Weather excuse doesn’t add up for this Booking.com customer
When WestJet canceled Brittany Muffet’s recent flight, she found herself caught in a blame game between the airline and Booking.com. But that wasn’t the weird part.
Christopher Elliott
Travel’s dirty little secret: How your comfort is engineered for profit
If you’ve ever felt frozen on a plane, or caught a whiff of vanilla in a hotel lobby, or couldn’t quite make a Wi-Fi connection in your room, congratulations: You may be a victim of the travel industry’s latest manipulation tactics.
How to find the best packing cube and use it to outsmart an airline
One of Wes Wakefield’s favorite travel hacks is a packing cube. These small, inexpensive accessories can help you fit more clothes into your luggage than you probably thought possible.
Help! A $1,400 Frigidaire cooktop catastrophe sent me through a customer service maze
A noisy, cracked induction cooktop from Frigidaire leaves Linda Lockwood chasing repairs, dealing with missed appointments, and getting the runaround from both the manufacturer and Best Buy. After months of unanswered calls and emails, Lockwood wonders: Will anyone take responsibility for this $1,400 kitchen disaster?
American Airlines broke my wheelchair. Is $200 enough compensation?
Kao Spencer flew from Philadelphia to Portland, Maine, on American Airlines earlier this month. She checked her $7,000 custom wheelchair, trusting the carrier to handle it with care.
Air France rejected my baggage claim for the most ridiculous reason
Gerardine D’Sa checks two bags in Bangalore but only receives one in Chicago. Air France’s customer service team rejects her legitimate receipts with absurd excuses. Can D’Sa recover the full compensation she deserves under international law?
They were left behind in Antwerp. Should I fight for a $116 refund from Viator?
Somewhere in Antwerp, Belgium, Patricia Fiedler’s Viator day tour came to a screeching halt. It wasn’t when she and her sister were ten minutes late returning to their bus and got left behind. No, the tour was an “unmitigated disaster” long before then, she says.
Who’s responsible for a dishwasher disaster that almost burned down my home?
Imagine this: You buy a new dishwasher, but two days later, your kitchen fills with smoke. The stench of burnt plastic hangs thick in the air, and water pools across your floor. Turns out the heating element failed on the new dishwasher and burned a hole straight through the machine.
Want to skip the bot and talk to a human? It could cost you
The problem with artificial intelligence is simple: When travelers need it the most, it is the least helpful.
Behind the fight for sustainable tourism in Okinawa
The turquoise water lapping against Okinawa’s pebbled beach is so clear that you can see an occasional parrotfish streaking by. Just behind it, the Hoshinoya Okinawa’s low-slung modernist villas blend into a landscape of gnarled fukugi trees and hibiscus.