Here to help
Christopher Elliott is the founder of Elliott Advocacy, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that empowers consumers to solve their problems and helps those who can't. He's the author of numerous books on consumer advocacy and writes weekly columns for King Features Syndicate, USA Today, and the Washington Post. If you have a consumer problem you can't solve, contact him directly through his advocacy website. You can also follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or sign up for his daily newsletter.
Read more of Christopher's articles here.A day isn’t 24 hours. More like 41 hours, as Edd Vinci discovered when he had a Ritz-Carlton problem involving a cancellation and Expedia.
Some hotels allow you to cancel a reservation up to 24 hours before your arrival without penalty. So Vinci, who had booked a night at the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain in Tucson, believed he had plenty of time when he canceled his stay a full 41 hours before his arrival.
He was wrong. Read more “Help! I want this $261 Ritz-Carlton problem to disappear.”
When is a Holiday Inn actually a Rodeway Inn? When you’re booking on TripAdvisor, that’s when. At least that’s what Thomas Burgei discovered when he tried to make a reservation through the site and encountered a TripAdvisor website error that he couldn’t resolve. Read more “This TripAdvisor website error should be easy to fix. It isn’t.”
If you can answer “yes” to the eternal question, “Are we there yet?” then you probably need a survival manual for the first day of vacation. The 24 hours after you arrive are among the busiest and most stressful — the unpacking and settling in, the arguing, and the inevitable chaos. Read more “How to survive the first day of your vacation”
It’s T-minus 12 hours before we leave. In some ways, it’s the worst part of the vacation countdown. Everything’s half-done.
Millions of other travelers will experience the same thing this summer in the agonizing hours and minutes before their departure. Read more “These tips will help you survive your vacation countdown”
Neil Castillo should have known better than to leave a loaded gun in the glove compartment of his rental car. After all, he’s a truck driver and, as a driving professional, should be aware of the rules of the road. But there’s enough gray area to warrant a closer look at a case that landed Castillo on Hertz’s Do Not Rent list. Read more “He left his gun in a rental car. Now he’s on the Hertz Do Not Rent list”
