Christopher Elliott

Christopher Elliott is the founder of Elliott Advocacy, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that empowers consumers to solve their problems and helps those who can't. He's the author of numerous books on consumer advocacy and writes three nationally syndicated columns. He also publishes the Elliott Report, a news site for consumers, and Elliott Confidential, a critically acclaimed newsletter about customer service. If you have a consumer problem you can't solve, contact him directly through his advocacy website. You can also follow him on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or sign up for his daily newsletter.
artoon of a huge crowd of tourists with rolling suitcases stampeding down a narrow tiled European street at night as residents watch in alarm from windows and doorways.

Why you should be a tourist, not a local, this summer

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Damien Zouaoui used to believe in living like a local. He hunted for authentic-looking apartments in up-and-coming neighborhoods, shopped the local markets, and did his best to blend in. Then came Lisbon. The bakery on his street was gone. So was the barbershop, replaced by boutique rentals and brunch spots catering, as he puts it, to people like him. Then he watched his host get into a shouting match with a neighbor over yet another guest’s rolling suitcase clattering down the cobblestones, and something clicked. He was not a visitor. He was part of an invading force. For a decade now, the travel industry’s golden rule has been to shun the tourist traps, skip the hotels, and embed yourself in a residential neighborhood in search of something real. But there is a simple arithmetic problem buried in that advice, and it is starting to show up in the streets of the cities we say we love: when everyone insists on living like a local, who is left to actually be one?

Cartoon of a wide-eyed woman staring at a computer screen while booking a trip, packed luggage stacked beside her.

Airlines want to hide the real price of your ticket. Should the government let them?

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Remember what booking a flight used to be like? You would spot a $99 fare, click it, and then meet the carrier-imposed surcharge. Then the mandatory fuel surcharge. Then, somewhere near the end, the taxes. By checkout, your $99 flight cost $180. In 2011, the Department of Transportation put a stop to it with the full-fare rule, which says the price an airline shows you has to be the price you pay, taxes and fees included, and that the total has to be the most prominent number in the ad. The airlines went to court to kill the rule and lost, and travelers have shopped with confidence ever since. Now that standard is back on the table. The DOT has proposed letting airlines display each piece of a fare just as prominently as the total, and it is separately asking whether the rule should be repealed outright, which would allow advertised fares that leave out taxes and mandatory fees altogether. The department calls the current requirement unnecessarily prescriptive and raises legal questions about it. Consumer advocates answer that a price you cannot actually buy at is not a price.

Cartoon of a scowling woman holding an oversized fork beside a giant bare foot.

Should cruise lines ban more passengers?

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A video from a Carnival cruise made the rounds this month: a passenger seated in the ship’s dining area, scratching a bare foot, then going back to eating with the same hand. The comments wrote themselves. But underneath the reaction sits a question the cruise industry has never really answered. Look at what actually gets people banned from cruise ships. Violence and threats. Illegal drugs. Vandalism, harassment, theft, ignoring safety orders. Every category on the list has the same thing in common: malice, criminality, an intent to harm. A passenger who creates a public-health problem in a shared dining room fits almost none of it. And yet a cruise ship is a closed environment where norovirus and other illnesses move fast, so it is at least arguable that someone exposing hundreds of people to infection is a bigger problem than one guest throwing a punch in a lounge. The puncher gets a lifetime ban. So should the list be wider, or is the real question who gets to decide?

Cartoon of a green-faced traveler clutching his stomach as he rushes toward a restroom door, a palm-lined resort at dusk behind him.

How an airport sandwich could destroy your next vacation

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It starts with a plate of chilled shrimp at the resort buffet. It looks pink and fine, sitting on a bed of ice, and you feel fine after you eat it. Then, six hours later, your vacation is over and you are on the bathroom floor. Late summer is peak season for exactly this kind of culinary hazard, and this year the risk is sharpened by record heat colliding with a travel industry already in meltdown, delayed flights, understaffed hotels, tarmac waits with the air conditioning broken. While everyone worries about cancellations and lost bags, something more dangerous is brewing quietly in galley carts and buffet lines. Your food depends on a cold chain, a temperature-controlled path from farm to fork, and when the heat spikes, that chain can snap. The bacteria that move in when it does are the kind you cannot see, cannot smell, and cannot taste, which is what makes them so easy to eat.

Cartoon of a distressed mother holding a swaddled newborn at an airport counter while an unmoved agent stands with arms crossed.

Aeromexico rescheduled my flight and expected me to sleep in an airport with a newborn. Can I get a refund?

