rule, our advocacy team doesn’t get involved in account recovery cases. But we try to offer the resources to help you get the help you need.

My best advice for avoiding a lockout

Almost anything can set off a fraud-detection algorithm. A few days ago, my Facebook account locked me out because I flew from New Zealand to Australia. I didn’t care; I’m trying to get off Facebook anyway. Eventually, the problem fixed itself. 

And that’s your best-case scenario: The system realizes it got the wrong guy and restores your account on its own. AI is making the systems smart enough so that they can spot a mistake and fix it without any human intervention.

So here’s my straightforward advice: Don’t do anything that makes you look like a criminal. That includes sending out mass mailings, visiting sites on the dark web, or changing your location frequently using a VPN. (If you don’t know what any of those things are, chances are you’re not doing them, so you’re fine.) But don’t look like a bad guy on the internet and you’re less likely to have your account frozen.

The strategy is a little different for social media accounts and e-commerce sites. There, your account can get frozen for violating your terms of service, which could really be anything. I deal with lots of readers who lose access to their Walmart accounts because they returned too many items they bought online, for example.

Will Microsoft do the right thing?

I contacted Microsoft on Curtin’s behalf. I pointed out the obvious: Here was a 20-year customer with a paid subscription who was being held hostage by a bot. 

A day after my team got involved, Microsoft finally reached out to Curtin and reinstated his account.

“I am now backing everything up to non-Microsoft related options,” he told me. “Lesson learned!”

It shouldn’t take a syndicated columnist to remind a trillion-dollar company that its customers are people, not just data points. But as long as the bots are in charge, I’ll be here to help you fight them.

I almost always get stuck in a middle seat, so I consider myself something of an expert when it comes to surviving aviation’s worst conflict zone.

But I’m also lucky, because I usually fly with my adult sons. The boys let me use both armrests, and I can spread out and get up to stretch my legs whenever I want to, so there’s practically no conflict. 

That’s not the usual reality of the middle seat experience.

For most travelers, the middle seat is a contact sport. As jacket weather makes already tight quarters feel even tighter, millions of passengers are about to spend hours wedged between strangers. They’ll fight over plastic armrests and slowly lose their minds at 35,000 feet. 

Alex Gervash, an experienced commercial airline pilot, explains that the middle seat triggers a psychological mechanism called perceived loss of control. 

“When you can see the aisle or the window, your nervous system stays calmer,” he says. “In the middle, both are blocked by strangers’ bodies. Your brain interprets this as confinement, and your fight-or-flight system activates at a low level for the entire flight.”

That doesn’t have to be you. The new rules of middle-seat survival require mastering armrest diplomacy with humor, building an impenetrable personal gear bubble, applying jacket weather hacks for extra space, and using ergonomic micro-movements to avoid physical injury. 

Armrest diplomacy: Establishing the truce

Let’s start with the oldest argument in commercial aviation: who owns the armrests? The answer, according to etiquette professionals, is clear.

“Both middle armrests belong to the middle-seat passenger,” says Adeodata Czink, an etiquette expert with Business of Manners. The window seat gets the wall. The aisle seat gets freedom of movement. The middle seat gets both armrests — that’s the deal.

Jodi RR Smith of Mannersmith Etiquette Consulting agrees, adding the nuance that consideration should temper ownership. If you’re a smaller person and the person next to you is “folding themselves into an origami-yoga pose” to fit in the seat, share. Humans aren’t just territorial creatures — they can also empathize. Use it.

But knowing the rule and enforcing it are two different things. Stephanie Ward, a veteran of basic economy middle seats, has a system. She introduces herself immediately, then deploys a single joke.

“The middle seat gets both armrests — that’s the rule — but I promise not to get up to go to the bathroom every 30 minutes,” she says.

People laugh. Then she plants her elbows, staking out her territory.

What kind of gear do you need to survive a middle seat?

If armrest diplomacy is the offense, gear is the defense. And nobody has assembled a more complete defensive package than Katharine Nohr, a Hawaii-based attorney who travels frequently and has spent years optimizing her middle-seat survival kit.

