You feel it at the gate when your flight is delayed a third time and nobody offers an explanation. In the United States, air passenger rights are shrinking. Everywhere else, from Europe to India, governments are moving the other way.
The travel industry will happily charge you to bring your dog along, and its marketing calls that a perk. But an airline calls your pet cargo, a court of law calls it baggage, a hotel calls it a nightly fee.
Your hotel room feels like a sanctuary, and security experts say that is exactly the problem. A cracked balcony door. A cloned key card. A stranger who trailed you from the bar. Travelers drop their guard where they feel safe.
HP’s techs could not fix Hugh Fuller’s laptop, then sold him a $40 warranty the warranty department later called the wrong type. HP agreed to refund it, sent the money to a bank he does not use, and closed it.
Canceled without consent, then charged $360 more to rebook the same two hotel rooms. The company admitted its error. How the refund was finally won.
John Curtin had 20 years of his life in his Microsoft account: banking records, mortgage papers, a visa application. He paid $84 a year for it. Then Microsoft flagged unusual activity and locked him out. The bots would not budge.
For most travelers the middle seat is a contact sport, and winter coats make the squeeze worse. One pilot says your brain reads it as confinement and flips on fight-or-flight for the whole flight. There are ways to win anyway.
Minutes after Howard Gross picked up his Alamo rental in Nice, a tire warning light came on. An agent checked the tires and called it a false alarm. A week later a tire went flat. Alamo charged his card $752.
Vacationing in a French château is a cliché, so when the Château de Candes became a wellness resort, its owners set out to be nothing like everyone else. The spa sits in caves once used to dry prunes for market.
Tony Rogozinski called StubHub to cancel his concert ticket listing before selling the tickets to someone else. The agent said no further action was needed. The listing stayed live, the tickets sold on StubHub, and the site billed him $864.
