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Our columnist begs you to avoid middlemen, get promises in writing and stop expecting perfection in an imperfect world.
By Seth Kugel
Seth here — writing to you to gripe this time, rather than the other way around. The Tripped Up column helps travelers with problems they encounter (and sometimes even wrangles refunds), but no matter how much great advice I give, readers keep making the same mistakes! It’s almost as if you prioritize your families, jobs and health over memorizing my suggestions.
So, instead of using my last column of the year to get an express commuter out of trouble, I made the decision to repeat the very important classes I learned and help some 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 cashed out twice, totaling $15,153, and never won a single booking code from Priceline or the airline.
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 Priceline spokesperson Christina Bennett, she apologized and wrote that the company was “disappointed” to hear the customer experience and considered a refund. A technical factor that “incorrectly rejects the booking but processes the charge” is also known and constant.
10 months passed!
“Obviously, this is not the pleasure we need for those who use our platform,” he continued.
But, as my inbox shows, it’s hard to deal with visitor service from a single company, and it’s even harder to interact with multiple companies. My advice: call the big intermediaries (Expedia and Booking. com, but also Hotels. com). , TripAdvisor. . . ) to find your smart offer. But unless you have a great explanation for why you would do it any other way (big savings on packages, one-click e-bookings of complex itineraries), your wife is a CEO. — Take a few extra minutes to open a new tab and make an e-book directly with the existing service provider.
Large O.T.A.s are not the only middlemen to avoid, when you can. Generally speaking, the fewer companies involved in your travel planning, the better off you’ll be when something goes awry. Those include smaller agencies like consolidators (who often sell airfares not openly available on the internet), vacation rental agencies like Vrbo and Airbnb, credit card platforms like Chase Travel and even code share flights when you book with one airline and fly on 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 lead product manager, Anna Maxim, wrote in an email that the company “very sorry” for the lack of refunds, but noted that Aer Lingus had made it very difficult, saying it is “not the most responsive airline”. I’ve also been ignored in the past. But in this situation, they responded by saying “we didn’t succeed this time” and then approved the refund, which they sent back, through the company, to Andrea.
Jennifer of Irvine, Calif. , wrote when her flight operated through American Airlines and issued through British Airways between Boston and New York was canceled, forcing her to make a $219 exercise to catch her connecting flight to Paris. At one point, American told him to move to British Airways; in some other exchange, British Airways said it was passing 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.)
I’d be just fine if they declined. Scheduling anything of even middling importance so tightly in today’s air travel environment is folly.
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. “
“To the contrary,” the filing said, “the ‘service’ that Qantas relevantly offers is a bundle of contractual rights, which are consistent with Qantas’ promise to do its best to get consumers where they want to be on time.”
When I fall behind in the Tripped Up inbox and reply to someone who wrote to me a month or two earlier, they no longer want my help, having solved the challenge by pushing to reach supervisors or just waiting for the squeaky formula to work.
It turns out that your most productive method for good luck is to speak through concise and polite email inquiries rather than phone calls, online chats, or internet forms. Customer service email addresses are harder to find, but that means they can get faster attention. or increased service. In addition, they are a transparent written record that you can advance two weeks later if you don’t have a response.
And if not, aim higher. When Amy from St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote to me asking for help with a $1,172 United Airlines credit 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 handles paints and provides tactile data to vendors. She told me that she had written to a United visitor services manager and got a reaction the same day with a solution. “Magic!” She.
If emails sent directly to your service provider fail, what could work are complaints to your credit card issuer, the Better Business Bureau, your state’s attorney general (or department of insurance for insurance-related cases) and the federal Transportation Department (for flights).
Passengers often write to me outraged, with complaints that an airline canceled their entire itinerary just because they missed one leg. Yet, that’s a widespread, well-documented rule. No fair? I absolutely agree, but can do nothing except tell you to (please) write to your 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, perhaps he simply made a mistake. When a retired teacher tried to register for a return trip to London to return to his home in Austin, Texas, the airline told him he had not made the outbound leg to London. He was at his wit’s end trying to convince the airline that he had indeed flown; They had even searched his suitcase on the first flight and he 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 Marrakech, Morocco, during the September earthquake that killed an estimated 2,900 people. They had booked a tour package through an intermediary and were disappointed that the local tour guides hadn’t done more to restructure their itinerary accordingly. Someone else was outraged that they may not get reimbursed for Maui vacation rental after the August fires. Did they think that the owner – the one who actually had their money, who had long since disappeared from Vrbo – could be in a much worse situation than them?In these cases, the 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: the holidays are cars, mass-produced in factories with some kind of quality control and which 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 your couch for a day of naps and electronic streaming services. Just be sure to book directly with your family.
If you’d like a recommendation on an optimal plan gone wrong, 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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