The war on snark is over and the good guys won

Note: Effective Jan. 1, this site shifted from a travel advocacy site to a general consumer advocacy blog. But that isn’t the only change for 2015.

When I enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, one of the first things I did was visit Sproul Plaza, where the Free Speech movement was born in 1964.

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Hotels cancel their old cancellation policies

Archiwiz/Shutterstock
Archiwiz/Shutterstock
When heavy rain grounded Amy Li’s recent flight from San Francisco to Cancun, Mexico, she hoped that her resort would allow her to cancel her prepaid room. But it didn’t.

Instead, she received an apologetic e-mail from the Excellence Playa Mujeres, saying that while the hotel was “truly very sorry” about her canceled flight, it would be keeping her money. “They were unwilling to refund a penny,” says Li, who works for the city of San Francisco. “Not even in hotel credits.”

She and her husband lost $1,656, the entire cost of the hotel.

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US Airways tells customer her cancer isn’t terminal enough for a refund

Not the friendly skies. / Photo by wbav - Flickr
Not the friendly skies. / Photo by wbav – Flickr
Ben Coleman and his wife were supposed to fly from New York to Oakland last November on US Airways. The couple had purchased nonrefundable roundtrip tickets on US Airways for just under $1,000.

But in October, Coleman’s wife was diagnosed with cancer.

“Her diagnosis is positive and the doctors tell us — nothing is certain, of course — that it will be a hard year, but expect that she will lead a long healthy life.”

That’s when things got a little complicated.

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