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.
Cartoon of a grinning car salesman with a cash-filled thought bubble gesturing toward a white SUV as a customer stands with arms crossed at a dealership lot.

How to get the car you reserved without falling for the upsell scam

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Have you ever heard of the car rental upsell scam? Neither had Steve Sphar. When the business consultant from Sacramento arrived to pick up a compact car from Europcar in Granada, Spain, the company had run out of vehicles. So it handed him an SUV and said he could swap it for his reserved model the next day, a seemingly generous fix. Then he made the swap, and Europcar charged him a $423 “customer choice” fee. It looks like a clever variation on an old rental-counter ploy, and experts say it is spreading as fleet shortages and inflation squeeze the industry. Running out of cars and then charging extra for a bigger one is legal, they note, but that does not make it right. The industry standard when a company oversells is simple: upgrade the customer for free. Some companies, though, see an oversold lot as an opportunity, offering two bad choices, wait for hours or pay a ransom, and betting you will not want to delay your vacation. Sphar contacted Europcar to reverse the charge.

Black and white cartoon of an annoyed traveler with a rolling suitcase glaring at an airline agent behind a check-in counter.

You’re mad at the wrong machine

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Does the TSA want to measure your luggage? You might think so after a viral aviation report warned that the agency’s newer 3D scanners have smaller entry tunnels than the old X-ray machines, and that an oversized carry-on might not fit, potentially sending you back to the counter to check it. Travelers connected the dots fast: the government as the airlines’ baggage enforcer, turning every overpacked bag into a checked-bag fee. It is a textbook case of decoy outrage, a fake scandal that soaks up all the anger a real one deserves. The tunnels are indeed smaller, and the TSA advises asking a screener for help. But there is no algorithm flagging a bag an inch too wide, and no documented wave of passengers being marched back to pay up. If your bag fits and passes screening, it flies. The scanner panic is a non-story. The question it accidentally raises, about a government that already helps airlines keep the true cost of flying out of the advertised price, is not.

Black and white cartoon of a traveler handing his passport across a desk to a uniformed border officer at passport control.

Your passport just got political. Here’s what that means

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The next time you hand over your passport at a border, it might double as a political statement. To mark America’s 250th anniversary, the State Department has begun issuing a limited-edition commemorative passport unlike any before it: a fully valid travel document, with all the usual security features, whose interior pairs a sitting president’s portrait with the text of the Declaration of Independence. A passport historian says he can find no precedent for a sitting head of state’s image in a passport, not even in authoritarian regimes. Other countries have made their travel documents political in quieter ways, a disputed map here, a national-identity redesign there, but a leader’s face inside the book appears to be new. You only receive the commemorative version if you apply in person at one office in Washington, where it becomes the default; everyone else keeps the standard design, which works identically at every crossing. Supporters call it a patriotic keepsake for the semiquincentennial. Critics ask whether any single administration belongs inside a document issued to every citizen.

Illustration of a man with a camera on a neck strap crouching to photograph the rear of a white rental car in a parking area, documenting its condition.

Do I still need to take photos of my rental car?

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When Matt Murray rented an Audi A4 in Tampa recently, the lot already had at least four cameras recording the car as it rolled out the gate. An attendant assured him he did not need to take his own photos. He took them anyway, and then started to wonder: in an age of automated inspections, does a renter still need to document the car at all? It is a fair question, because the industry is changing fast. Car rental companies are rolling out AI-powered imaging systems that photograph a vehicle before and after every rental and compare the two sets side by side to flag new damage, with automated systems arriving at roughly 100 large U.S. airport locations. The promise is fewer disputes and the right renter billed for the right ding. The worry, as one industry expert puts it, is that it is too early to tell whether this protects renters or simply becomes a new source of revenue for rental agencies. Damage claims can already stack repair costs on top of service fees and loss-of-use charges, and rental companies do not always get it right.

Cartoon of a distressed woman standing at her front door, hands to her face, as a UPS driver stands by his truck with his hands raised in an empty-handed shrug.

Michael Kors and UPS are playing hot potato with my $687 refund — how do I win?

