Carol Bartell's flight to Mexico got canceled, and Viva Aerobus refused to put her $844 back on her credit card. It insisted on wiring the money instead. That's when a wrong SWIFT code sent her refund to a bank she's never used.
My wife and I have started to use Premium Coach (or whatever your favorite airline calls it) for our flights. It's generally about $50-$200 more than regular coach (depending on the flight) and, we feel, gives you some advantages; (a) about 4"-6" more leg room; (b) it's just behind business/first class so getting off the plane doesn't require a 20 minute wait from the back of the bus; (c) boarding is usually right after first class so no fighting for overhead space, and; (d) depending on the flight/airline the food selection is generally better than coach.
I'd be interested in the views of other travelers.
One of our readers panic-bought a duplicate airline ticket after falling for a fake call center scam. When she asked Capital One to reverse the $2,301 charge, it sided with the airline instead.
Kim Calla has a superpower. According to her credit card issuer, she can sit in two airline seats at the same time.
I'm working on a story about the fees travelers pay to avoid discomfort, and whether those fees are worth it. Airlines and hotels have built a business around anxiety: pay now to avoid the middle seat, pay to sit with your family, pay to skip the room by the elevator or the ice machine. I want to look at what happens when travelers decline these upsells and take their chances instead.
I'd love to hear from anyone who simply stopped paying to avoid discomfort. Did you skip the seat assignment and still end up where you wanted? Did you book the basic fare and get moved anyway, for better or worse? What did you do with the money you saved?
Scandinavia, Alaska and Iceland are packed and overpriced this summer. Phoenix and Madrid are empty and cheap.
I'm researching a story about how travelers are rethinking their plans as extreme heat, wildfire smoke and related weather events disrupt destinations that were once considered reliable. I want to look at how people decide whether to cancel, postpone or push ahead, and what they do to protect themselves when they go anyway.
I'd love to hear from anyone who faced this call. Did you cancel a trip because of a heat wave, wildfire smoke or a weather warning, and how did you make that decision? If you decided to go, what did you do to prepare, and did your insurance cover any of it? What do you wish you'd known before you left?
Has anyone had a refund problem with this company?
Has anyone taken a hot air balloon ride over the Serengeti recently?
Three of the big four carriers already have. Does their reasoning hold up?
Three airlines already decided for you.
A man bought his robot a ticket to Dallas on Southwest. The robot walked through the terminal, passengers took pictures, and within days Southwest had rewritten its rules to keep human-like and animal-like machines off its planes "regardless of size or purpose."
Delta followed on June 18. United on July 23. American Airlines hasn't said anything yet, though I expect it will.
All three point to lithium batteries, and that argument has merit. A full-size humanoid carries far more power than a laptop. The FAA already caps cabin batteries at 100 watt-hours without carrier approval and 160 with it, and any airline is free to enforce those numbers hard.
Here's what bothers me. The policies don't stop at watt-hours. Delta's covers anything built to imitate a human or animal in appearance, size, movement or behavior. United's internal guidance reportedly reaches machines that mimic how a person thinks and speaks. And every one of these carriers has declared in advance that such devices can't qualify as assistive equipment, which is a category federal law defines by what a device does for a passenger with a disability. Paro, the seal-shaped robot used in dementia and palliative care, is sold as a medical device.
Nobody has defined a toy, either. So a gate agent decides in real time whether your child's robot dog stays or goes while 40 people wait behind you.
Aviation has done the fast ban before. Laptops from certain airports, lighters, e-readers below 10,000 feet, shoes at the checkpoint. All of them came back.
I've laid out the rules, the precedents, the survey numbers and where I come down on it.
There's a poll at the end of the piece, and the comments are open. Tell me whether you'd take the seat next to a robot or whether you want that seat to stay human. I read every response, and the ones that change my mind are the ones I quote later.
The Consumer Federation of America just asked the FTC and state attorneys general to investigate Speechify, one of the bigger AI voice-cloning platforms. The complaint says the company makes it easy to clone someone's voice from a few seconds of audio while doing almost nothing to confirm the person actually agreed to it.
It matters because impersonation scams are exploding. The FTC says consumers lost $3.5 billion to imposter scams in 2025, close to three times what they lost in 2020, and older Americans are getting hit the hardest.
I want to hear from you. Has someone cloned your voice, or used a fake version of it to try to fool your family, your bank, or your coworkers? Maybe you got the call that sounded exactly like your kid or your mother, and something felt off.
Tell me what happened, how you caught it, and whether anyone, the platform, the FTC, or your state AG, did a thing about it. I'm collecting these for a future story, and Backchannel is the first place I'm asking.
Travel sites are asking their readers to fight a bill that could make prices more affordable. But why?
Travel sites spent this summer asking readers to write to Congress about credit card swipe fees. Not to lower them, but to keep the current Visa-Mastercard duopoly in place.
The petitions come with a prewritten letter and a warning that a bill before Congress will wipe out your points. Running alongside them are two lobbying campaigns, one from the banks' trade group and one funded by Airlines for America. The travel sites supply the readers.
