Our columnist begs you to avoid middlemen, get promises in writing and stop expecting perfection in an imperfect world.
Dear Travelers,
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 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 nearly 2,000 reader submissions (so far) in 2023, here are my top six guidelines for minimizing travel trouble in 2024. Seth, Queens, N.Y.
Avoid online travel agencies (mostly)
I get so many complaints about huge O.T.A.’s like Expedia and Booking.com that I’ll have to spin the wheel to find someone to help. OK, let’s take John of New Port Richey, Fla. Last February, he found a British Airways flight for four passengers from Tampa, Fla., to Venice, Italy, on Priceline. He tried to book twice, with different credit cards, but both times was told his purchase was unsuccessful.
Surprise! He was charged twice anyway, for a total of $15,153, and never got even one reservation code from either Priceline or the airline.
He went to Priceline, as he should have, 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 from which he had made the purchase.
Finally, Priceline said it would refund his cards, but over two billing cycles. Not willing to trust the company, he requested chargebacks from his credit card issuers. That worked for a week, but British Airways recharged him $1,894. It was only when he spotted one of those six-character locator codes on that document that he realized there had indeed been a reservation.
When I contacted Christina Bennett, a spokeswoman for Priceline, she apologized and wrote that the company was “disappointed” to hear about the customer’s experience and issued a refund. It has also identified and corrected a technical issue that “improperly rejected the reservation but processed the charge.”
All it took was 10 months!
“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.
Beware other intermediaries, too
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.)
The product director of Skywithclass, Anna Maxim, wrote in an email that the company was “terribly sorry” for the lack of reimbursement, but noted Aer Lingus had made it very difficult, claiming it is “not the most responsive airline.” I agree — they have ignored me in the past, too. But in this situation, they did respond, saying “we fell short on this occasion,” and then approved the refund, which they sent — through the agency — back 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.
Spokeswomen for both British Airways and American confirmed to me that the issuer is responsible in such a case, and noted that Jennifer had received an $18 refund, the value their system applied to that leg of the four-leg, $1,159 itinerary. But she hadn’t even noticed — and when she saw it, was unsatisfied with the amount, which on a good day might get you from Boston to New York on a bus that stops in Hartford. (A spokeswoman for American Airlines noted that more than half the $1,159 was for taxes, which are not refundable.)
Give yourself a time cushion
Alex of Los Angeles wrote about the time he was to fly from Nairobi, Kenya, to Boston, with a nearly 18-hour layover in London, during which he scheduled business meetings. In Nairobi, Alex arrived at the airport only to find Kenya Airways had no record of his reservation, which was booked through Delta using the Chase Travel platform. Uh-oh, middlemen. But those companies reacted admirably to the error, booking him on a different route that got him to Boston only about an hour late. But he has repeatedly requested “compensatory ‘good will’ points for missing the 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 really need to leave a 24-hour cushion for anything important, and make it 48 for a once-in-a-lifetime event like a big wedding or cruise departure or Super Bowl kickoff. In the United States alone, 88,419 flights were canceled in the first three quarters of 2023. And no airline will reimburse you for football tickets you couldn’t use or the emotional damage from missing your sister’s wedding, no matter how outraged a message you send to them.
If you suspect airlines don’t feel bad about changing or canceling your reservation, you’re wrong: It’s no secret. Qantas caused a stir in October when, in a filing in Australian federal court, it argued a reservation is not for “a particular 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.”
Write an email
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.
Their best method for success, it seems, is to communicate via polite, concise email queries rather than phone calls or online chat or web forms. Those customer service email addresses are sometimes harder to find, but that means they may receive faster attention or better service. Plus, they make for a clean, written record you can forward two weeks later if you don’t hear back.
And if you don’t, aim higher. When Amy from St. Paul, Minn., wrote to me asking for help with a $1,172 credit from United Airlines that was proving impossible to use, I suggested she use elliott.org/company-contacts, a site run by Elliott Advocacy, a nonprofit that does Tripped Up-like work and provides contact information for travel providers. She told me she wrote to a customer care executive at United and heard back the same day with a solution. “Magic!” she said.
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).
Be sure you are right
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 often decline to get travel insurance because they think that if they get sick they can just submit a doctor’s note and the airline or cruise line or hotel will refund them. But this is not grade school, and although companies do sometimes make exceptions, you can’t count on it. Tong of Sebastopol, Calif., wrote to me that when his wife, Elizabeth, fell ill with Covid-19 during a trip to Italy in October, easyJet would not refund them $390 for an unused Naples to Palermo flight. At peak pandemic, that might have worked. Not anymore.
Finally, maybe you just screwed up. When a retired professor tried to check in for a return trip in London back to his home to Austin, Texas, the airline told him he hadn’t flown the outbound portion to London. He was at wits’ end trying to convince the airline he had indeed flown — they had even checked his bag 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!
Pack patience
Travelers often write to me with complaints that smack of self-centeredness at best, privilege at worst. One memorable note came from a couple who was in Marrakech, Morocco, during the September earthquake that killed nearly 2,900. They had booked a tour package through a middleman and were disappointed that the local tour guides didn’t do more to restructure their itinerary accordingly. Someone else was outraged they could not get a refund from their vacation rental in Maui after the fires in August. Did they consider that the homeowner — the one who really had their money, which was long gone from Vrbo — could be in far worse shape than they were? These cases are decided by the small print, and the only way to avoid that is to purchase travel insurance.
So a final note as you plan for 2024: Vacations are not automobiles, mass-produced in factories with some form of quality control, and returnable for a refund or replacement if they arrive in less than perfect condition. Vacations are complex, emotional adventures that take place in the real world, with its unpredictable weather, chaotic geopolitics and cultural complexities.
Anyone looking for a perfect, stress-free experience should skip the river cruise or backpacking trip or destination wedding and simply book your couch for a day of naps and streaming services. Just be sure to reserve directly with your family.
If you need advice about a best-laid travel plan that went awry, send an email to TrippedUp@nytimes.com.
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