Bayard Allmond is told his rental car won’t come with an extra driver fee for his wife, but when he gets his bill, he finds the surcharge, anyway. Is there any way to get his car rental company to make good on its promise?
FEE
Luggage fees are a quick and relatively easy way for an airline to make money, but the European discount airlines have turned it into an artform. If your carry-on tips the scale a few grams over the limit, the price of your air transportation can routinely double, thanks to their punitive and arbitrary baggage surcharges.
It’s not your imagination. Congress seems to be paying closer attention to travelers’ welfare.
When it comes to airline fees, there’s no shortage of outrage. The simple mention of the word “ancillary” or “surcharge” in a story is enough to draw hundreds of comments.
I’m always on the lookout for new fees, so when Katherine Walton emailed me about her recent stay at the Chateau Timberline, a hotel in Packwood, Wash., she had my attention.
Search for a flight between Washington and Los Angeles on United.com and you’ll find a notice posted high above the fares saying, “Additional baggage charges may apply.”
Since my last conversation with Roger Van Horn, the vice president for corporate loss control at Enterprise Holdings, a lot of questions have been raised about one of the most controversial damage-related fees: loss of use charges. I decided to put some of those questions to him in a telephone interview yesterday.
Bernardino Suva is hit by a $250 cleaning fee for smoking in his New York hotel room. Problem is, he doesn’t smoke. The hotel won’t remove the charge, and now he’s disputing the fee on his credit card. Is that his only option?
When Beulah Saideman accidentally books the wrong W hotel through Cheaptickets.com, she finds a $477 cancellation fee on her credit card bill. The W insists it didn’t charge the fee. Can Saideman get her money back?
When Robert Hillestad tried to withdraw £200 from an automatic teller machine in London last April, he got a bait-and-switch. Almost literally.
Here’s the problem with Spirit Airlines’ new $5 fee for printing a boarding pass, according to Dennis Tucker. Not everyone has access to a PC and printer when they’re on the road.
So the federal government weighed in on airline fees earlier this week, and will soon require optional fees like baggage, meals and in-flight Wi-Fi, to be “prominently” disclosed on a carrier’s website.
When Stacey Koprince rents a car with her partner in Hilton Head, SC, there’s an additional driver fee of $5 a day – a fee Enterprise had promised not to charge. What now?
To get an idea of what the hotel bill of the future might look like, take a look at your present bill at the Atlantis in the Bahamas.
A few weeks ago, Bob Johnson got an email from a US Airways employee that began, “They’re at it again.”
Elliott is consumer advocate 
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