On Travel

On Travel is a weekly consumer travel column that offers information and advice for people planning a business or leisure trip. The feature started in USA Today in 2013 and is now nationally syndicated.

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.

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.

artoon of a huge crowd of tourists with rolling suitcases stampeding down a narrow tiled European street at night as residents watch in alarm from windows and doorways.

Why you should be a tourist, not a local, this summer

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Damien Zouaoui used to believe in living like a local. He hunted for authentic-looking apartments in up-and-coming neighborhoods, shopped the local markets, and did his best to blend in. Then came Lisbon. The bakery on his street was gone. So was the barbershop, replaced by boutique rentals and brunch spots catering, as he puts it, to people like him. Then he watched his host get into a shouting match with a neighbor over yet another guest’s rolling suitcase clattering down the cobblestones, and something clicked. He was not a visitor. He was part of an invading force. For a decade now, the travel industry’s golden rule has been to shun the tourist traps, skip the hotels, and embed yourself in a residential neighborhood in search of something real. But there is a simple arithmetic problem buried in that advice, and it is starting to show up in the streets of the cities we say we love: when everyone insists on living like a local, who is left to actually be one?

Cartoon of a dismayed man at a Paris cafe table, Eiffel Tower behind him, staring at a laptop screen that reads "RESERVATION CANCELED."

Travel companies say their customers are no-shows—but are they?

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On a recent flight from San Francisco to Paris, Dan Skilken was a no-show. It was not his fault. A weather delay scrambled his first leg, the airline rebooked him, and then someone pushed the wrong button, so the system decided he had missed his connection. He only found out when he tried to check his return reservation from France and discovered he had no tickets at all. Because that is how it works: miss one leg of a flight, and the airline quietly cancels the rest. Skilken knew the industry well enough to sort it out, but plenty of travelers do not, and lately there are more of them. Teresa McGee flew from Detroit to Charlotte on American Airlines without a hitch, then tried to fly home and was told she had no ticket. She had a boarding pass proving she had flown the outbound. The airline could not tell her why, only that it had labeled her a no-show and that a new ticket would cost her. Cases like these keep landing in my inbox, and they raise an uncomfortable question. When a company marks a paying customer a no-show and keeps the money, is that a clerical slip, or has the no-show become a quiet little revenue stream?

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.

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.

Cartoon of a disappointed traveler holding a paper coffee cup in a packed airport lounge marked SKYLOUNGE, beside a picked-over breakfast buffet with a "seating full" sign.

Your airport lounge pass Is worthless—unless you do this

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The overcrowded airport lounge is no longer a perk. It is purgatory. Karin Kemp can tell you why. She had a four-hour stopover in Washington and thought it was the perfect chance to use her lounge pass. She was wrong. The lounge was full, an agent ordered her to wait, and she finally got in half an hour later. “There was barely anything left on the breakfast buffet,” she says. “If you could call it that.” That is the lounge letdown. What was once a quiet corner of the terminal, your reward for loyalty or a hefty annual fee, has become a cafeteria for the masses, with entry lines longer than the Starbucks queue, food gone by midmorning, and seats that take the sharp elbows of a subway commuter to claim. Blaming credit cards is the easy answer, and it is part of the story. But the real reason the lounge curdled, and what it will cost you to buy back anything resembling exclusivity, is where this gets interesting.

Cartoon of a furious, wild-haired traveler raising a suitcase overhead as if to smash a laptop that displays a large red "BOOK" button on its screen.

Are you rage-booking your next vacation? Here’s how to stop

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It was a $12,000 vacation to Bali, booked late one night after a stressful business meeting. Sydney Ceruto, a neuropsychologist, remembers it well, because it happened to one of her patients. “She told me later she didn’t even want to go,” Ceruto says. “She just needed to feel like she was escaping.” We are living in the age of rage-booking, the impulsive travel purchase driven by exhaustion, anger, or heartbreak rather than any real desire to see a place. More than half of American travelers say they feel exhausted, and a striking share admit they have booked a trip purely to get away from their lives. It is reshaping how the whole industry sells to you, and some companies have figured out exactly how to profit from your worst, most depleted moments. The question is whether you can catch yourself before you click, and there are clearer warning signs than you might think.

lack and white cartoon of a woman laughing with her arms crossed beside two rolling suitcases at an airport check-in counter, while a uniformed agent gestures apologetically under a wall of flight boards.

Traveling? Here’s why you should pack your sense of humor

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Did you hear the one about the professor who spent 24 hours trapped in airport hell trying to reach a conference on happiness? It is not a joke. Travel has become absurd enough that humor is now a survival skill, and psychologists say the gap between the trip we are promised and the circus we actually get is exactly the thing we should be laughing at. The interesting part is what laughter actually does for a stranded traveler, and the way experts say to use it that most people get exactly backwards.

Cartoon of a panicked business traveler in a suit sprinting through an airport terminal dragging a rolling suitcase, with large RED ZONE signs overhead and a tense crowd waiting behind him.

The red zone: Why this part of air travel makes even the pros lose it

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The red zone is that anxious stretch from your front door to your airplane seat, where normal people turn into nervous wrecks. It is a blur of high-stakes, time-sensitive decisions that overloads your brain, and it is stressful enough that most couples in one recent survey called travel the ultimate relationship test. It has even given rise to the airport divorce, where partners deliberately separate after security just to avoid an argument. We have all seen it: the passenger shouting at a gate agent over a delay, the family sprinting through the terminal with shoes half on, the quiet sob at the gate when a flight is canceled. With air travel booming this summer, the red zone is only getting more intense. There is real science behind why a security line can hijack your nervous system, and the surprising part is that even the most seasoned travelers, the ones with passports full of stamps, are not immune to it.