You do not have to be anywhere near a hurricane for one to wreck your trip. The sun can be out at your destination while your aircraft is stuck a thousand miles away, waiting out a storm it never escaped.
Something goes wrong on the road. A flight collapses, a bag disappears, you get sick in a country where you do not speak the language. You file a travel insurance claim expecting reimbursement, and then the insurer asks for documentation, and you realize you kept almost none of it. The blurry photos are on your phone somewhere. The confirmation email is buried. The hotel receipt is gone.
Industry experts say the event itself is rarely what sinks a claim. Missing paperwork is. And travel policies do not pay on your account of what happened. They pay on proof of loss, which means you have to be able to show what occurred, when, and what it cost you, in a form an adjuster can accept.
The travel industry has spent two summers selling the coolcation, the idea that the smart move as temperatures climb is to head north to Scandinavia, Alaska or Iceland. The reality can be a sweaty and expensive mess. One traveler followed the herd to Scandinavia last July expecting a quiet getaway, and found rooms had doubled in price and the ferry routes were fully booked. Then a heat wave hit Oslo, and his hotel had no air conditioning. People paced the hallways at midnight, unable to sleep. Another tried Iceland’s ring road, got lost after a mudslide, and asked a police officer for directions, only to be led half an hour out of town and left there. So while everyone else queues for a view of a glacier, a question worth asking is what is happening in all the places they abandoned.
It starts with a plate of chilled shrimp at the resort buffet. It looks pink and fine, sitting on a bed of ice, and you feel fine after you eat it. Then, six hours later, your vacation is over and you are on the bathroom floor. Late summer is peak season for exactly this kind of culinary hazard, and this year the risk is sharpened by record heat colliding with a travel industry already in meltdown, delayed flights, understaffed hotels, tarmac waits with the air conditioning broken. While everyone worries about cancellations and lost bags, something more dangerous is brewing quietly in galley carts and buffet lines. Your food depends on a cold chain, a temperature-controlled path from farm to fork, and when the heat spikes, that chain can snap. The bacteria that move in when it does are the kind you cannot see, cannot smell, and cannot taste, which is what makes them so easy to eat.
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?
After Patrice Krecek’s suitcase did not arrive at Stockholm’s airport, she did everything right. She filed a Property Irregularity Report with SAS. She submitted a claim. She called customer service, more than once. Maybe she should have checked the Motel L Alvsjo, a 40-minute drive away, because that is exactly where her luggage turned up five weeks later, how it got there a mystery wrapped in pink duct tape. Inside that bag was most of her clothing for a 14-night cruise, including a new sweater she had bought just for the trip and never got to wear. Her husband had wrapped the case in hot pink tape so it would be easy to spot on the carousel, a detail that would matter more than he could have guessed. The motel could only hold the bag for a month before donating it. SAS had the address, the photos, and clear instructions, and still the suitcase sat 4,000 miles away. What it took to finally get it moving, and whether a claim filed one day late would cost the Kreceks everything, is where this case turns.
Michelle Girasole thought she knew Rhode Island’s Beavertail State Park well enough to leave her phone in the car. It was a warm summer morning, and she wanted to catch the sunrise with her terrier, Scooter, and enjoy a few minutes without calls, texts, or notifications. Then she followed Scooter off the path and lost her bearings. She spent the next nine hours stranded, with no water, no sunscreen, and no way to call for help, until a fisherman finally spotted her on the shoreline. “If I had my phone,” she says, “none of that would have happened.” Her ordeal is a warning about the travel industry’s latest wellness obsession, the digital detox, which hotels and tour operators are selling as the only way to truly be present. Nearly every traveler says they want to disconnect. But there is a reason a row of security and medical-evacuation experts say that, for anyone without a private fixer, ditching your phone is not relaxation. It is something closer to recklessness.
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.
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.
Iran and the United States have agreed to end more than 100 days of war. If you’ve been sitting on a summer trip you were afraid to book because of the turmoil in the Middle East, the temptation now is to click the “buy” button before the ink dries. But you might want to slow down.