Here's what those newsletters leave out: Many card-review sites earn a commission every time someone is approved for a card through their links, and that money traces back to the same fees the bill targets.
I went through the numbers both sides are quoting, including the $80 billion rewards figure that keeps turning up, and looked at where it started.
There is another Back Channel app in the Apple Store that is not from Chris Elliott.
Wanna know a secret about consumer journalism? Most of it starts behind the scenes.
It's in comments no editor will run, in tips that don't fit a column, in "call me, don't email me" conversations. ("Chris, you wouldn't BELIEVE what just happened to me!")
In other words, it happens in the Backchannel. And that, my friends, is where you are right now.
Here's what you'll find.
General — The main stage. Story teasers, hot takes, and the occasional argument about whether a cruise passenger deserves a lifetime ban for bad table manners.
Newsletters — Every Elliott Confidential post, landing here so you can comment without digging through your inbox.
Off the Record — Where we say the things that don't make it into print, because either the lawyers or my own better judgment said no.
On The Road — Dispatches from wherever you are this week. I travel 330-plus days a year, so this fills up fast. I'd love to get your trip reports, too!
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Get Help — Where a complaint turns into a fix. Sometimes the company wins. I'll tell you that too.
Insiders Only — The stuff I'm not ready to publish anywhere else yet.
What you can expect from the moderators—and me:
• We focus on solutions, not problems.
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If you've ever wanted to get behind the scenes at a consumer advocacy organization, or you need someone in your corner when a company stonewalls you, this is the place. Pull up a chair.
After an earthquake leveled a third of Christchurch's buildings, the city had to decide how to rebuild. Here’s what it decided to do.
There's a machine named Oscar in the back of house at the Christchurch convention center in New Zealand. He's a gray industrial box about the size of a commercial dryer, and over a 30-hour cycle he dries hundreds of pounds of food scraps into a fertilizer that staff say looks like coffee grounds.
Oscar is one reason Te Pae Christchurch holds a Toitū carbon zero certification. The building also tore up the single-use plastic carpet routine that trade shows throw in a landfill after 48 hours and installed permanent carpeting across 35,000 square feet. It buys milk in kegs, which keeps about 2,500 bottles out of the trash every year.
None of this happened out of virtue. Christchurch lost roughly a third of its buildings in the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes, and the rebuild gave it a rare chance to start over. What it built is a compact center designed for walking and biking, a library that runs on smart energy design, and a former residential red zone turning into wetlands and native forest.
Here's the part I expect an argument about. A visitor to Christchurch doesn't have to think about any of this. The infrastructure handles it. One expert I talked to called that the point. I'm not so sure. A traveler who never notices never changes a booking, and a city collecting credit for work nobody sees starts to look like marketing.
Read the commentary, then tell me where you land in the comments. Would a city's environmental record ever move your booking, or has it never once entered the decision?
Debbie McNulty listed her vacation home on Furnished Finder for three years. Not one booking came through in all that time. She paid the annual fee anyway.
This year she went back to short-term rentals and didn't need the listing. Furnished Finder sent a single reminder email the month before her membership renewed. She was coming off a two-week trip, her inbox was buried, and she missed it. Then a $179 charge landed on her card.
She contacted the company that same day, canceled, and asked for her money back. A representative sent her the standard line about nonrefundable fees.
This is where readers tend to split. One camp says she signed the agreement, she blew the deadline, and the company owes her nothing. The other says charging a customer for a full year of service she told you within hours she wouldn't use is a choice the company made, not a legal requirement.
I have an opinion. I also have the answer she eventually got, plus a look at what automatic renewal law does and doesn't cover now that the click-to-cancel rule has been thrown out.
Read the case, then tell me in the comments where you land. Is one reminder email enough notice before an annual charge?
Georgina Montalvan did what I tell everyone to do. She photographed her Turo rental in Los Angeles before she drove it, every panel and both bumpers, and she uploaded the images through the app.
So when the owner reported a scratched fender the day after she returned the car, she had proof. Turo reviewed her photos, agreed the damage predated her trip, and told her the claim was closed as normal wear and tear.
A week later Turo reopened it and charged her card $660. She never received an itemized bill. Then a second invoice landed for $1,678, this time for damage a repair shop found after taking the bumper apart. Turo sent her a photo of a hole she says she has never seen.
Here's where readers tend to split. Supplemental claims are a real practice in the collision repair business, and shops do find damage that photos miss. Plenty of renters would call that a legitimate bill. Others would say a platform that reviews your evidence and rules in your favor has closed the matter, and reversing itself a week later is indefensible no matter what a shop found later.
I have a view. I want to hear yours first.
Read her case, then leave a comment. Should a platform be allowed to reopen a claim it already closed? And do you photograph your rentals at pickup? Tell me whether that record has ever saved you, or been ignored.
Alison Palkhivala did what the contract asked her to do. She read the listing, clicked book, and paid for two nights in a Munich apartment during Oktoberfest.
