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Fiascos and Fixes
Here’s what happens when things go wrong for travelers on the road, in the air, at hotels, and in vacation rentals.
The Travel Troubles category at Consumer Rescue is a collection of real-life stories about travelers who’ve encountered unexpected issues during their adventures. Each tale is dramatic but is a cautionary example, offering valuable lessons and practical advice.
The Travel Troubles section is meant to educate and empower travelers, helping them avoid similar issues and know what to do when things go wrong.
Travelers who encounter a problem they can’t resolve on their own should ask for help from our advocacy team. Our direct mediation service is fast, friendly, and always free!
A Delta Air Lines passenger believed she could fly to China with an expired passport, but was denied boarding. She says Delta made a mistake rejecting her documents and should have allowed her to take the flight to China.
Now she’s hoping for a refund and additional compensation for her troubles.
What’s going on here?
Mary Bradley says she was billed hundreds of dollars extra for a United Airlines Travel Bundle on a self-booked ticket. She doesn’t know what these fees are, but she wants a refund. Can our advocacy team help?
Airbnb guests Elizabeth Knox and her husband recently discovered bed bugs aren’t the only pests making accommodations uninhabitable in Paris. Soon after arriving at their cute rental in the City of Lights, they found another family already enjoying the apartment.
United Airlines repeatedly changed Joseph Baloun’s flight to Hawaii so significantly that it bore little resemblance to his original schedule. After he returned home, he wasn’t sure what he was owed for the extended flight delay so he made a wild guess. A really wild guess. He calculated the airline owed him $10,000 for the unpleasant 16-hour delay.
But does United Airlines owe him anything at all?
Could you be accused of causing costly damage to your next rental car even if you didn’t do it? Several hours after returning his Budget rental car Derek Melber found out the answer to that question. That’s when an employee emailed him with the surprising news that the driver’s side window of the vehicle was shattered.
Despite Melber’s best efforts to convince Budget that he didn’t damage the rental car, the company charged him for repairing it.
Melber says it wasn’t him who shattered that window, but he thinks he knows who did. He’s hoping Consumer Rescue can prove the rental agency has wrongly accused him. And of course, he wants Budget to refund the nearly $500 repair charge it billed to his credit card.
But without any proof of what the rental car looked like when Melber returned it, that might be impossible.
Or maybe not. Let’s break this case down.
Elaine Miller’s disgusting train ride from Illinois to California should have qualified her for a full Amtrak refund. But it didn’t. With an overflowing filthy toilet inside her accessible bedroom just feet from her pillow, how did Amtrak justify its refusal?
If you have an elderly grandmother or mother, you’ll likely share my outrage at Amtrak’s treatment of Miller. Her terrible two-day experience rides the fine line between lousy customer service and what I would consider elder abuse.
During a family trip, Anna Eardley’s son got sick in their hotel room. Really sick – all over the room. After spending the rest of the night cleaning up the mess, she left a hefty tip and drove home at dawn. So why did she later receive an angry call from the manager telling her that she must pay for the extensive damage to the room — including all new carpet?
Yevgeniy and Artyom Yevtushenko flew LOT Airlines from Toronto to Astana, Kazakhstan, via Warsaw, Poland, last June without a hitch. But it was a different story when they tried to check in for their flight back to Canada in August. That’s when a stern LOT Airlines agent reviewed their passports and quickly denied boarding to the father and son.
Confused by the employee’s announcement, Yevtushenko assumed there was some mistake that the airline could easily correct. That is until a supervisor appeared who promptly ended that assumption. He confirmed that LOT Airlines was required to deny boarding to the pair because they were missing Canadian visas.
But the agents had some good news for the rejected passengers. Since their ultimate destination was Grand Rapids, Michigan, LOT could reroute the pair and avoid Canada altogether. However, there was bad news as well: the new itinerary would cost an additional $2,249.
Given no other choice, a frustrated Yevtushenko paid the fee, and he and his son flew home to Michigan.
Now, Yevtushenko is asking Consumer Rescue for help getting the money back. He hopes we can convince LOT Airlines that its employees mistakenly denied boarding to him and Artyom. They didn’t need Canadian visas, and he can prove it – if only someone would listen and look at the facts.
If you’re familiar with our team, then you know he came to the right place to find someone willing to listen.
If you get sick on a bus tour, should the operator give you a refund — even if you completed the entire trip? Gay Hackney believes so.
She says that two fellow travelers aboard her bus appeared ill during a 13-day tour through Spain and Portugal. The father and son’s constant coughing irritated her, but the last straw came at the end of the trip when she woke up sick herself.
Now that she’s home, she wants to know if Trafalgar owes her a refund for this unpleasant bus tour.
Dollar Car Rental customer Kuno Zurkinden recently discovered how a surprisingly common mistake can end in a giant financial headache. At the end of an adventurous road trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles, he made a navigational error: He returned the rental car to the wrong airport.
As a result of that miscalculation, Dollar voided the original contract Zurkinden had through a third-party provider. On the spot, the rental car company created a new contract with new charges – astronomically high charges.
Now, Zurkinden is asking Consumer Rescue for assistance. He wants to know if his “little” geographic mistake really allows the car rental company to charge him $2,081 extra.
Something tells me he isn’t going to like the answer.
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