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Catch up on the latest stories from the Elliott Report

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.

These New Zealand eco-lodges are redefining sustainability (and reaching for the stars)
Two lodges at the head of Lake Whakatipu on New Zealand’s South Island have pushed sustainability well past recycled materials and refillable soap dispensers. One generates more power over a year than it uses and sends all of its profit to a community trust, and the other is wiring an 1868 pioneer tavern into a 500-kilowatt solar microgrid.

Janet Lis keeps getting orange where she saw pink when she photographs sunsets on her iPhone, and neither exposure compensation nor shooting RAW has given the color back. One member says the answer is hiding in the Live Photo slider and a free editing app. Is this something you fix afterward, or do you have to stop the phone from guessing before you press the shutter? See what our members are telling her on Backchannel.