Christopher Elliott

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 three nationally syndicated columns. He also publishes the Elliott Report, a news site for consumers, and Elliott Confidential, a critically acclaimed newsletter about customer service. If you have a consumer problem you can't solve, contact him directly through his advocacy website. You can also follow him on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or sign up for his daily newsletter.
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.

Hotel clerk asleep at the front desk while four guests wait in line with rolling suitcases

The ugly truth about August travel: Why you should stay home—or do this

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Welcome to August, the month travel goes to die. The system has been redlining for months and now it is starting to crack. Planes are filthy. Hotels look neglected. The staff is exhausted and they are done with you.

If you are packing for a vacation right now, here is what you need to know. You are buying a product the system cannot always deliver. The infrastructure is built for a short summer sprint, not a hundred day marathon, and by the middle of August the machinery starts to sputter. The seasonal workers who staff the resorts and restaurants are leaving for the school year while the tourists are still arriving and the weather is still perfect. The people who remain are running on fumes.

Airline passenger reaching up to a closed overhead bin latch with a worried look

Would you pay extra to use the overhead bin?

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Jetstar has announced that it will charge economy passengers to put a bag in the overhead locker. This is not the carry-on fee travelers already know. It is not a penalty for a bag that is too big or too heavy. It is a charge for the locker itself.

From February 2027, every Jetstar fare will include one under-seat bag measuring 40 by 30 by 20 centimeters, roughly a small backpack. Anything larger goes overhead, and overhead requires an add-on called Priority Carry-on, which runs between 25 and 52 Australian dollars one way depending on the route. The airline says the model keeps fares low, that customers pay only for what they need, and that the change came from passengers and crew who named gate weighing and the scramble for locker space as the worst parts of flying. The 7 kilogram weight limit goes away with it.

Cartoon traveler at an airport terminal looking up at a dollar bill folded into a paper airplane

A stunning reversal for airline consumer rights

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The federal government has not assessed a single civil penalty against an airline for violating consumer protection rules this year. It has also been closing out formal passenger complaints without enforcement action, including refund demands that had been sitting in the docket since 2020.

Traveler at a hotel front desk photographing a long paper receipt with his smartphone

More travelers are losing their insurance claims because of this. Don’t be one of them.

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Something goes wrong on the road. A flight collapses, a bag disappears, you get sick in a country where you do not speak the language. You file a travel insurance claim expecting reimbursement, and then the insurer asks for documentation, and you realize you kept almost none of it. The blurry photos are on your phone somewhere. The confirmation email is buried. The hotel receipt is gone.

Industry experts say the event itself is rarely what sinks a claim. Missing paperwork is. And travel policies do not pay on your account of what happened. They pay on proof of loss, which means you have to be able to show what occurred, when, and what it cost you, in a form an adjuster can accept.

Cartoon of a frustrated traveler holding up his phone at a hotel front desk while a stern clerk stands with folded arms and two companions wait with luggage.

My hotel reservation disappeared. Why won’t Booking.com refund me for my new room?

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Stephen Stein had booked a two-bedroom suite at a Homewood Suites in Bonita Springs through Booking.com, and his party of three arrived to find the hotel had no reservation for them. He handed over the confirmation number. It made no difference. A family dinner was 90 minutes away, so while he waited on the phone with Booking.com and got nowhere, the group went and found another hotel themselves. The only rooms available were regular ones, so they took two, which came to $126 more than the suite they had already reserved. A representative promised to cover roughly half the difference. Then came the calls. Over the following days each conversation produced a new reason the payment could not yet be authorized, including a request to prove which currency he had paid in, for a Florida hotel booked on a US credit card.

Cartoon of an alarmed woman holding an American Express card in one hand and a glowing phone in the other.

Viva Aerobus canceled my flight. Why did it send my $844 refund to the wrong bank?

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Carol Bartell booked a flight from Tijuana to Hermosillo on Viva Aerobus, and the airline canceled it. When she asked for her money back, the carrier would not simply reverse the charge on her American Express card. It insisted on wiring the refund to a US bank account instead. So she looked up a SWIFT code for her credit union online and sent the details across. Two problems followed. Her credit union does not use the SWIFT system at all, and the airline transmitted a different code than the one she had supplied. Her $844 landed at Navy Federal Credit Union, where she is not a member and where nobody could help her. Emails to customer service and to the chief executive went unanswered, so she filed a formal complaint with PROFECO, Mexico’s consumer protection agency.

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 man in sunglasses relaxing on a yellow lounger with a cocktail beside an empty pool and palm trees.

Coolcations aren’t cool anymore. Why you should book a trip to a hot place

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The travel industry has spent two summers selling the coolcation, the idea that the smart move as temperatures climb is to head north to Scandinavia, Alaska or Iceland. The reality can be a sweaty and expensive mess. One traveler followed the herd to Scandinavia last July expecting a quiet getaway, and found rooms had doubled in price and the ferry routes were fully booked. Then a heat wave hit Oslo, and his hotel had no air conditioning. People paced the hallways at midnight, unable to sleep. Another tried Iceland’s ring road, got lost after a mudslide, and asked a police officer for directions, only to be led half an hour out of town and left there. So while everyone else queues for a view of a glacier, a question worth asking is what is happening in all the places they abandoned.

Cartoon of a wary airline passenger glancing sideways at the small white humanoid robot seated beside her.

Should airlines ban robots?

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It started with Stewie, a three-and-a-half-foot humanoid robot. His owner bought him a seat to Dallas on Southwest, and when the robot walked through the terminal, passengers stopped to take pictures. Within days, Southwest rewrote its policy to keep human-like and animal-like robots off its aircraft, regardless of size or purpose. Delta followed in June. United followed in July. American Airlines has yet to say anything, though a position seems likely soon. So three of the big four have now decided, and each ban covers the cabin and checked bags alike. The stated concern is lithium batteries and handling, and there is a real case there: a full-size humanoid carries far more power than a laptop, and a gate agent should not have to decide in the boarding line whether a machine with limbs counts as baggage, cargo or a passenger.