REFUNDS

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 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?