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Catch up on the latest stories from the Elliott Report

Is your hotel room safe? The mistake you’re making right now
Nala Fox left a balcony door cracked at a five-star resort in Negril, Jamaica, and woke from a nap to find her carry-on and passport gone, with the security desk telling her this sometimes happens. Hotel security consultants call the condition resort security amnesia, and it shows up in cloned key cards, key sleeves with the room number printed on them and balconies an intruder can cross at night.

Holland America canceled my cruise because of a pricing error. Can it do that?
Cindy Woodring booked a 10-day Zuiderdam sailing at $479 a person, applied a $200 credit and paid the $758 balance in full. Three days later Holland America called the fare a pricing error and billed her $1,530 more, then offered a complimentary stateroom upgrade to anyone willing to pay it.

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.

Jeff Kudla says he got the heads-up emails from Vail Resorts before the spring deadline, went online and switched off the autorenew on his season passes, and a renewed pair landed on his card anyway. He points to the five-day lift tickets he bought in August as evidence he never meant to keep them, and customer service has answered with scripted replies and a form letter. Should Vail Resorts refund the passes? Here’s our team’s advice on Backchannel.