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.

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?

by

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

by

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?

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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.

Cartoon of smiling sardines packed upright into narrow airplane seats in a tightly spaced cabin, illustrating how shrinking economy legroom crams travelers in like sardines.

Premium creep: How the travel industry downgraded you for profit 

by

Remember when you could check a bag, choose your seat, and stretch your legs on a flight without paying extra? It is not an urban legend. You used to be able to do all three at no additional charge. A 34-inch seat pitch was once standard in economy class. Today the industry calls that same space premium economy and charges you more for it, while the 30-inch squeeze becomes the new normal. Call it premium creep, the quiet industry-wide pattern where yesterday’s basics quietly become today’s luxuries, wrapped in marketing language about choice and flexibility. And it is not just airlines: hotels, cruise lines, and even car rental companies have all found ways to strip out what used to be included and sell it back to you. Which raises the question worth sitting with the next time you compare two fares: are you buying an upgrade, or just paying to undo a downgrade the company handed you in the first place?

An angry airline passenger stands with a suitcase while holding a $10 voucher after a flight delay.

The delay tax: Why your airline voucher barely covers your expenses anymore 

by

When a flight is delayed or canceled, airlines cover only what they call duty of care: a meal voucher, sometimes a hotel, or a refund if the flight is canceled. Angela Justice received a $10 voucher after her Boston to Chicago flight was canceled. The real cost, the delay tax, is far larger. It includes nonrefundable hotels travelers cannot reach, lost wages, child care that keeps ticking, and the replacement flights passengers must book themselves when the airline’s rescheduling timeline proves useless. Airlines calculate compensation based on what it costs them to reschedule a flight, not what it costs the traveler to miss the reason they flew in the first place. The official story is that duty of care solves the problem and the Department of Transportation signs off. But the law was written in a different era, when travel was simpler and airlines were more generous, and regulators have not caught up now that delays are chronic and carriers watch every penny.

Editorial cartoon illustration of a smiling AI robot with "AI" labeled on its chest holding out a paper voucher in one hand and a colorful striped "Favor" shopping bag in the other, while a frustrated middle-aged man in a blue polo shirt stands with arms crossed next to his black rolling suitcase refusing the offer, illustrating how travel companies use automated systems to push customers into accepting vouchers instead of legally required cash refunds

Why are travel companies replacing real refunds with “coupon justice”?

by

Travel companies are increasingly replacing cash refunds with vouchers and goodwill credits when flights cancel, hotel rooms fail, and rental cars run out of vehicles. The practice exploded after the pandemic when companies pivoted to vouchers to hoard cash. The actual redemption rate for travel vouchers is below 10 percent, meaning a 90 percent chance the credit goes unused and the company keeps your money entirely. Under U.S. Department of Transportation rules, airlines must provide prompt refunds to your original form of payment when they cancel flights or make significant schedule changes. Airlines offering only vouchers without a genuine cash option violate these legal obligations. Hotels and online booking sites operate in a legal gray zone with few hard rules governing refund practices.