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Tripped Up
Our columnist pleads with you to turn to intermediaries, obtain written promises, and avoid expecting perfection in an imperfect world.
By Seth Kugel
Here’s Seth: he writes to complain this time, not the other way around. The Tripped Up segment helps travelers sort through the upsets they encounter (and even fight refunds), but no matter what smart recommendation you give them, readers keep making them. Same mistakes! It’s almost like you’re prioritizing your family, your job, and your fitness over memorizing my suggestions.
So instead of using my last column of the year to get one specific traveler out of a jam, I’ve decided to rehash the crucial lessons I’ve learned — and hopefully help a few travelers along the way.
Based on roughly 2000 reader submissions (so far) in 2023, here are my six most sensible rules for minimizing problems in 2024. Seth, Queens, N. Y.
I get as many court cases about massive OTAs as Expedia and Booking. com that I’ll have to spin the wheel to find someone to help me. Okay, let’s take John from New Port Richey, Florida. Last February, he discovered a British Airways flight for four passengers from Tampa, Florida, to Venice, Italy, on Priceline. He tried to book twice, with other credit cards, but each time he said his purchase had failed.
Surprise! He still got paid twice, for a total of $15,153, and never earned a single Priceline or airline reservation code.
He went to Priceline, as he had done, but after what he said were hours of phone calls and several emails, he gave up and contacted British Airways directly. They responded as most companies would: he had to go through the company he had bought from. .
Eventually, Priceline announced that it would refund its cards, but in two billing cycles. Before accepting it as true with the company, he requested chargebacks from his credit card issuers. It ran for a week, but British Airways charged it $1,894. . . . It was only when he saw one of those six-character location codes on that document that he knew there was indeed a warning.
When I reached out to Christina Bennett, a spokesperson for Priceline, she apologized and wrote that the company was “disappointed” to hear the customer experience and consider a refund. He also learned about and confirmed a technical factor that “incorrectly rejected the reservation yet. “prosecuted the charge. “
10 months passed!
“This is clearly not the experience we would want for anyone using our platform,” she continued.
But as my inbox shows, dealing with one travel company’s customer service is hard — and having multiple companies interact is harder. My advice: Use the big middlemen (Expedia and Booking.com, but also Hotels.com, TripAdvisor and the like) to find your deal. But unless you have an excellent reason to do otherwise — significant savings on package deals, one-click booking of complex itineraries, your wife is C.E.O. — take a few extra minutes to open a new tab and book direct with the actual service provider.
Big O. T. A. ne aren’t the only middleman you should avoid, when you can. Generally speaking, the fewer corporations involved in planning your trip, the better off you’ll be if something goes wrong. These come with smaller agencies, such as consolidators (who sell airline tickets that you can’t blatantly get on the internet), vacation rental agencies like Vrbo and Airbnb, credit card platforms like Chase Travel, and even codeshare flights when you book electronically with one airline and fly with another.
Andrea of Morgantown, W. Va., bought three tickets to Dublin on Aer Lingus for July through a consolidator called Skywithclass, which offers unlisted business class deals. Her family had to cancel when her husband broke some ribs in May. Thanks to an add-on trip cancellation plan that covered injuries, she was owed a refund of $11,364. Months of efforts to get Skywithclass to get Aer Lingus to return her money had hit a dead end. (And, predictably, when she contacted the airline directly, they sent her back to Skywithclass.)
Skywithclass’s chief product officer, Anna Maxim, wrote in an email that the company “very much regrets” the lack of refunds, but noted that Aer Lingus had made it very difficult for them, saying it was not “the most responsive airline”. I agree: they, too, have ignored me in the afterlife. But faced with this situation, they responded by saying “we were not successful on this occasion” and then approved the refund, which they returned – through the signature – to Andrea.
Jennifer of Irvine, Calif., wrote in when her American Airlines-operated, British Airways-issued flight between Boston and New York was canceled, forcing her to take a $219 train to catch her connecting flight to Paris. At one point, American told her to go to British Airways; at another exchange, British Airways said to go to American.
Spokespeople for British Airways and American showed me that the issuer was at fault in such a case and noted that Jennifer won a refund of $18, the price her formula implemented for this leg of the four-leg itinerary, which was $1,159. But she hadn’t. She even saw it, and when she did, she wasn’t satisfied with the amount of cash that on a smart day could take you from Boston to New York on a bus that stops in Hartford. (An American Airlines spokeswoman noted that more than part of the $1,159 for taxes, which are nonrefundable. )
Alex from Los Angeles wrote about what time he planned to fly from Nairobi, Kenya, to Boston, with a layover of just 18 hours in London, where he scheduled business meetings. At Airobi, Alex arrived at the airport to discover that Kenya Airways had no record of his booking, which had been made through Delta using the Chase Travel platform. Oh, oh, the middlemen. But those corporations responded admirably to this mistake, hiring him at another address that brought him to Boston only an hour late. But he continually called for “compensatory ‘goodwill’ issues for missing meetings. “
A spokeswoman from Chase said the flight was booked correctly on their end, but is still considering his request for compensation. (Neither of the two airlines responded to me.)
