Welcome to Consumer Rescue
Fiascos and Fixes
Here’s what happens when things go wrong for travelers on the road, in the air, at hotels and vacation rentals. Each cautionary tale ends with solutions and ways you can avoid a similar fiasco.
If you’re a regular reader of this site, you know travelers can make all types of expensive car rental mistakes. But Rose Hidalgo’s $2,000 error was the first of its kind for our advocacy team. She recently dropped a Thrifty rental car off, as scheduled, at the Oakland International Airport location.
The problem? She returned the rental car to the wrong agency.
United Airlines just canceled Pamela Money’s return flight from a remote area of Canada, so where’s her refund?
She says an Expedia agent cheerfully informed her that United Airlines would give her a voucher instead of cash. But that doesn’t sit right with this passenger, and she’s hoping we can get her money back.
What’s really going on here?
Falling for a vacation rental scam surely is not at the top of your list of things to do this summer. It certainly wasn’t in Don Boyk’s plans. But that’s exactly what happened when a thief disguised as a Vrbo host persuaded him to send a $500 deposit via Zelle.
His cash was soon in the hands of the scammer and Vrbo informed him the listing was fraudulent.
Now Don hopes we can find a way to save him from this vacation rental scam and retrieve his money.
But if a consumer uses Zelle to send cash to a stranger, is there any way to get it back?
Warning: Buyer’s remorse is never a valid reason to report a credit card charge as fraudulent. But that’s exactly what Philip Paul did when he came down with the post-purchase blues after he bought a vacation club membership. Now he wants to know if our advocacy team can help unravel this mess.
Heather Steele just landed on the Do Not Rent list of her favorite car rental company — Hertz. She says she’s been a great customer of Hertz for many years and the banishment has her flabbergasted. But a dispute over a prepaid car rental refund sent her account to collections and earned her a spot on the blacklist.
Now Steele is asking our advocacy team to step in and clear her name. She wants to be removed from the Do Not Rent list and have Hertz return her account to good standing.
Can we do it?
It’s easy to find a shared space Airbnb rental if that’s what you’re looking for. Each one is clearly labeled and it’s difficult to book a shared space property by mistake. So that’s what makes Maxim Belyayev’s recent Airbnb experience so unusual.
He used the listing giant to book a private condo in London for his upcoming vacation. But when the Airbnb host sent the house rules, it sounded more like a youth hostel than a $3,668 luxury apartment. A follow-up message made it clear that Maxim would be sharing the common space in the Airbnb rental with strangers.
Maxim immediately canceled the unwanted shared space rental, and the Airbnb host just as quickly rejected his refund request.
Now Maxim hopes that we can get his money back. He believes this Airbnb host is a scammer. And if you’re a regular reader of my column, I suspect you’ll soon agree with him.
Despite the popular belief to the contrary, in the U.S., you are not owed a free hotel if your flight is delayed and you get stranded overnight on your journey. And that is true no matter what the reason for the delay.
But if a friendly gate agent offers a hotel reimbursement to a passenger in distress, shouldn’t the airline pay the bill?
If American Airlines delays or cancels your flight home from vacation, what does it really owe you?
That’s what Mikayla Shade wants to know after finding herself in this unfortunate situation. She says an American Airlines agent told her that when the airline cancels a flight, the passenger will receive a full refund. Mikayla used that guidance to determine her budget for a new flight home. It wasn’t until American Airlines processed her “full refund” that she discovered she’d relied on incorrect guidance from the agent.
Now Mikayla wants our team to ask American Airlines to provide what its representative promised her.
How could American Airlines consider a passenger a no show for a flight it canceled? The answer to that question is, of course, it can’t. Yet that seems to be precisely what happened to Sherri Gleason – and at the worst possible time for the grandmother-to-be.
What does United Airlines owe you after an extended flight delay? Joseph Baloun took a wild guess during his recent experience. A really wild guess. He calculated that United Airlines owed him $10,000 in future travel credit for an unpleasant 16-hour delay.
But does United Airlines owe him anything at all?
If you’ve ever wondered what you can and can’t expect in compensation after an extended flight delay, then this article is for you.