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Lina Mahmoud’s $687 Michael Kors order never showed up. UPS investigated, declared the package lost, and confirmed in writing that the refund should come from the shipper, Michael Kors. That should have settled it. Instead, Michael Kors refused, pointing to a proof-of-delivery photo that, she says, does not clearly show her package at all. She was told the claim was denied and that this was the final answer, and when she kept pushing, she says customer service agents began disconnecting her live chats. She was left feeling as though the company now viewed her as a fraud, caught in a game of corporate hot potato: the carrier says the retailer owes the money, the retailer hides behind a questionable image, and the customer is stuck in the middle. It is a stark reminder of how much the burden of proof can fall on the shopper when a package goes missing, and of what recourse you really have when the standard customer-service channels simply stop answering.

Cartoon of a shocked woman standing between two twin beds with visibly stained sheets in a hotel room, a city skyline through the window behind her.

They advertised two queen beds and a clean room. I got neither—and a $922 charge.

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Rebekah Singleton booked a room with two queen beds at a Brooklyn hotel through Booking.com because she specifically needed the queen beds. What she got was something else entirely. The beds measured out to roughly 50 inches wide, a full size, not a queen, and the room itself was filthy: sheets marked with grease stains, hair, and what looked like suspicious red stains. The second room she was offered was worse, with red splatter across the floor. She did not feel safe, so she left that night and found another hotel. Then the real ordeal began. The hotel denied her photo evidence. Booking.com dragged the matter out for weeks and offered only a small goodwill credit. She disputed the $922 charge with her credit card, which briefly credited her before rebilling the entire amount once the merchant pushed back. She was left out nearly a thousand dollars for a room she never used, caught between a property, a platform, and a card issuer, each pointing elsewhere, and left asking what a booking site actually owes you when the room it sold bears no resemblance to the one you paid for.

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.

Cartoon of a weary traveler standing with a red suitcase beside a self-service check-in kiosk while three uniformed airport employees nearby chat among themselves and ignore her.

Self-service fatigue hits travel: Why are we having a DIY backlash?

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Judy Williams stood in two lines at the airport just to drop a single checked bag, and then the machine rejected it, again and again. The real insult was not the glitchy kiosk. It was the three employees standing nearby, chatting and hugging, who did not lift a finger to help. That small scene is the reality of do-it-yourself travel: you do the unpaid work, and when the system fails, you are on your own. Across the industry, more of travel’s routine tasks have been handed to the traveler, the app check-in, the self-tagged bag, the help center that loops without ever reaching a person, and the convenience can start to feel like something closer to abandonment. Self-service technology, one customer-experience expert notes, was never meant to replace human support. It was meant to enhance it. In travel, the gap between that intention and the reality keeps widening.

Danielle Shanahan, Zealandia’s CEO, shows a visitor the innovative fence surrounding the ecosanctuary in Wellington, New Zealand.

A New Zealand ecosanctuary with a 500-year plan to turn back the clock

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A single mouse once redefined the borders of Zealandia. Researchers testing prototype fencing watched a rodent wrap its tail around a screw, swing its body, and haul itself over the top, a feat of gymnastics that helped engineers design the 5.3-mile barrier that now encircles this 556-acre valley above Wellington, New Zealand. Its team calls it the world’s first fully fenced urban ecosanctuary, an attempt to turn back the clock to a time before mammals ever reached these islands. For more than a century the valley supplied the capital’s drinking water, and before that it was scarred by failed gold mines and stripped for farmland. Now it is something stranger: a place where rare native birds and a reptile from the age of dinosaurs are returning, just a short cab ride from the city’s best coffee shops. But the sanctuary sits directly on a major fault line, and the woman who runs it is working toward a 500-year plan she knows she will never see completed.

Cartoon of an exasperated woman in an apron standing hands-on-hips in her kitchen beside her wide-eyed cat, both staring at a green refrigerator with a taped-on "OUT OF ORDER" sign.

Sears left me without a refrigerator for six months—how do I fix this?

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Karen Plaskon’s refrigerator died in February. That should not have been a crisis, because she had paid for a Sears Master Protection Agreement, the whole point of which is to make a failure like this someone else’s problem. Sears approved a replacement in April. Then the real ordeal began. The Frigidaire she ordered was canceled over delivery delays. Sears suggested a GE model in June. That one did not show up either. She spent hours on the phone, shuffled between departments that blamed vague “manufacturing delays,” while retailers like Costco were delivering refrigerators in days. Years earlier, Sears had settled a similar problem by simply cutting her a check. This time, it said that option no longer existed. Six months in, she still had no working refrigerator and no clear answer, just the question of what a protection plan is actually worth when the company that sold it decides to stall.