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The Travel Industry's Version of the Truth
The Travel Critic · June 21, 2000

Like so many travelers, Pat Woods distrusts - if not disbelieves - many of the claims made by the travel industry.

Can you blame her? On a recent America West flight from Los Angeles to Philadelphia via Phoenix, Woods' first leg of the flight got cancelled. "Not to worry," the Philadelphia corporate training executive remembers a ticket agent telling her. "You can board a flight leaving a half-hour later and meet your connecting flight in Phoenix."

It turns out the Philadelphia flight was also out of commission - a detail Woods says the airline employee knew but failed to mention.

"If they had told me the truth in Los Angeles, I could have re-ticketed for any number of flights to the East Coast - but in Phoenix, I was stranded," she says. She didn't leave the Valley of the Sun until the next morning.

"That's a pretty bold assumption, to say we lied," counters Patty Nowack, an America West spokeswoman. "Maybe the ticket agent didn't know about the delay."

We'll probably never know what the agent knew, but we do know what America West's policy is. Its "Customers First" initiative says if a flight is "delayed, canceled or diverted, America West will make every effort to notify customers of the situation in a timely and accurate manner."

That didn't happen to Woods, to hear her talk about it. Her grievance to the airline prompted a letter of apology from America West and a $150 voucher good for future travel on the airline.

So is the travel industry really truth impaired? Deborah Cooper, a Los Angeles clinical psychologist and a frequent flier on several domestic and international airlines, believes it's possible.

Cooper, as a therapist, says she hears people give all sorts of reasons for falsehoods. She says some people in the travel industry lie "because they can get away with it. And then they feel like they can keep doing it, so they keep doing it."

Everything from the beginning to the end of a flight is often not as it seems. You arrive at the airport and check in your bags, expecting to see them when you land. Maybe they won't be waiting for you. Statistically, at least one passenger's luggage will get lost on every flight, federal figures show.

You board a plane anticipating a decent meal and enough personal space for a comfortable journey; neither is guaranteed, as anyone who's pondered a dry in-flight sandwich and been smashed in a center seat knows.

Many travelers suspect that airlines also are less than straightforward with them when flights are delayed or canceled. When a flight is only half-full, a carrier sometimes is said to call it off for "mechanical" reasons in order to save money. The U.S. Department of Transportation, sadly, does not keep separate figures for these suspect breakdowns.

Cooper believes money is the leading reason that some airlines aren't always up-front with their customers. It took the threat of re-regulation to force the airline industry to stop misrepresenting the facts about delays -- or, at least, to say it would stop.

Let's not forget the other travel segments. When you rent a car, do you ever pay the rate you've been quoted by a reservation agent? Possibly not. You can get hit with every imaginable surcharge for things like a "concession fee recoup" or a "trans corridor perserv revolving loan fund," whatever they are. Then the rental agency talks you into buying unneeded insurance. After all that, a taxi begins to look pretty good.

That's not just anecdotal grousing, either. Last month, USA Today conducted a survey of eight major car-rental agencies and determined that half of them routinely fail to mention charges that can add as much as 30 percent to the cost of a car rental. Customer, beware.

Sometimes the travel industry can mislead by omission. For example, The New York Times reported last July that one cruise line in five years had received 62 complaints from passengers alleging they'd been sexually assaulted by employees -- an average of one complaint a month. Don't look for that fact in the cruise brochures when planning your next floating vacation.

Cruise lines also say they're concerned about the environment, but some have been caught dumping oil and hazardous chemicals offshore. They say they're good employers, but some register their ships in countries where regulations are lax and they're allowed to pay their workers extremely low wages. News reports have documented all of the above cruise-line activities - trashing the seas, slipping under the regulatory radar and barely paying workers a subsistence wage.

And how about hotels? They often suck you in with reasonable room rates, but what they fail to tell you is that about one-third of their profits come from extras, like phone charges, food, beverages and services like laundry - meaning that they're going to nickel and dime you at every opportunity. Resorts misrepresent their properties with more flair than any other supplier I can think of. They embellish their amenities and then fall woefully short of the pretty picture that's painted on their promotional brochures.

Jim Panto, an Albuquerque, New Mexico, sales executive, says he's been misled about a hotel's available inventory. On one occasion, he called a property four times in a day and got three different room rates quoted and one "Sorry, we're totally booked." He ended up reserving a room at $115 a night. "It was a hotel lie," he says.

What do we do? Next week, I'll turn the tables and examine how travelers bend the truth when they're on the road - and why they do it.

If you've ever lied to a gate agent, reservationist, car rental agent or crewmember, click back here next week to see what your fellow travelers have done.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.