Jim McClenathan was looking forward to a fishing trip to Montana this summer with a group of friends. But then the men found a better deal and asked for a refund. Even though the fishing lodge promised to quickly return the money, the checks haven’t arrived yet.
Is this fishing trip refund dead in the water?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kids do the darndest things on vacation. Their antics include dangling off cliffs in Utah, immersing themselves to the icy waves of the Gulf of Alaska, and braving some of the world’s most hazardous roads in Africa. I know because that’s what my children have done — and it scared the living daylights out of me.
Alyson McFarland’s Alitalia problem may be solvable. She’d missed her flight from Johannesburg to Tunis even though she showed up at the airport on time. But the solution isn’t going to make her happy, and it probably won’t make you happy, either.
At first, Beverly Parker’s Greyhound bus problem looked like a slam dunk case. Valuables had gone missing from her checked luggage during a recent trip from Birmingham, Ala., to Albion, Mich. And Greyhound wasn’t exactly breaking a land speed record to help her. But then I read the details of her request, and a simple case suddenly became complicated. It wasn’t the $150,000 claim amount that fazed me. My computer adds a few extra characters if I don’t release the zero key fast enough. I was certain that was a typo.It was everything else.
Staying home may not be your idea of a vacation, but more people are reportedly considering a “staycation” this year than any time since the Great Recession.To which I say: Go for it! Staying home can teach you so much about having a better vacation.
Cristina Falcon wants to know if her ticket refund problem is her mistake or a Lufthansa mistake. After all, the fare she chose said “refundable.” But is a refund from Lufthansa even possible for her?
