passenger rights

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?

Black and white cartoon of a cruise ship docked beside a high prison wall topped with razor wire and a guard tower.

The FBI wants you to report cruise crime. Then what?

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The FBI has a message for cruise passengers as vacation season begins: if you are assaulted, kidnapped, or sexually assaulted at sea, report it right away. It is good advice. Of course you should report a crime. But the announcement leaves out what happens after you speak up. The law meant to track crime at sea, passed in 2010, counts only a short list of the most serious categories. Its requirements generally reach incidents involving U.S. nationals, which leaves out most crew members and plenty of passengers. Thefts count only above a dollar threshold. And an assault is reportable only if it causes “serious bodily injury,” a term the law never defines, which turns a beating into a judgment call. Here is the part that deserves a longer look: the FBI tells passengers to report incidents to the cruise line, and the cruise line is the one that reports them to the government. A company sells you a safe vacation, then helps decide whether what happened to you counts as a crime worth counting.

Cartoon of a weary couple driving a car down a straight desert highway lined with cactuses at sunset, as an airplane flies overhead.

American Airlines delayed my flight, so I drove. Why can’t I get a refund?

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Michael Damarino and his wife thought they had done everything right. They booked refundable American Airlines tickets through Expedia from Boston to Tucson by way of Phoenix, paying extra for the flexibility. Then a 90-minute delay in Phoenix, blamed on a sick first officer and a baggage weight problem, made them miss their connection. With no later flights available, they did the resourceful thing: they rented a car and drove the final 100 miles so they would not lose their vacation. What they did not realize is that solving the airline’s problem themselves had quietly turned them into a “no-show” for that last leg. In the airline’s system, skipping a flight without canceling it first triggers a clause that can cancel the rest of your itinerary and wipe out the ticket’s value, even when you paid for a refundable fare. American offered only a flight credit and called the ticket nonrefundable. Expedia pointed back to the airline, and the airline pointed to Expedia.

Cartoon of a distressed woman at an airport with a red suitcase, reaching toward her boarding pass as it floats away in a glowing puff, vanishing from her hands.

My wife’s airline ticket vanished, then Hawaiian Airlines charged me an extra $575

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James Phillips did everything by the book. He booked two first-class, round-trip tickets through the Hawaiian Airlines app, one for himself and one for his wife Linda, purchased one after the other on the same credit card. Within minutes, he had written confirmations for both. Then they got to the Honolulu airport. The agent told him his ticket was fine, but Linda’s, confirmed and paid for, had simply been voided. No one could say why. Her seat had already been sold to someone else. To get her on a later flight, Phillips had to buy a brand-new ticket that cost $575 more than the one he had already paid. The airline first hinted his card had been declined, then tried to pin it on a third-party booking channel he had never used, even though he booked directly and had the confirmation to prove it. Who should eat the cost of a mistake the passenger did not make, and what it took to get a straight answer, is where this case turns.

cartoon of a worried older couple standing on a river cruise deck while a mechanic kneels over a smoking engine behind them, with green hills and a castle along the Rhine in the background.

Can this company refuse to cover my costs for a canceled river cruise?

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Michael Cawley and his wife had been looking forward to a relaxing six-day Rhine River cruise with CroisiEurope, a gentle start before they carried on to Dublin. What they got instead was a series of mechanical problems and a lot of anxiety. The ship stopped cruising early the first night. The next morning, scuba divers worked under the hull, the departure ran late, and an excursion was scrapped. Then, around midnight, the ship hit something. The hull shook, and at 1:30 a.m. every passenger was roused and herded into the lounge. By the next morning the verdict was in: the cruise was canceled, a bad motor. With nonrefundable travel waiting at the far end and no help yet in sight, the couple booked their own train and hotel to keep their connection, only to be offered an alternative too late to use. CroisiEurope returned the cruise fare. What it decided to do about the rest of their money, and the European law it leaned on to justify it, is where this case turns.

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.