Catch up on the latest stories from the Elliott Report

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.

Experian said his credit was unfrozen. So why couldn’t he buy a car?
Robert Boisvert asked Experian to lift a credit freeze so he could finance a car, mailed two certified letters with copies of his ID and his utility bills and waited three months. Experian told our advocates the freeze had come off the day he asked, and the only letter that reached him said his account was inactive.

Travelers are facing more entry and exit fees than ever. Here’s what you need to know.
New Zealand charged Brian Clark about $70 to enter before he’d booked a room, Britain has raised the price of its entry permit twice since launch and the United States nearly doubled its own fee to $40.27. Fake government portals now outrank the real ones in search results, and the colleague who clicked the first result paid a markup for the same 72-hour wait.

These 7 phrases will doom your consumer complaint
Threaten to sue and your file goes straight to in-house counsel, where goodwill refunds don’t exist. Our advocates read every request that comes through the help form, and a discouraging number are sabotaged in the first paragraph by a single word.

I’m in Bad Hindelang this week, a Bavarian village where the houses look like gingerbread and the big event of the season is the Viehscheid, the morning the cows come down off the mountain for the winter. It is louder than anything you would expect from a cow. (MORE COWBELL!!!) What corner of the world should we point the camera at next? Here are the pictures on Backchannel.