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.
The man in the Tokyo departure lounge looked prepared. Color-coded itinerary, screenshots of every boarding pass, the newest luggage. Then the Wi-Fi froze, a gate change hit the monitor, and he came apart. The passenger beside him just walked over.
You take your seat on the plane and realize you have not spoken to a single person since you arrived at the airport. Not at the kiosk. Not at security. Not at the gate. Travel is efficient, frictionless and silent.
You booked a first class seat expecting a hot meal. What arrives is a basket of lukewarm popcorn, because the airline quietly stopped serving meals on that route. Across travel, prices have held steady while the things they bought disappeared.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