It would be fine if they refused. Planning so much for even medium sized things on today’s airlines is crazy.
You want to leave 24 hours for everything vital and set aside 48 for an exclusive occasion like a big wedding, the departure of a cruise ship or the start of the Super Bowl. In the U. S. alone, 88,419 flights were canceled in the first 3 quarters of 2023. And no airline will reimburse you for football tickets you couldn’t use or the emotional damage caused by your sister’s wedding, even if the message you’re sending is one of outrage.
If you secretly believe that airlines don’t care about converting or canceling your booking, you’re wrong: it’s no secret. Qantas caused a stir in October when, in a case brought in an Australian federal court, the company argued that a booking did not stop “a specific flight. “
“Rather,” the filing states, “the ‘service’ presented through Qantas is a set of contractual rights, which are consistent with Qantas’ promise to make every effort to get consumers to where they need to be in time. “
When I fall behind on the Tripped Up inbox and respond to someone who wrote in a month or two earlier, they often no longer need my help, having solved the problem by pushing to speak to supervisors or simply waiting for the creaky system to work.
It turns out that your most productive method of good luck is to speak through polite and concise email inquiries rather than phone calls, online chats, or internet forms. Customer service email addresses are harder to find, but this means they possibly get faster attention or better service. In addition, they provide a transparent written record that you can play back two weeks later if you don’t listen to it.
And if not, aim higher. When Amy from St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote to me asking for help with a $1,172 loan from United Airlines that was highly unlikely to use, and I advised him to use elliott. org/company-touchs, a site run by Elliott Advocacy, a nonprofit that does Tripped Up work and provides tactile feedback for providers. He told me he wrote to a United visitor service representative and got a reaction the same day with a solution. “Magic!” she says.
If emails sent directly to your service provider fail, what boxes are court cases for your credit card issuer, the Better Business Bureau, your state’s attorney general (or insurance branch for insurance-related cases), and the federal Department of Transportation (for flights).
Passengers write to me indignantly, complaining that an airline has cancelled their entire itinerary just because they missed a leg. However, it’s a widespread and well-documented rule. I totally agree, but there’s still nothing I can do to tell him to (please) write to his member of Congress.
People also refuse to buy travel insurance because they think that if they get sick, they can simply present a medical certificate and the airline, cruise line, or hotel will refund their money. But we’re not in elementary school, and while corporations rarely make exceptions, we can’t count on them. Tong, from Sevastopol, California, wrote to me that when his wife, Elizabeth, fell ill with Covid-19 while on holiday in Italy in October, easyJet did not reimburse them for the $390 for an unused Naples. At the height of the pandemic, it may have just worked. It’s over.
In the end, maybe he just made a mistake. When a retired teacher tried to check in for a return trip to London to return home to Austin, Texas, the airline told him he hadn’t made the one-way leg to London. He was at the limit of his wits trying to convince the airline that he had indeed flown; They had even checked his bag on the first flight and had the receipt.
But it turns out he had somehow booked two round-trip flights with similar itineraries, used one for the outbound flight, and then tried to use the other for his return flight, which the airline had rightfully canceled. So he did have a valid ticket to get home — just two days later on a different flight. In theory, a top-notch customer service agent might have figured this out, but in this case the second reservation was booked via code-share on a partner airline. Middlemen!
Travelers write to me with court cases that smack of self-centeredness at best and privilege at worst. A memorable note came from a couple who were in Marrakesh, Morocco, during the September earthquake that killed about 2,900 people. They had booked a tour package through a broker and were disappointed that the local tour guides had not done more to restructure their itinerary accordingly. Someone else was outraged that they may not get a refund for their Maui vacation rental after the August fires. Did they think that the owner – the one who actually had his money, who had long since disappeared from Vrbo – could be in a much worse situation than them? In these cases, a decision is made through the fine print, and the only way to avoid it is by purchasing travel insurance.
So, a definitive e when making plans for 2024: Holidays are cars, mass-produced in factories with some form of quality control and that can be returned for a refund or repositioning if they arrive in not-so-perfect condition. Vacations are complex and emotional adventures that take place in the real world, with its unpredictable weather, chaotic geopolitics, and cultural complexities.
Anyone who is looking for a relaxing and seamless experience on a river cruise, backpacking trip, or destination wedding and simply book their couch for a day of naps and streaming services. Just be sure to book directly with your family.
If you’d like a recommendation on an optimal plan gone wrong, please email TrippedUp@nytimes. com.
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Seth Kugel is a columnist for “Tripped Up,” an recommendations column that helps readers navigate the confusing world of travel. Learn more about Seth Kugel
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