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Catch up on the latest stories from the Elliott Report

Americans are tearing down surveillance cameras. Then they're lining up for one at the airport.
Americans spent the summer packing city council meetings and cutting down license plate cameras, and last week the company behind them rewrote its privacy rules. A lot of those same people drove to the airport, walked up to a checkpoint and let a machine photograph their face.

Can you turn tourists into conservationists? How one tour operator is trying to close the “say-do” gap
RealNZ raised $270,000 for predator control and replaced invasive pines with about 30,000 native trees across the lake from Queenstown. Its chief executive says the hard part is getting visitors to care once they start comparing prices.

The Bruno Mars ticket glitch that only affected fans with disabilities
A Chicago reader filtered Ticketmaster for ADA seating and watched every seat he selected come back unavailable. The next day the same seats were available through resellers, at a markup.

Avis charged her for returning a car early. Then things got complicated
A medic working in the North Sea cut a rental in Spain short after a family emergency, and the bill nearly doubled. Avis called the extra charge an error, refunded most of it and kept about $130.

How to get a refund when your luxury hotel stay goes to the dogs
A Westin resort on Hilton Head Island caps pets at 40 pounds, two to a room, and then let shepherds and pointers ride the elevators. A Lifetime Titanium member wrote to the general manager and got silence.

Travel is lonelier than ever. Here’s why, and what to do about it.
Kiosks, QR codes and noise-canceling headphones removed nearly every point of human contact from a trip. Group travel is down 9 percent since 2020, and the average trip now carries fewer than two people.

How do you prove your flight was delayed?

On Backchannel, an American Airlines flight to Chicago diverted to Milwaukee, and the passengers spent the night there. One of our PRO members took the train home the next morning, a cost his credit card insurance covers, but the insurer wants the airline to confirm the overnight delay first. American's records put the delay at 276 minutes, and two rounds with customer service haven't moved it, even after he sent a photo of the departure board showing otherwise. Can anyone help him get the record corrected?

The comments on my commentary about the price on your screen being fiction turned into an argument about who should be writing the rule. Tim says the FTC shouldn’t be writing it at all, that lawmaking belongs to Congress, and he walks through what a posted after-tax price would do to a store in a state that drops the sales tax on kids’ clothes every August. He does want the all-in number on the hotel room, the rental car and the plane ticket, upcharges included. Gerri Hether doesn’t expect any consumer protection to survive the current administration, and lostinlodos counters that the problem is older than this president and has done fine under both parties. AJPeabody had the last word, imagining a day when the price is the price, “and all illness will be cured, and politicians will speak the truth, and pigs will fly.” Who should be fixing this?