Elliott Advocacy is a nonprofit organization that mediates cases between consumers and businesses. These are commentary articles that detail our efforts and provide educational information for consumers.
You can negotiate a room rate, skip the minibar, maybe talk your way out of a resort fee. But you cannot negotiate a tax. It is the one charge on your bill with no say, and no one explains it.
Most consumer complaints are fixable. But a discouraging number arrive pre-broken, sabotaged by the person who wrote them, usually in the first paragraph and with a single word. Seven phrases all but guarantee your case fails before anyone reads it.
A cheap airfare catches your eye, you click, and the boxes pop up. Forty dollars for a checked bag. Twenty-five for a seat. Airlines say showing the full price up front would confuse you. Vacation rental platforms just proved otherwise
An algorithm sets your airfare. Another sets the hotel’s rate. A third answers your complaint with a non-answer, hoping you give up. AI arrived in travel years ago, and travelers are paying more and getting worse service because of it.
A federal committee created to give air travelers a voice inside the government meets this month for the first time in three years. It has four members, one of them for consumers, and an agenda limited to three disclosure documents.
Dirk Shearer says he was scammed out of $15,000 through a money transfer. He filed a claim, then a police report, then wrote to a consumer advocate for help. The advocate had to turn him down. Here is the reason.
What if a grocery store charged you more for milk because it knew how many kids you had? What if a ride app quoted you a higher fare because you had not installed its rival’s app? These are not hypotheticals.
Hackers cleaned out Amy Pollick’s PayPal account. The bot offered to connect her to a human. She typed yes. Then it repeated the offer, word for word. She typed yes again. Four times, the machine promised a person and reneged.
Federal preemption was the last thing on Jamie Baltus’s mind when she booked her tickets from Chicago to Cairo. Then war broke out, her airline refused a refund, and she learned that no state in America can touch an airline.
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.
