Howard Madnick calls it the “disappearing reservation” trick. I’ll let him describe a bizarre series of circumstances that led to several reservations being made and then lost. American has offered a resolution, but he wants to know: Is it enough?
Studio/ShutterstockWhen Peter Verstage finds a wallet on a London bus, he tries to do the right thing and return it to its owner. Easier said than done.
Question: I found a wallet on the bus in London containing some cash, the business card of a personal banker at Wells Fargo in Denton, Texas, and a Wells Fargo Platinum credit card and debit card.
Being a good citizen, I emailed the personal banker suggesting that he contact his customer with my details so that I could return his property to him.
I received no reply, so I telephoned Wells Fargo’s customer service number on the debit card and explained the situation to the agent who answered. She said that the bank would not be prepared to contact their customer on my behalf, and the agent and I agreed that my only alternative was to spend the cash and throw away the wallet.
Darren Bradley/ShutterstockFor just $89 a night, the all-suite hotel in Killeen, Tex., promised Steven Hoybook and his family “European-style luxury” – an offer that seemed too good to pass up.
But Hoybook wishes that he had. When he and his family arrived, they found the hotel’s windows and doors shuttered. “They were out of business,” says Hoybook, who lives in Minneapolis. He couldn’t reach Orbitz, the site through which he’d booked the room, so the family found accommodations at a nearby Marriott, paying $111 a night for a smaller room.
When Hoybook finally reached the online travel agency by phone the next day, a representative “seemed sympathetic, leading us to believe that they would reverse the charge for the closed hotel,” he recalls. But after months of back-and-forth, during which the Hoybooks formally disputed the credit card charge for their first hotel, Orbitz referred their bill to a collection agency.
Christine Lagasse and her companions had checked in for their early morning US Airways flight from Manchester, NH, to Philadelphia, enroute to a Caribbean cruise. They walked to the gate indicated on the boarding passes they’d printed at the airline counter.
Or so they thought.
“Our boarding passes showed that our gate was number 9,” she says. “We were all sitting there wondering why there weren’t many people around and when it got to be 4:50 a.m., we didn’t see anyone at the podium.”
That’s because their gate had been moved, minus any announcements. By the time they discovered the change, it was too late.