When Rela Geffen was hospitalized after suffering from congestive heart failure recently, she assumed her airline would take care of her. She was in Georgia on a business trip, but she’d paid an extra $19 for trip interruption insurance on her US Airways tickets.
CHANGE
David and Dorothy Juergens are looking forward to their fourth Princess cruise next month. There’s just one little problem: Their airline rescheduled their flight, and that messed up their schedule — and cost them money. Airline schedule changes are a fact of life, and it’s usually unrealistic for passengers to expect a carrier to compensate [...]
Melinda McGowan had to cancel her European vacation late last year because of a medical emergency. When she tried to rebook her tickets through Lufthansa, an airline representative quoted her a fare differential of $388, which seemed like a lot at the time.
Christa Webster doesn’t trust her hotel towels. And with good reason.
Beth Anderson accidentally books two tickets under her name to fly from Chicago to Panama City, Fla. Is her 16-year-old son, for whom she should have bought the second ticket, stuck without a ticket? Both her airline and agency say “yes.”
John Koehn planned his cross-country trip from Washington to Medford, Ore., with his wife and three-month-old daughter carefully. He booked their flight a year in advance to make sure they could sit together.
No recent story has generated more hate mail than my investigation of hotels that don’t change their sheets between guests.
As far as most airlines are concerned, if you cancel your tickets, your options are pretty simple: You have a year to use them. Or you can let the credit expire, and it keeps your money.
Southwest Airlines likes to think of itself a no-fee zone in the skies, with its promises of bags flying free. But it has at least one absurd surcharge of its own, according to Julian Vasquez Heilig.
This chart, which comes to us courtesy of the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, is quite revealing. And at the same time, misleading.
Rules are meant to be broken, right? Well, kinda. We know that norefundable airline tickets aren’t necessarily totally nonrefundable. Some airlines, for example, refund tickets to the estate of dead passengers. Question is, when should airline refund their nonrefundable tickets? Here are the results of the survey. I’d also like your thoughts on the subject. [...]
Here’s a common complaint from travelers who book through so-called “opaque” sites like Priceline and Hotwire: A customer who tried to buy a particular flight, hotel or rental car, but ended up with a nonrefundable reservation in the wrong place.
And now, a follow-up to yesterday’s post about reservation change fees. Passengers are upset about these surcharges, which often reduce the value of their ticket credit to just a few dollars. Airline apologists call the fees a “proven revenue model” that will continue for as long as people fly.
It’s not your imagination: Fixing your airline ticket is more expensive these days. A lot more expensive.
Here’s a question I get a lot, but to which I don’t have a good answer — yet. If you pay a change fee and fare differential to fly today instead of tomorrow, and your airline cancels today’s flight, forcing you to fly on the day you were originally scheduled, are you owed a refund of the fee?
Elliott is consumer advocate 
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