These tales are from our consumer advocacy files. If you’re a consumer with a problem with a company, you can contact us for help as well.
Robert Logan paid $489 on StubHub for concert tickets. The artist canceled the show and never rescheduled. Logan called six times for his refund. Each time he heard the same line: we will escalate, give us four to five days.
Benjamin Khoury measured his backpack before his Frontier flight and it fit the airline’s own sizer. The gate agent charged him $99 for an oversized item anyway. Khoury photographed the bag sitting inside the box. Frontier’s customer care said no.
Ray and Denise Oswald returned their Budget rental at O’Hare and got a clean receipt for $312. Five days later came a $450 charge for smoke cleaning, backed by blurry photos of a generic white car. None of them smoke
Athena Smith flies JetBlue twice a month to care for her 95-year-old mother. At the gate, an agent stopped her. Pay $468 or be banned for life. She had booked through a site called Farehub and paid by credit card.
The resort publishes a clear rule: pets up to 40 pounds, two per room. Terry Reilly counted German shepherds, collies and pointers. Then things got worse.
Avis billed Tasha Huebner $450 to deep clean a car she says she returned in pristine condition. The charge was for smoking. She does not smoke. Neither does her passenger. Rental agreements leave odor claims entirely to the company’s judgment.
Michael Huang thought he had found a reliable and clean place to stay when he reserved a studio apartment in Penang, Malaysia, through Booking.com. Instead, he walked into something that looked like a crime scene.
There were stains on the surfaces that appeared to be blood. There was mold on the walls. The bedding was crumpled and smelly, carrying hair that did not belong to anyone in his family. Clumps of hair on the floor, spiderwebs through the property, a stained mattress, a dirty couch. In his words, it was a health hazard.
Kim Calla apparently has a superpower. According to her credit card issuer, she can sit in two airline seats at the same time. That is the only conclusion left after her dispute with the bank. Three days before flying to Lisbon, she searched online for her airline’s phone number and dialed the first one she found. It belonged to a scammer, who told her she had no tickets booked and would have to rebook. Her other card caught and blocked a fraudulent charge of nearly $17,000, but the fear had already done its work. She went online and bought two replacement tickets for $2,301. Half an hour later she realized her original booking had been valid all along. The airline would not cancel the duplicates, and when she asked her card issuer to step in, it closed the case in the airline’s favor.
Alison Palkhivala was ready for pretzels, polka, and a pint. She had booked a Munich apartment through Booking.com for Oktoberfest, and three days before her arrival she noticed the line she had skimmed past. Check-in was strictly between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. Read that again. Not 7 p.m. Not “after 3 p.m.” A two-hour window first thing in the morning, when most travelers are either asleep or looking for coffee. Her flight did not land until 10. She messaged the host and offered everything she could think of, a lockbox, a later handover, even collecting the key the next morning and writing off the first night entirely. The answer was no. The host canceled the booking outright and kept roughly $1,000 under the cancellation penalty. Booking.com declined to intervene, saying the policy was valid. So she stood in a foreign city during its busiest week of the year with no room and no money, holding a reservation she had agreed to in every respect except the one nobody could have met.
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?
