Welcome to Consumer Rescue
Fiascos and Fixes
Michelle Couch-Friedman is an author and consumer advocate. She is the founder of Consumer Rescue. Michelle has successfully mediated thousands of problems for troubled travelers and other consumers during her career as an advocate.
Hertz will never ask customers to pay for their car rental with a gift card… but a scammer will. Unawareness of this basic fact led one couple to lose $800 to a devious international scheme.Â
Is there any way to get that money back?
A perpetually leaking ceiling in an Airbnb rental seems like a problem the host should fix immediately. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the experience of one young mom who paid $5,400 for the privilege of living in a soggy apartment. Â
Can Consumer Rescue help?
Barbara Goldfuss saved for two years to buy the $1,900 La-Z-Boy recliner she finally ordered last year. After relaxing in the comfy model in the local showroom, she eagerly awaited her custom-made chair. But months later, when the much-anticipated La-Z-Boy recliner arrived, Goldfuss immediately detected a terrible problem.Â
What if you used an online booking agent to reserve a hotel, but when you arrived at the property, you discovered it was being used as a homeless shelter? It happened to this solo female traveler, and she wants you … Read More
Princess Cruises recently accidentally published a fare for a 21-day Mediterranean sailing that was too good to be true. Literally. The mistakenly displayed price – caused by human error – rang in at just a fraction of the cruise’s actual cost.
That fat-finger rate was only briefly available on the Princess website, but word spread quickly across the Internet. That alert caused an immediate flutter of unusually high booking activity, and the cruise line noticed. For all of the elated would-be cruise passengers who snagged this dream deal, bad news was on the horizon.
After an enjoyable mid-winter getaway to Clearwater, Florida, Cynthia Sutherlin intended to return her Avis car rental and fly home. But the night before she was set to leave, a gang of thieves threw a wrench in that plan. Those bad guys brazenly stole her rental car from the valet at the luxury resort where she was staying. Will she be on the hook for the $3,600 loss-of-use fee?
Your cruise agent can’t legally require you to buy the travel insurance product he or she is selling. So why does 82-year-old Marla Caplan say that is precisely what a consultant did after booking her latest cruise?Â
That’s the question of the day.
If an Airbnb host asks you not to come through the front door of the vacation rental, you should ask some questions before you show up. This group of friends wishes they had done just that.
Hundreds of Carnival Cruise Line passengers were disappointed recently when their ship completely missed Greenland, the main attraction. But that disappointment turned to rage when a quasi-travel agent refused to refund their canceled shore excursions to the island.
Can she really do that?
Verizon customers are being targeted by phone scammers pretending to be helpful agents of the wireless titan. The predators deliver troubling news to their unaware victims and then provide urgent solutions to “fix” the problem.
I know this firsthand because one of these crooks called my Verizon number and tried his scheme on me. As you can imagine, things didn’t go quite as this phone scammer had planned.
Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Info
© 2025 Consumer Rescue / Michelle Couch-Friedman
