DOG

When airlines misread passport rules, who pays?

Question: My husband and I were scheduled to take a Spirit Airlines flight from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to San Jose, Costa Rica. The afternoon before my flight, my dog chewed a corner off the front page of my husband’s passport and we were concerned about having proper documentation.

We arrived at the airport almost three hours early in order to have enough time to ask a ticket agent. He seemed seasoned and professional, and he assured us that there would be no problem with the passport, as the number could still be manually inputted.
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84 comments

My dog needs to have surgery. No, seriously.

Pixellating Dachshund. / Photo by Mr. T - Flickr
Question: I booked a trip a few weeks back to Regent Palms in the Turks and Caicos through a website called SniqueAway. It didn’t allow for any refunds or changes. The booking appears to be made through a company called Classic Vacations.
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87 comments

The strange case of the dog bite and the $2,305 hotel bill

Come closer, human ... I have something for you. / Photo by Vagabond Shutterbug - Flickr
Question: I was scheduled to attend a veterinary dental seminar in Colorado a few months ago. Somehow, I accidentally booked a room at the Holiday Inn Express and Suites Colorado Springs for an entire month — February 16 through March 16 — and I didn’t realize the mistake until the day before my departure.
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182 comments

Kicked off a flight because of a dogfight

This flight went to the dogs. / Photo by Jden Red - Flickr
Mention the word “pets” and “planes” and it’s enough to start a dogfight.

That’s exactly what happened to Marilyn Bruno, who was flying from Miami to Boston on American Airlines recently. Bruno is allergic to dogs — technically, it’s a class 3 allergy, which is relatively mild and doesn’t require her to travel with an epinephrine pen.
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183 comments

Is this enough compensation? A partial refund for my dogless flight

Barbara Hilliard’s dogs didn’t make their KLM flight from Nuremberg, Germany, to Dallas via Amsterdam. Neither did she.

Turns out the plane was swapped out at the last minute — a so-called “equipment change” — and there was no room for her pets. “They told me they had no place to put the dogs and I would have to secure another way to get the dogs to Amsterdam and then they would fly them to Dallas,” she says.

Hilliard was unhappy. Not only because she’d made several phone calls before her trip to make sure her dogs could fly, but also because her only option was to buy an expensive ticket on Lufthansa to make her connection. She thinks KLM and its codeshare partner Delta Air Lines, through which she booked the tickets, should refund the price of her new ticket and pay the dogs’ freight, too.
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47 comments

Is this enough compensation? Two vouchers for a kennel I didn’t need

=”drop_cap”>When Charles Robinson tried to load his Labrador Retriever on a United Airlines flight from Frankfurt, German, to Washington, recently, an airline employee stopped him. Not only was the cage he’d used for years to carry his dog too small, but the one for his cats didn’t cut, it either.

The cat kennel, he was told, needed screw-down connectors instead of clip-down connectors. Robinson had to buy new cages for his pets and paid extra to have them sent back to the States, at a cost of nearly $1,000.

That didn’t sit well with Robinson, who is a member of the armed services flying on orders. Had United informed him of the requirements in advance, he could have found larger cages that met their standards. Even though he pointed out that the old cages were perfectly acceptable to the airline when he arrived in Germany two years ago, United just reiterated that it stood by its employee’s decision.

“There seemed to be no actual interest in looking at the facts,” he says.
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49 comments