Catch up on the latest stories from the Elliott Report

Where’s the line between a consumer complaint — and crazy?
One reader filed more than 100 submissions on our help form in about a week, naming Apple, Chase, Equifax, Uber, Coca-Cola and FedEx, and asked for $8.4 million nearly every time. The form takes 30 to 50 requests a day, and sorting a frustrated customer from someone in distress turns out to be harder than three decades in this work would suggest.

“Debanked” by your frequent flier program? You should have rights
Ari and Shanna Nachison each held more than 550,000 American AAdvantage miles when the airline closed their accounts and cited only “the general AAdvantage program conditions,” without saying which ones. A bank that closes your account owes you a written reason within 30 days, while the Supreme Court has told frequent fliers their remedy is to go find a better program.

In Germany’s Black Forest, winter isn’t a sure thing anymore
Achim Laber has been a ranger at Feldberg Nature Reserve for 36 years, and the mountain has now gone four straight Christmas holidays without snow on slopes that used to hold it from November through April. Its lift operator is expanding snowmaking to buy more seasons, while a resort at similar elevation across the French border has already set a date to stop skiing altogether.

Is there a way out of this Amazon account recovery black hole?
Henry Dickson’s iPad was bricked during an update, and when he reinstalled the Amazon app, the login asked him to approve a notification on the device he couldn’t reach. Amazon’s identity recovery page required him to sign in before uploading a driver’s license, a dozen representatives sent him the same broken link, and he lost access to his Prime benefits and his entire Kindle library.

Help! A three-hour delay returning my rental car cost me $650!
George Meyer paid $670 for a 27-day Europcar rental in France on a voucher that promised unlimited mileage, then hit traffic on the way back to Charles de Gaulle and reached the counter three hours late. The delay pushed the rental to 28 days, which under EU rules puts it in a different category with a 3,750-kilometer cap, and Europcar billed him $650 for the extra distance.

An arson attack in France doubled her car rental bill. Does she have to pay?
Marianne Piepenburg booked a five-day car from National at the Avignon TGV station for $434, and arsonists attacked the French rail lines on the morning she was due to pick it up. She reached the counter a day late to find her reservation canceled and a comparable vehicle priced at $837 for four days, with National pointing at Enterprise, Enterprise pointing at a local franchise in Avignon and the franchise answering neither its phone nor its email.

The reverse packing list: What should you leave at home?
A first checked bag now costs $45 on most major U.S. airlines, and American charges basic economy passengers $55. Travel advisors who live out of a carry-on have cut themselves down to one pair of versatile shoes and a merino layer that handles a 40-degree morning without the bulk, and one of them nominates the full-size travel umbrella as the most useless item in anybody’s bag.

Debra Holler uses a wheelchair, and her family booked a designated accessible stateroom on Princess Cruises so she could get in and out of it on her own. She says housekeeping carts and crew equipment blocked the corridor nearly every time she tried to leave, until her brother and sister-in-law started clearing the path themselves, and Carnival’s executive office answered her complaint with a $250 future cruise credit. Is a credit the right answer to a blocked accessible route? Here’s our team’s advice on Backchannel.

Behind this line: what the complaint says happened to that midnight deadline, and the court ruling that set off more than 30 copycat cases in a single state. Plus, the seven ways to tell whether a sale deadline will hold.

A Members Only story like this runs in every issue, along with Backchannel and the vault.