Christopher Elliott

Christopher Elliott is the founder of Elliott Advocacy, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that empowers consumers to solve their problems and helps those who can't. He's the author of numerous books on consumer advocacy and writes three nationally syndicated columns. He also publishes the Elliott Report, a news site for consumers, and Elliott Confidential, a critically acclaimed newsletter about customer service. If you have a consumer problem you can't solve, contact him directly through his advocacy website. You can also follow him on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or sign up for his daily newsletter.
Cartoon of a man in sunglasses relaxing on a yellow lounger with a cocktail beside an empty pool and palm trees.

Coolcations aren’t cool anymore. Why you should book a trip to a hot place

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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.

Cartoon of a wary airline passenger glancing sideways at the small white humanoid robot seated beside her.

Should airlines ban robots?

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It started with Stewie, a three-and-a-half-foot humanoid robot. His owner bought him a seat to Dallas on Southwest, and when the robot walked through the terminal, passengers stopped to take pictures. Within days, Southwest rewrote its policy to keep human-like and animal-like robots off its aircraft, regardless of size or purpose. Delta followed in June. United followed in July. American Airlines has yet to say anything, though a position seems likely soon. So three of the big four have now decided, and each ban covers the cabin and checked bags alike. The stated concern is lithium batteries and handling, and there is a real case there: a full-size humanoid carries far more power than a laptop, and a gate agent should not have to decide in the boarding line whether a machine with limbs counts as baggage, cargo or a passenger.

Cartoon of a wary traveler with a suitcase standing beside a large blank billboard.

This summer’s biggest points swindle

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Travel websites are asking you to do something strange this summer. They want you to write to Congress and beg lawmakers not to lower your credit card fees. Sites that present themselves as working for consumers are running petition drives against the Credit Card Competition Act, a bipartisan bill that would require the biggest banks to let more than one network process your credit card. The pitch is always some version of protect your rewards, and there is usually a form: fill in your name and ZIP code, and a prewritten letter goes to your representatives. What those drives tend not to mention is who else is making the same argument. The banks run a campaign of their own through their trade group, and the airlines fund another. Swipe fees run roughly 2 to 3 percent of every purchase, merchants build them into their prices, and you pay them whether you notice or not.

Te Pae Christchurch, the city's new carbon zero certified convention center.

From earthquake rubble to carbon zero: Here’s how Christchurch is building a greener city

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To understand how Te Pae Christchurch became a carbon zero certified convention center, you need to meet Oscar. He is about the size of a commercial dryer, but instead of laundry he dries hundreds of pounds of food waste, heating, mixing, and shredding scraps across a 30-hour cycle until what comes out looks like coffee grounds. Oscar lives in the back of house, a rugged gray box with a heavy lid and caution stickers, entirely indifferent to the awards the building collects. He is also a fair symbol of the city above him. The earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 took roughly a third of Christchurch’s buildings, and what rose in their place was designed to a different standard: a compact center built for walking and biking, a library designed around energy, a former residential red zone turning into wetlands and native forest, an airport that has spent two decades cutting its own emissions. Most of it happens where no visitor will ever see it, which raises a question worth asking about the whole idea of green travel.

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 woman photographing the front of a rental car with her phone in a parking lot, a Turo sign behind her.

Turo charged me $2,338 for damage I didn’t cause. Can I get a refund?

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Georgina Montalvan rented a car through Turo in Los Angeles and dropped it off a day early so she could catch an earlier flight home. The next day a text arrived: the owner said she had damaged it. Turo sent photos showing a scratch on the fender and a small hole in the bumper. But Montalvan had done the one thing that should end an argument like this. She had photographed the car when she picked it up, and her pictures showed the scratch was already there. She sent them in, Turo reviewed the evidence, and the claim was dropped as normal wear and tear. That should have been the end of it. A week later Turo reopened the claim and charged her credit card $660, with no itemized bill. Then came a second invoice, this one for $1,678, for what the company described as hidden damage, illustrated with a photo of a larger hole she says she had never laid eyes on.

Cartoon of a dismayed traveler with a suitcase pleading at a reception desk while an unsmiling clerk stands with his arms folded.

Is this the worst check-in policy in the history of travel?

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Alison Palkhivala was ready for pretzels, polka, and a pint. She had booked a Munich apartment through Booking.com for Oktoberfest, and three days before her arrival she noticed the line she had skimmed past. Check-in was strictly between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. Read that again. Not 7 p.m. Not “after 3 p.m.” A two-hour window first thing in the morning, when most travelers are either asleep or looking for coffee. Her flight did not land until 10. She messaged the host and offered everything she could think of, a lockbox, a later handover, even collecting the key the next morning and writing off the first night entirely. The answer was no. The host canceled the booking outright and kept roughly $1,000 under the cancellation penalty. Booking.com declined to intervene, saying the policy was valid. So she stood in a foreign city during its busiest week of the year with no room and no money, holding a reservation she had agreed to in every respect except the one nobody could have met.

artoon of a huge crowd of tourists with rolling suitcases stampeding down a narrow tiled European street at night as residents watch in alarm from windows and doorways.

Why you should be a tourist, not a local, this summer

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Damien Zouaoui used to believe in living like a local. He hunted for authentic-looking apartments in up-and-coming neighborhoods, shopped the local markets, and did his best to blend in. Then came Lisbon. The bakery on his street was gone. So was the barbershop, replaced by boutique rentals and brunch spots catering, as he puts it, to people like him. Then he watched his host get into a shouting match with a neighbor over yet another guest’s rolling suitcase clattering down the cobblestones, and something clicked. He was not a visitor. He was part of an invading force. For a decade now, the travel industry’s golden rule has been to shun the tourist traps, skip the hotels, and embed yourself in a residential neighborhood in search of something real. But there is a simple arithmetic problem buried in that advice, and it is starting to show up in the streets of the cities we say we love: when everyone insists on living like a local, who is left to actually be one?

Cartoon of a wide-eyed woman staring at a computer screen while booking a trip, packed luggage stacked beside her.

Airlines want to hide the real price of your ticket. Should the government let them?

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Remember what booking a flight used to be like? You would spot a $99 fare, click it, and then meet the carrier-imposed surcharge. Then the mandatory fuel surcharge. Then, somewhere near the end, the taxes. By checkout, your $99 flight cost $180. In 2011, the Department of Transportation put a stop to it with the full-fare rule, which says the price an airline shows you has to be the price you pay, taxes and fees included, and that the total has to be the most prominent number in the ad. The airlines went to court to kill the rule and lost, and travelers have shopped with confidence ever since. Now that standard is back on the table. The DOT has proposed letting airlines display each piece of a fare just as prominently as the total, and it is separately asking whether the rule should be repealed outright, which would allow advertised fares that leave out taxes and mandatory fees altogether. The department calls the current requirement unnecessarily prescriptive and raises legal questions about it. Consumer advocates answer that a price you cannot actually buy at is not a price.

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?