Advocacy

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.

Guest sitting on a bed in a rented room with red stains spreading across the walls and floor

No, blood on the walls does not count as a vacation rental amenity

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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.

Cartoon of two identical women seated side by side in adjacent airplane seats, one of them holding a white cat.

The laws of physics say you can’t be in two places at once—unless you have a Capital One card

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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.

Cartoon of a dismayed traveler with a suitcase pleading at a reception desk while an unsmiling clerk stands with his arms folded.

Is this the worst check-in policy in the history of travel?

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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.

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?

Muted digital illustration of a distressed man in a suit sitting with his head in his hands at an airport, blurred travelers passing behind him.

The $1,863 mistake: Why a missing last name cost one passenger his ticket

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Saurabh Kumar had a passport, a plane ticket, and a plan to visit family in Delhi. He was good to go, or so he thought. The trouble was hiding in plain sight on his passport: his full name sits in the given-name field, and the surname line is blank. That is ordinary in parts of the world, but a headache for Western airline systems that insist on a last name. When Expedia’s booking form demanded one, Kumar did what most people would do, he split his name into a first and a last and clicked buy. He had done it before and flown without a hitch. This time, at the Toronto airport, the Porter Airlines computer stopped him cold. The name on his ticket did not match the name on his passport, and to a security system built to screen millions against international watchlists, close enough is not enough. Porter said only the ticketing airline, Qatar Airways, could authorize a fix. Qatar was not at the counter. And the clock was running out.

Cartoon of a distressed man holding a paper marked "BANNED" and clutching his head in a rental car lot, while a smiling rental agent gestures beside a row of cars.

Banned for a century: How one driver beat the car rental blacklist

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Carlos Brown walked up to the rental counter in Cleveland expecting a car. Instead, he got a lifetime ban. A state transportation specialist who had rented dozens of cars that year alone, every payment cleared and every car returned without a scratch, Brown watched the agent’s computer crash, heard her read his license details to headquarters, and learned in that moment that he was on the company’s Do Not Rent list. His loyalty account was terminated on the spot over a mistake from years earlier. Brown’s case pulls back the curtain on the hidden world of rental car blacklists: proprietary “Do Not Rent” lists that can bar you from every brand a company owns. The reasons vary, from unpaid bills to damage claims to simply being rude to an employee, and unlike your credit report, you have no legal right to see the file or dispute it. The Federal Trade Commission does not regulate these lists. Companies do not have to give you a hearing. They can just say no.

Illustration of a worried woman in a tank top standing at a cruise ship railing, shading her eyes with one hand as she scans the horizon against a clear blue sky.

SAS lost her luggage—then a motel in Stockholm found it

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After Patrice Krecek’s suitcase did not arrive at Stockholm’s airport, she did everything right. She filed a Property Irregularity Report with SAS. She submitted a claim. She called customer service, more than once. Maybe she should have checked the Motel L Alvsjo, a 40-minute drive away, because that is exactly where her luggage turned up five weeks later, how it got there a mystery wrapped in pink duct tape. Inside that bag was most of her clothing for a 14-night cruise, including a new sweater she had bought just for the trip and never got to wear. Her husband had wrapped the case in hot pink tape so it would be easy to spot on the carousel, a detail that would matter more than he could have guessed. The motel could only hold the bag for a month before donating it. SAS had the address, the photos, and clear instructions, and still the suitcase sat 4,000 miles away. What it took to finally get it moving, and whether a claim filed one day late would cost the Kreceks everything, is where this case turns.

Cartoon of a frustrated traveler with arms crossed standing between two suitcases in an empty airport gate area, beneath a large red departures sign reading "FLIGHT DOES NOT EXIST."

Booking.com said my flight was confirmed, but the airline says it never existed

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Lindley Kinerk’s last morning in Dresden seemed routine. She and her companions packed up, checked out, and headed to the airport for their 8:25 a.m. flight home to Boston. They had even gotten a friendly check-in reminder from Booking.com the night before. Then they reached the counter and learned something that would cost them nearly $6,000: their flight did not exist. Not that morning, not any morning. It had been off the airline’s schedule for months. Booking.com, it seems, had quietly rebooked them on an earlier flight and never said a word, and the airline insisted the whole thing was not its problem. With a third ticketing agency tangled into the booking and every company pointing at the others, Kinerk had to buy new tickets on the spot just to get home. What she did next, and what Booking.com eventually said about her money, is where this case turns.

Cartoon of a shocked couple standing beside their blue rental Jeep, staring wide-eyed at a small pile of sand on the ground next to the vehicle's tire.

Budget’s $125 sand trap: When does a “dirty” floor mat become a rental car rip-off?

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When Barb and Steve Pfeffer returned their rental Jeep after an eight-day hiking trip in the Pacific Northwest, the drop-off seemed routine. A friendly Budget agent verified the fuel, thanked them, and sent them on their way. It was anything but routine. Two weeks later, they found a $125 cleaning fee on their credit card. The reason? Excessive sand on the floor mats. Budget claimed the debris forced the Jeep out of service for detailing. The Pfeffers, who have rented cars for more than 40 years and never once been charged a cleaning fee, were stunned. They admit there was sand, they had been hiking in national parks for over a week, but they argue a couple of dirty mats hardly justify sending a car to a detailer. The deeper problem is buried in Budget’s contract, in a single phrase that lets the company decide, entirely on its own, what counts as too dirty and what that judgment will cost you.

Cartoon of a glum man standing alone outside a packed UFC arena as crowds stream past him to the entrance, illustrating a fan shut out of an event he paid for but could not attend.

StubHub’s FanProtect guarantee fails: The $4,606 ticket he never got

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Roland Nazariyan paid $4,606 to see a UFC fight, and he missed the main event. He had ordered three tickets through StubHub on the day of the fight, and when none of them arrived in time, he called the platform. It refunded the first two orders after he sent screenshots showing the tickets were never delivered. The third and most expensive order sat in limbo, marked as in final escalation, and then came back denied: a seller had claimed the ticket was transferred, and StubHub told him he had never even contacted the company about it, despite its own emails in the thread asking him for proof. Here is the standard worth holding any reseller to before you accept a denial like this. StubHub’s FanProtect guarantee promises that you will get your tickets in time for the event, and if not, comparable or better tickets or your money back. A guarantee, in other words, is only as good as a company’s willingness to honor the words it is built on.