CONSUMER RIGHTS

Cartoon of a wary traveler with a suitcase standing beside a large blank billboard.

This summer’s biggest points swindle

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Travel websites are asking you to do something strange this summer. They want you to write to Congress and beg lawmakers not to lower your credit card fees. Sites that present themselves as working for consumers are running petition drives against the Credit Card Competition Act, a bipartisan bill that would require the biggest banks to let more than one network process your credit card. The pitch is always some version of protect your rewards, and there is usually a form: fill in your name and ZIP code, and a prewritten letter goes to your representatives. What those drives tend not to mention is who else is making the same argument. The banks run a campaign of their own through their trade group, and the airlines fund another. Swipe fees run roughly 2 to 3 percent of every purchase, merchants build them into their prices, and you pay them whether you notice or not.

Cartoon of a woman in pajamas staring in shock at a laptop showing a $179 Furnished Finder charge, her cat asleep beside her on the bed.

My Furnished Finder subscription auto-renewed. Why can’t I get a refund?

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Debbie McNulty had listed her vacation home on Furnished Finder for three years and never once received a booking through it. She paid the annual fee anyway. Now that she was renting short term again, the platform was no use to her at all. Her membership was set to auto-renew, and the company sent a reminder email the month before. She missed it, back from a two-week trip and buried under the same avalanche of email everyone else is buried under. Then she woke up to a $179 charge. She contacted the company that same day, asked to cancel, and requested her money back. What came back was a form response: fees are nonrefundable, it is in the terms you agreed to. She did not dispute that she had missed the deadline. Her question was different, and it is one worth sitting with. When a customer cancels on the very day the charge goes through, and has just told you plainly that she will not use a single day of the year she has been billed for, is keeping the money really the right call?

Cartoon of a woman photographing the front of a rental car with her phone in a parking lot, a Turo sign behind her.

Turo charged me $2,338 for damage I didn’t cause. Can I get a refund?

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Georgina Montalvan rented a car through Turo in Los Angeles and dropped it off a day early so she could catch an earlier flight home. The next day a text arrived: the owner said she had damaged it. Turo sent photos showing a scratch on the fender and a small hole in the bumper. But Montalvan had done the one thing that should end an argument like this. She had photographed the car when she picked it up, and her pictures showed the scratch was already there. She sent them in, Turo reviewed the evidence, and the claim was dropped as normal wear and tear. That should have been the end of it. A week later Turo reopened the claim and charged her credit card $660, with no itemized bill. Then came a second invoice, this one for $1,678, for what the company described as hidden damage, illustrated with a photo of a larger hole she says she had never laid eyes on.

Cartoon of a dismayed traveler with a suitcase pleading at a reception desk while an unsmiling clerk stands with his arms folded.

Is this the worst check-in policy in the history of travel?

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Alison Palkhivala was ready for pretzels, polka, and a pint. She had booked a Munich apartment through Booking.com for Oktoberfest, and three days before her arrival she noticed the line she had skimmed past. Check-in was strictly between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. Read that again. Not 7 p.m. Not “after 3 p.m.” A two-hour window first thing in the morning, when most travelers are either asleep or looking for coffee. Her flight did not land until 10. She messaged the host and offered everything she could think of, a lockbox, a later handover, even collecting the key the next morning and writing off the first night entirely. The answer was no. The host canceled the booking outright and kept roughly $1,000 under the cancellation penalty. Booking.com declined to intervene, saying the policy was valid. So she stood in a foreign city during its busiest week of the year with no room and no money, holding a reservation she had agreed to in every respect except the one nobody could have met.

Cartoon of a wide-eyed woman staring at a computer screen while booking a trip, packed luggage stacked beside her.

Airlines want to hide the real price of your ticket. Should the government let them?

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Remember what booking a flight used to be like? You would spot a $99 fare, click it, and then meet the carrier-imposed surcharge. Then the mandatory fuel surcharge. Then, somewhere near the end, the taxes. By checkout, your $99 flight cost $180. In 2011, the Department of Transportation put a stop to it with the full-fare rule, which says the price an airline shows you has to be the price you pay, taxes and fees included, and that the total has to be the most prominent number in the ad. The airlines went to court to kill the rule and lost, and travelers have shopped with confidence ever since. Now that standard is back on the table. The DOT has proposed letting airlines display each piece of a fare just as prominently as the total, and it is separately asking whether the rule should be repealed outright, which would allow advertised fares that leave out taxes and mandatory fees altogether. The department calls the current requirement unnecessarily prescriptive and raises legal questions about it. Consumer advocates answer that a price you cannot actually buy at is not a price.

Cartoon of a scowling woman holding an oversized fork beside a giant bare foot.

Should cruise lines ban more passengers?

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A video from a Carnival cruise made the rounds this month: a passenger seated in the ship’s dining area, scratching a bare foot, then going back to eating with the same hand. The comments wrote themselves. But underneath the reaction sits a question the cruise industry has never really answered. Look at what actually gets people banned from cruise ships. Violence and threats. Illegal drugs. Vandalism, harassment, theft, ignoring safety orders. Every category on the list has the same thing in common: malice, criminality, an intent to harm. A passenger who creates a public-health problem in a shared dining room fits almost none of it. And yet a cruise ship is a closed environment where norovirus and other illnesses move fast, so it is at least arguable that someone exposing hundreds of people to infection is a bigger problem than one guest throwing a punch in a lounge. The puncher gets a lifetime ban. So should the list be wider, or is the real question who gets to decide?

Cartoon of a distressed mother holding a swaddled newborn at an airport counter while an unmoved agent stands with arms crossed.

Aeromexico rescheduled my flight and expected me to sleep in an airport with a newborn. Can I get a refund?

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Allison Turpen booked a round-trip Aeromexico flight from Washington, D.C. to Oaxaca, and then the airline moved her connection to the next day. The new itinerary had her landing in Mexico City at 9:30 at night, with the onward flight not leaving until 6:15 the next morning, a layover of more than eight hours. She would be traveling with a newborn, and spending the night in an airport with a baby was not something she could do. So she asked to cancel and get her $1,360 back. She called nearly a dozen times. Aeromexico finally answered, and denied her, pointing to a line in its contract that says flights are subject to change. But Turpen was holding a ticket for a flight departing the United States, which raises a question a lot of travelers never think to ask: when an airline is the one that rewrites your trip, can it really hide behind “subject to change,” or do federal rules say something different?

Cartoon of a distressed blonde traveler holding a ticket at an airport counter, gesturing in protest at a giant Russian nesting doll standing in place of an agent.

I paid $500 for an upgrade on Swiss, then the airline kept it

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Elizabeth Webley thought she had found a deal. She bid $500 for an upgrade on a Swiss International Air Lines flight from Zurich to San Francisco, and the airline accepted. Then her plans changed, she rebooked, and she assumed her upgrade would either move to the new flight or come back to her card. It did neither. Swiss told her the bid was gone and that she would have to pay for a new upgrade, calling the original nonrefundable because she had changed the booking voluntarily. There is a name for this: the ghost upgrade, a product you pay for that vanishes the moment you touch your reservation. But Webley had something most travelers do not. She had taken a screenshot of the terms she agreed to at the moment of purchase, and those terms said plainly that if she changed her flight she was entitled to a full refund of the bid amount, as long as her fare allowed rebooking. The airline’s agents kept quoting a different rule, the one about voluntary cancellations, and pointing her to the FAQ. So the standoff came down to a single question with real money riding on it: when the contract you agreed to says one thing and the airline’s FAQ says another, which one is supposed to win?

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?