Lil had been struggling for a month, unable to solve her consumer problem — until she contacted our team for assistance.

“Honestly, you're the only ones who helped me,” she says. “I wish I had contacted you sooner. Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. You made me so happy.”

The A-Team is delighted to hear success stories like Lil’s. But we can’t do it alone. We're 21% of the way toward our fall fundraising goal. We urgently need to raise $20,000 to cover our expenses. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to today.

Catch up on the latest stories from the Elliott Report

Hells bells! How did these AC/DC tickets go from front stage to the worst seats in the house?
Jerry Auer paid $506 for AC/DC tickets at Notre Dame Stadium after StubHub’s seating chart showed Section 121 beside the stage, and the official venue map put those seats behind it. StubHub fixed the flipped map the day after he reported it, then used the corrected version to tell him he had bought precisely what he ordered.

Triple-stacking and high-low tracking: New strategies for preventing luggage loss
Virgin Australia scanned my son’s purple Peak Design rollaboard in Queenstown and again in Melbourne, then lost track of it for almost 48 hours. Travel experts now recommend stacking trackers on separate networks, adding a battery-free QR tag and photographing the 10-digit barcode on your bag tag at check-in.

Resort fees have been “dead” for a year. Did anyone notice?
The FTC’s fee rule has required hotels and booking sites to put the full price in the first number an American traveler sees, with taxes and optional add-ons the only things allowed to appear later. It stops at the border, so a room booked on a non-U.S. site sits outside the whole system.

Rising hotel taxes need better disclosure. Here’s the fix.
Topeka’s transient guest tax rises to 8.5% on Jan. 1 to help fund tourism marketing, a theater and a planned downtown ice rink, and the deputy mayor has noted that residents don’t pay it unless they stay in a hotel. The hotel industry generated $85.1 billion in taxes last year, and your folio still reports the whole stack on a single line marked “taxes.”

Your hotel room isn’t guaranteed. Here’s the fine print they’re hoping you won’t read.
Omer Malik reserved a king room on a low floor at a German chain hotel because he thinks about exits and stairwells for a living, and the front desk told him at midnight that a guaranteed room type belongs to elite members. Hotels have stretched run-of-house assignment, once a discount option, across full-price bookings, and a confirmation now commits the property to little more than a bed configuration.

Help! My $1,866 Lenovo Yoga is an expensive paperweight
Tracey Croisier’s $1,866 Lenovo Yoga 9 started dropping from 100 percent to 30 percent battery in two hours less than a year after she bought it, and an in-home technician replaced the battery and the motherboard without fixing it. Six repair tickets later the laptop was peaking at 134 degrees, and a Lenovo representative suggested she turn it off during her 10-mile drive to class.

Help! Swiss bumped us to the back of the plane, and now our refund is gone
Mila Schoun paid $3,274 for premium economy from Miami to Prague, and Swiss moved him and his wife to economy for the long leg home, a downgrade worth $165 under European rules. The airline told him he had already collected an Easy Cash card at the Zurich airport, and he had never seen one.

A rental car agent says the state requires the extra coverage, a front desk clerk says a resort fee is required by law, and a crew member insists the tip is mandatory. Each of those lines turns something optional into something that sounds like a rule. I’m working on a story about how travelers can tell one from the other. Were you ever told a fee was required and later found out it wasn’t? Tell me what you were told on Backchannel.