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Catch up on the latest stories from the Elliott Report

Is travel insurance useless in a crisis? Here’s what you need to know
Janice Lintz filed a claim after civil unrest in Nepal closed the airspace and canceled her flights, and her credit card policy denied it because no one had classified the protests as terrorism. Security memberships are absorbing the demand that insurance won’t, with one provider reporting nonmedical evacuation requests up 31 percent in a year.

Rover left my dog home alone for 17 hours, and now it refuses to pay the vet bill
Luke Gilbertson’s Ring camera caught his Rover sitter shut into another room for 17 of the 24 hours she was booked, while his dog, Stewie, vomited and later needed care for a swallowed object. Rover denied the $5,272 claim as an illness of undetermined cause and sent him $276 for the sitting.

Can Princess Cruises charge you more after you paid in full?
Deborah Keck paid $1,449 to upgrade to a suite on the Star Princess and got a confirmation marked paid in full with a zero balance. Princess added $3,967 to the booking months later, then told her to pay it, give up the cabin or lose the cruise.

Frontier Airlines baggage fees: When the sizer says yes but the agent says no
Benjamin Khoury measured his carry-on before a Frontier Airlines flight from Dallas to Phoenix and photographed it sitting inside the gate sizer. Frontier charged him $99 for an oversized personal item, then spent three months not answering questions about the photo.

Analog travel: why film cameras and paper maps are back
Bob Gourley shot a trip to Muscat, Oman, on 36 frames of film and hired a travel advisor instead of booking it himself. New research from ALG Vacations found that among travelers who use AI to plan a trip, about 77 percent still want a human making the final call.

A maintenance delay is the airline’s problem. That’s about to change.
A Transportation Department rule taking effect Oct. 19 moves 10 causes of delay and cancellation out of the airline’s column in federal reporting, and unscheduled maintenance is on the list. Europe answered the same question in 2008 and answered it the other way.

An air travel watchdog woke up after three years. It wants to bark at posters.
A federal advisory committee that hasn’t met since January 2023 returns on Sept. 22 with three items on its agenda, all of them disclosure documents Congress already ordered. It won’t vote on a single recommendation, and none of the consumer protections the Transportation Department rolled back while the committee was dark made the list.

When Samsung offered Joseph a coupon that expired in 2030, he thought he would be able to use it to upgrade his refrigerator.

Wrong. Samsung withdrew the offer when he tried to redeem the coupon. And that brought him to our advocacy team. We investigated, advocated, and got him results.

“We received the new refrigerator a few weeks later,” he says. “We are very happy with the prompt service we received from Elliott and believe we would not have been able to get this resolved without them.”

We’re always happy to help. Thank you for being there for us. Here’s how to get our free help.

Scott Kopper asked Bank of America to move $2,000 to his Fidelity cash account, and a misplaced digit dropped it into a stranger’s account at another bank instead. Months later he has a liability waiver the bank wanted signed, a claim it says it did nothing wrong on and no answer about where the money went. Does he have any leverage left after signing? See what our members are telling him on Backchannel.