Her setup: two inflatable lumbar pillows (one for her back, one as a footrest), a tested inflatable neck pillow, an eye mask, a hood to cover her face, special slippers in a small case, an infinity scarf that doubles as a blanket, a water bottle clipped to the seat back with a carabiner, noise-canceling headphones, a small pouch with essentials, and a jacket engineered with pockets. The whole kit compresses into a thin backpack that fits inside a larger carry-on.

“I’m the most comfortable coach passenger on the plane,” she brags.

Jacket weather hacks: The coat as a tool

Fall and winter bring a complication: bulky outerwear. Coats don’t fit cleanly in overhead bins once the flight is full, and dragging a heavy jacket onto your lap in an already-compressed seat can feel like wearing a straitjacket. 

Christopher Jimenez, a board-certified hip and knee surgeon, has a better idea. He doesn’t wear a coat in the seat at all. Instead, he rolls it tight and uses it as a lumbar bolster at beltline height. This prevents in-flight back pain.

One underused option: Stow the coat in the overhead before your neighbors board. Flight attendants frown on this, but as former attendant Celeste Bell points out, “holding on to a big coat in a middle seat can feel claustrophobic.” She doesn’t wait until the flight is fully loaded and finds a slot for her winter coat.

Don’t wreck your body

Lou Ezrick, a physical therapist who sees the aftermath of holiday travel every January, has a warning: Avoid the isometric shrug.

“The single biggest physical mistake middle seat passengers make in cold weather is that they tense their shoulders upward against their neighbors reflexively,” Ezrick says. “They essentially do an isometric shrug for three hours straight.” The result: a guaranteed pain in the upper back. He recommends consciously dropping your shoulders down and back every 20 minutes. Set a phone timer if necessary.

Thomas Jeneby, a board-certified plastic surgeon who manages long operating room days, treats the middle seat like a surgical procedure: circulation and micro-movements matter more than willpower. His timed routine: every 30 to 40 minutes, do 10 ankle pumps, 5 glute squeezes, and 3 slow chin tucks. It takes about 90 seconds and dramatically reduces swelling and neck tension.

His middle-seat rule is “neutral spine, elbows in, pelvis anchored.” Keep your forearms vertical rather than splayed outward. Feet flat. Don’t torque your hips trying to create space that isn’t there.

Can an app get you out of the middle seat?

The best way to survive the middle seat is to never sit in it. American Airlines just made that a little easier. Last month, it added a feature to its app that watches the seat map for you. After you book, you tell the app whether you want a window, aisle or middle seat. If a matching seat opens up, the app moves you and sends a notification.

There’s fine print. You have to be an AAdvantage member traveling alone with an assigned seat, and the monitoring stops 24 hours before departure.

United has offered a similar tool in its app since 2024.

Whose fault is this?

Let’s assign blame where it belongs: with the airlines. 

“The middle seat is about physics, not etiquette,” says Joe Cronin, president of International Citizens Group, an insurance company that works with frequent travelers.

Until they give you more room, it’s up to you to figure out a solution. The travelers who handle it best treat the middle seat as a psychological challenge rather than a physical one. They come prepared. They establish their space early, through humor or gear or a well-placed coat, without starting a turf war. They protect their bodies from the slow structural damage of static posture. And they manage their expectations enough to arrive functional.

Or you could just travel with your kids, where the concept of personal space is more negotiable.

Just a few minutes after Howard Gross picked up the keys to his Alamo rental car in Nice, France, a tire pressure warning light flared up. He photographed the console and showed it to a car rental agent, who checked all four tires and assured him it was probably a false alarm.

It wasn’t. A week later, one of the tires went flat. The tow truck driver looked at Gross’s photos and said it couldn’t possibly be his fault. Even the rental company’s own manager noted in writing that the warning light was on at the time of pickup. But then it charged his credit card $752 anyway.