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Allison Turpen booked a round-trip Aeromexico flight from Washington, D.C. to Oaxaca, and then the airline moved her connection to the next day. The new itinerary had her landing in Mexico City at 9:30 at night, with the onward flight not leaving until 6:15 the next morning, a layover of more than eight hours. She would be traveling with a newborn, and spending the night in an airport with a baby was not something she could do. So she asked to cancel and get her $1,360 back. She called nearly a dozen times. Aeromexico finally answered, and denied her, pointing to a line in its contract that says flights are subject to change. But Turpen was holding a ticket for a flight departing the United States, which raises a question a lot of travelers never think to ask: when an airline is the one that rewrites your trip, can it really hide behind “subject to change,” or do federal rules say something different?

Cartoon of a distressed blonde traveler holding a ticket at an airport counter, gesturing in protest at a giant Russian nesting doll standing in place of an agent.

I paid $500 for an upgrade on Swiss, then the airline kept it

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Elizabeth Webley thought she had found a deal. She bid $500 for an upgrade on a Swiss International Air Lines flight from Zurich to San Francisco, and the airline accepted. Then her plans changed, she rebooked, and she assumed her upgrade would either move to the new flight or come back to her card. It did neither. Swiss told her the bid was gone and that she would have to pay for a new upgrade, calling the original nonrefundable because she had changed the booking voluntarily. There is a name for this: the ghost upgrade, a product you pay for that vanishes the moment you touch your reservation. But Webley had something most travelers do not. She had taken a screenshot of the terms she agreed to at the moment of purchase, and those terms said plainly that if she changed her flight she was entitled to a full refund of the bid amount, as long as her fare allowed rebooking. The airline’s agents kept quoting a different rule, the one about voluntary cancellations, and pointing her to the FAQ. So the standoff came down to a single question with real money riding on it: when the contract you agreed to says one thing and the airline’s FAQ says another, which one is supposed to win?

Cartoon of a dismayed man at a Paris cafe table, Eiffel Tower behind him, staring at a laptop screen that reads "RESERVATION CANCELED."

Travel companies say their customers are no-shows—but are they?

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On a recent flight from San Francisco to Paris, Dan Skilken was a no-show. It was not his fault. A weather delay scrambled his first leg, the airline rebooked him, and then someone pushed the wrong button, so the system decided he had missed his connection. He only found out when he tried to check his return reservation from France and discovered he had no tickets at all. Because that is how it works: miss one leg of a flight, and the airline quietly cancels the rest. Skilken knew the industry well enough to sort it out, but plenty of travelers do not, and lately there are more of them. Teresa McGee flew from Detroit to Charlotte on American Airlines without a hitch, then tried to fly home and was told she had no ticket. She had a boarding pass proving she had flown the outbound. The airline could not tell her why, only that it had labeled her a no-show and that a new ticket would cost her. Cases like these keep landing in my inbox, and they raise an uncomfortable question. When a company marks a paying customer a no-show and keeps the money, is that a clerical slip, or has the no-show become a quiet little revenue stream?

Black and white cartoon of a cruise ship docked beside a high prison wall topped with razor wire and a guard tower.

The FBI wants you to report cruise crime. Then what?

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The FBI has a message for cruise passengers as vacation season begins: if you are assaulted, kidnapped, or sexually assaulted at sea, report it right away. It is good advice. Of course you should report a crime. But the announcement leaves out what happens after you speak up. The law meant to track crime at sea, passed in 2010, counts only a short list of the most serious categories. Its requirements generally reach incidents involving U.S. nationals, which leaves out most crew members and plenty of passengers. Thefts count only above a dollar threshold. And an assault is reportable only if it causes “serious bodily injury,” a term the law never defines, which turns a beating into a judgment call. Here is the part that deserves a longer look: the FBI tells passengers to report incidents to the cruise line, and the cruise line is the one that reports them to the government. A company sells you a safe vacation, then helps decide whether what happened to you counts as a crime worth counting.

Black and white cartoon of a puzzled traveler with a question mark overhead watching two airplanes fly away in opposite directions.

America and Europe just went opposite ways on airline fees. Who’s right?

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How much of an airline ticket’s price do you deserve to see when you shop for a flight? The United States and Europe just answered that question within days of each other, and came to opposite conclusions. In America, a rule that would have required airlines and booking sites to show you the cost of a checked bag or a ticket change the first time a fare appeared never survived. A federal appeals court blocked it before any airline had to comply, then threw it out entirely, faulting the government for skipping a step rather than finding fee transparency unlawful. Instead of redoing the rule, regulators made the defeat official and restored the older standard: airlines note that fees may apply and point you toward the fine print. Europe went the other way, approving its first overhaul of air passenger rights in more than two decades, with fares that must include the cost of a standard carry-on from the outset. Airlines argue that unbundling lets travelers who skip the extras pay less, and that every mandatory fee is disclosed before you buy. Consumer advocates counter that a fare hiding the bag charge is not really a price at all.