flight cancellation

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 frustrated traveler with arms crossed standing between two suitcases in an empty airport gate area, beneath a large red departures sign reading "FLIGHT DOES NOT EXIST."

Booking.com said my flight was confirmed, but the airline says it never existed

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Lindley Kinerk’s last morning in Dresden seemed routine. She and her companions packed up, checked out, and headed to the airport for their 8:25 a.m. flight home to Boston. They had even gotten a friendly check-in reminder from Booking.com the night before. Then they reached the counter and learned something that would cost them nearly $6,000: their flight did not exist. Not that morning, not any morning. It had been off the airline’s schedule for months. Booking.com, it seems, had quietly rebooked them on an earlier flight and never said a word, and the airline insisted the whole thing was not its problem. With a third ticketing agency tangled into the booking and every company pointing at the others, Kinerk had to buy new tickets on the spot just to get home. What she did next, and what Booking.com eventually said about her money, is where this case turns.

Black and white cartoon of a small couple with suitcases standing on a dark horizon, watching a paper airplane folded from a banknote fly up and away into a vast cloudy sky.

Air travelers deserve stronger consumer protections—in Europe and the U.S.

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Mila Schoun knew what his downgrade was worth, but his airline pretended it did not. Schoun and his wife had paid Swiss International Air Lines for premium economy on a flight from Prague to Miami, and then the airline changed aircraft and put them in regular economy for the 10-hour crossing. He asked for the difference back. Swiss refused. What Schoun had on his side, even if he had never heard of it, was EC 261, a 21-year-old European regulation that makes airlines pay when they cancel, bump, strand, or downgrade you, and that quietly protects millions of Americans on any flight leaving an EU airport. Europe just spent the spring fighting over whether to gut that law, with the airline lobby pushing to raise the delay threshold and erase most claims. Passengers appear to have dodged the worst of it. But there is a quieter problem that no one in Brussels lobbied for and no one fought against, one that has been draining the value out of this protection for two decades while everyone argued about something else.

Black and white cartoon of a frazzled airline passenger facing a smiling gate agent at a counter, who holds up a document labeled "OUR RULES," illustrating the gap between what travelers want and what the DOT's disclosure rule actually delivers.

Congress asked for passenger rights. It got a PDF

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Airline passengers are tired of standing at the gate while agents hand out excuses. The Department of Transportation has a fix. Soon, airlines will hand out a piece of paper instead. The DOT just finalized a rule requiring airlines to publish a one-page summary of passengers’ rights. Congress ordered it eight years ago. The rule does not set any compensation amounts. It does not require meals, hotels, or rebooking when there is a delay. Each airline only has to briefly summarize its own existing policies, in whatever format it likes. The rule also skipped the public comment period, and in a detail that is hard to make up, the summaries are not even due yet, because carriers cannot submit anything until a separate government approval process is complete. When the regulated industry shrugs at a new regulation, that means something, and this rule drew no objection at all.

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 

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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 illustration showing a thin man with brown hair and round glasses standing with arms crossed next to two orange roller suitcases on an airport tarmac with palm trees and a small white airplane visible in the background, illustrating a passenger left stranded after an airline schedule change forced him to buy replacement flights at his own expense

Aeromexico offered him a “free” flight change. Then it refused to give him one.

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Jorrit Muller booked Aeromexico flight 335 from Puerto Vallarta to Orlando for a wedding. Three months before departure, Aeromexico shifted his flight one hour earlier, into the reception time. The airline notified him that if the new flight did not work, he could move to another at no additional cost. When he tried to use that offer through Aeromexico’s WhatsApp support, the available flights were operated by Delta as code-share. An agent told him to request a refund instead, then Aeromexico denied the refund. Under DOT rules, a significant change for international travel requires a schedule shift of six hours or more.