Car rental companies now act as both prosecutor and judge in damage disputes, and they’ve armed themselves with new tools to win. A company decides whether you damaged the car and what the repair costs, then charges your card directly. If you object, you appeal to the company that billed you. It’s time to give renters something they’ve never had: rules of evidence.

The robots will see you now

Rental companies are enforcing damage policies more aggressively, with help from artificial intelligence. Hertz and Sixt use drive-through scanners that photograph a returned car and flag anything resembling a dent. The scanners are good at finding dents, but they’re not as good at finding the truth.

This summer, a Hertz customer in Atlanta was reportedly billed $350 for two hood dents 17 minutes after drop-off, without any “before” photos for comparison. A Sixt customer in Florida got a bill for about $1,500 for two scratches. 

Both claims disappeared after a reporter’s inquiry.

A reader I’m helping now got a $4,567 bill from Hertz after a scanner flagged 11 dents on the hood and roof of his pickup. His bill includes $497 for “loss of use.” The repair estimate Hertz sent him lists the days to repair as zero. That’s a neat trick: losing rental income on a car that never left service. 

The renter asked for a person to check it. 

“There will not be a human review for this claim,” a claims specialist wrote back.

So I asked for a human review. Hertz told me the damage included in the claim was not present before the rental and occurred while the vehicle was in the customer’s possession. Therefore, he was responsible.

A representative told me that it believes the claim is valid. It also noted that diminished value and loss of use calculations are estimates based on a variety of factors but said its claims team has reached out to my reader about that portion of the claim.

Welcome to the deductible zone

The car rental damage cases I see follow a predictable pattern. When a claim is smaller than your car insurance deductible, the rental company has the advantage. It can charge the card on file, and no adjuster will ask awkward questions. Call it the deductible zone.

Once an insurance company gets involved, the rental company often backs off because it can’t substantiate the damage, let alone the junk fees associated with a claim, like loss of use or diminution of value. Adjusters know to ask for invoices and fleet records. Most renters don’t. Your credit card company is supposed to be the backstop, but as Gross learned, it may also side with the car rental company.

Rules of evidence for rental cars

Congress should set minimum evidence standards for rental car damage claims, enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. Before a company can charge you a cent, it would have to give you:

• Time-stamped before-and-after images of each damaged area.
• For AI scans, the actual measurements of the alleged damage and the right to a human review.
• An invoice for repairs that were actually made, not an estimate for repairs that might be.

No evidence, no charge.

Congress should also ban two fees: loss of use and diminution of value. In my view, the rental industry invented both to bill you for things that haven’t happened. Loss of use charges you for rentals the company says it would have made. Diminution of value charges you for money it says it’ll lose when it sells the car someday. Neither comes with a receipt.

New York already bans one of them. Its law says loss-of-use damages “and related administrative fees shall not be recovered from any authorized driver.” 

Rental companies will say some renters lie. Some do. (I’ve seen it.) A company with proof should have no trouble showing it.

A nice ending to a flat-tire story?

Gross, a health care manager who lives in Acton, Mass., disputed the $752 with his credit card company. It reversed the charges but then put them back after his car rental company responded to the dispute. 

Then he called Alamo’s customer service and wrote to the chief executive. Crickets.

“The amount of time and effort this has taken,” he told me, “is beyond absurd.”

So I asked about his claim. Alamo reviewed his case, including his photos of the warning light, and decided to back off. It fully refunded his money and some of the expenses incurred as a result of his flat tire.

“We are always open to further conversations with customers regarding damage claims if they believe they are not at fault,” a representative told me.

Gross isn’t so sure.

“Without your help I sincerely doubt I would ever have been reimbursed for their screw-ups,” he wrote to me.

A renter with time-stamped photos and a written admission from the company’s own manager shouldn’t need a consumer advocate to prove he didn’t damage a tire. Until Congress acts, shoot a walk-around photo session at pickup and drop-off. It’s your own damage scanner, and unlike the ones at the airport, it works for you.

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.”