What she didn't read closely was the arrival window: 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. Her flight from North America didn't land until 10.
She caught it three days out and messaged the host. Could someone leave a key in a lockbox? Could she come by later that afternoon? Could she skip the first night entirely and pick up the key the next morning at 7, inside the window, and pay for a night she'd never use?
The host canceled the booking and kept about $1,000.
Here's the part that will divide you. Booking.com's first answer was that the policy was printed on the page and she agreed to it. Which is true. She did. There's a case to be made that a traveler who books an international trip and doesn't check the arrival time has only herself to blame, and I've heard that argument from readers before.
There's also the question of what kind of business sets a window that a predictable share of long-haul guests can't hit, refuses every workaround, and then keeps the full payment with no room to clean and no utilities to run.
She started reading the property's reviews after the cancellation. What she found there changed how I think about polarized ratings.
https://www.elliott.org/advocacy/is-this-the-worst-check-in-policy-in-the-history-of-travel/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=is-this-the-worst-check-in-policy-in-the-history-of-travel
So tell me where you land. Should a platform have to step in when a host's rule is technically disclosed but nearly impossible to follow? Do you check the arrival window before you book, or do you assume it works like a hotel? Leave a comment on the story and let's argue it out.
For about ten years, the smartest advice in travel has been to live like a local. Rent an apartment in a residential neighborhood. Shop the local market. Skip the hotel and the tourist traps. Blend in.
I followed that advice for years. I'm on the road 350 days a year, and I'm writing this from a rental apartment in Auckland squeezed between a car repair shop and a Chinese grocery store. So much for authenticity.
Then I started paying attention to what this trend does to the neighborhoods we say we love. A traveler I spoke with watched his street in Lisbon lose its bakery and its barbershop, both replaced by boutique rentals and brunch spots built for visitors. He watched his host get into a shouting match with a neighbor over another guest's suitcase clattering down the cobblestones. He realized he wasn't a guest anymore. He was part of an invading force.
Researchers say short-term rentals pull thousands of homes off the market and push up rents for the people who actually live there. Which means the more we chase authentic local life, the fewer locals are left to make a place worth visiting.
My conclusion cuts against a decade of travel advice, and I know not everyone will agree. Some readers will say I'm blaming tourists for a housing problem with many other causes.
So I want to hear from you. When you travel, do you book the apartment in the residential neighborhood or the hotel in the visitor district, and what drives that choice? Do short-term rentals harm the places we visit, or is that blame misplaced? Read the commentary and leave a comment. I'm reading every one.
https://www.elliott.org/on-travel/why-you-should-be-a-tourist-not-a-local-this-summer/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=why-you-should-be-a-tourist-not-a-local-this-summer
It's open for business, the airlines are selling seats—and that's the problem
Remember when a $99 fare turned into $180 by the time you reached checkout? A rule adopted in 2011 put a stop to that. It requires airlines to show you the full price of a ticket, taxes and fees included, and to make that total the most prominent number in any ad. The airlines sued to kill it and lost.
Now the Department of Transportation wants to bring the old days back. It has proposed letting airlines display a low base fare as prominently as the real total, and it's weighing a full repeal that would let carriers advertise fares that leave out taxes and fees entirely. One aviation journalist showed the DOT a $314 flight to London where the base fare was $31 and a carrier-imposed fee made up most of the rest. Picture that number in an ad.
Supporters call the current rule too prescriptive and say it may run into the First Amendment. Consumer advocates say a price you can't actually buy at is not a price. Meanwhile Europe is moving the other way, requiring airlines to show more of the true cost before booking even starts.
The comment period closes July 31, so this one is time-sensitive. Read the piece, then tell us where you land in the comments. Should the total price always be the most prominent number in a fare ad, or is that government overreach?
https://www.elliott.org/blog/airlines-want-to-hide-the-real-price-of-your-ticket-should-the-government-let-them/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=airlines-want-to-hide-the-real-price-of-your-ticket-should-the-government-let-them
A woman on a Carnival cruise was filmed scraping dry skin off her bare foot at a dining table, then using the same hand to keep eating. In a follow-up clip, she reached for a fork to scratch. The video went viral, and the reaction split fast.
Here's what got me. Cruise conduct codes spell out bans for violence, drugs, theft and fraud. A public-health risk in a shared dining room barely appears. A passenger who throws a punch can draw a lifetime ban across an entire fleet. A passenger who exposes hundreds of people in a buffet line to a fungal infection often draws a shrug and a laughing emoji.
So should cruise lines start banning passengers for bad hygiene? It sounds reasonable until you ask who gets to decide. A messy eater? A crying baby? A passenger with a visible skin condition? And once you're flagged, there's almost no appeal.
I laid out who ends up on the Do Not Sail list, what the cruise lines say, and where I think the line belongs. Read it, then tell me in the comments: should she have been banned, and who do you trust to draw that line?
https://www.elliott.org/forum/should-cruise-lines-ban-more-passengers/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=should-cruise-lines-ban-more-passengers
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