Viking Cruises mixed up the booking numbers of two different trips, then canceled Cynthia and her husband’s two-week Mediterranean cruise one month before departure — and refused to refund their fare.

Then she turned to our advocacy team. After numerous calls and letters went nowhere, our advice on next steps, contacts and strategy — plus our own communication with Viking on her behalf — got the cruise line to acknowledge its mistake, apologize and issue full vouchers for a trip of her choice.

“Elliott staff were professional, persistent and patient. I highly recommend Elliott Advocacy for assistance with any travel problem a consumer may be experiencing,” she says.

We couldn’t help people like Cynthia without you. Thank you.

Catch up on the latest stories from the Elliott Report

How Queenstown, New Zealand, is creating a greener adventure capital
Shotover Jet has built a prototype electric jet boat and can’t get it light enough to deliver the 360-degree spins its customers pay for. Charging a fleet would draw a megawatt on a river that floods up to 16 times a year, and the Ngāi Tahu iwi that owns the operation has told it to move off fossil fuel anyway.

My GE washer is a heavy metal drummer, but I didn’t buy tickets to the show
Six months after installation, a $1,856 GE Spacemaker washer still bangs into the walls of Laura Bartholomew’s Ventura, Calif., laundry room on every spin cycle. Five technicians ran controlled tests with no water or with four matching towels, reported the machine was working properly, and GE closed her case.

My tour operator promised a price lock — and then broke it
Michael Hughes prepaid a Spain and Portugal tour 10 months early under Overseas Adventure Travel’s Good Buy program, which advertises protection from cost increases. After Air France canceled his flight, OAT billed him $670 more and gave him two conflicting explanations for the charge.

When your Daryl Hall concert is canceled but the refund is out of touch
Robert Logan paid $489 for a pair of StubHub tickets to a Daryl Hall show in Denver, and after Hall canceled it he called six times and got the same promise to escalate the refund in four or five days. His bank turned him down too, saying the Fair Credit Billing Act’s 60-day window had closed because he bought the tickets in June.

Is it worth paying extra for a “risk-free” vacation?
Celia Dunlap paid $805 for travel insurance before a 40-day Southeast Asia tour, and when the operator cut the trip to 10 days the policy didn’t cover her cancellation, leaving her with a nonrefundable $4,500 ticket. The Atlantic hasn’t produced a hurricane all season, and Caribbean bookings through one insurance marketplace are running 21% ahead of last year anyway.

Have we forgotten the lessons of 9/11?
Gateside by TSA PreCheck lets vetted travelers without tickets clear the checkpoint at 13 airports, and it arrives alongside the end of the shoe rule and a review of the liquids limit. A 2019 GAO audit found that none of nine vulnerabilities identified through covert testing had been formally resolved.

Pace the frontier? In travel, AI is already making our lives miserable
Air Canada’s chatbot told Jake Moffatt he could claim a bereavement discount after he flew, which wasn’t the airline’s policy, and the airline argued to a tribunal that the chatbot answered for itself. Algorithms already set your airfare and rank who gets the last seat out of a meltdown, and nothing requires anyone to tell you where you stand.

The Transportation Department stopped enforcing the automatic refund rule when an airline renumbers your flight, a pause it has now extended to July 2027. In August it suspended five parts of the wheelchair rule through the following April. Both sets of requirements are still printed in the Code of Federal Regulations, where you can look them up and quote them back to an airline. So does citing a regulation get you anywhere once the agency behind it has said in writing that it won’t enforce it? Tell me how your last conversation went on Backchannel.