A mother and son who never made it to Cairo, and a refund no state can force. (Illustration by Dustin Elliott)
☕ Hello from Hongdae — The boys and I are hanging out in Seoul this weekend in search of the best espresso. There’s quite a coffee scene, and I can’t wait to tell you more about it.
Today’s lead story started with a reader who lost $1,808 to an airline and then found out her own state isn’t allowed to help her. On Backchannel, our first Ask Me Anything session drew a question about whether a doctor’s letter is enough to get your medication across a border. It isn’t, and I’ll explain why.
In our Members Only section, San Francisco is suing the booking sites that dress themselves up as hotels, and the complaint shows you what to look for. Have a great weekend! — Christopher Elliott
TODAY’S FEATURED ARTICLE
Your state can sue a used car dealer. It can’t touch your airline.
One of our readers bought two tickets from Chicago to Cairo, then watched a war break out before she could go. Turkish Airlines kept her $1,808. Her state attorney general reads complaints like hers every day, and there’s nothing he can do about this one. Why can’t her state help her?
🏗️ This week we rebuilt almost everything for you
I've spent all week in the daily edition of this newsletter walking you through the changes. If you missed it, here's the Readers' Digest version:
A new Elliott Report. The site went live Wednesday. It's faster, it's easier to read, and the stories you came for are available immediately—no more scrolling.
New company contacts. We rebuilt the system behind the executive contacts directory, which will improve accuracy by 80 percent. You'll get fewer bounced emails and fewer 800-numbers that ring forever. Executives pay reputation firms to scrub their names off the internet, and this will make it a lot harder.
A new newsletter. Exclusive Members Only stories, an upgraded community engagement section, and a new look. You're reading it right now.
A new forum. Backchannel is where readers argue about the cases, ask me questions and talk each other out of bad bookings.
Want this in your inbox every morning? You can switch the daily on, or dial it back, in your preferences.
Oh, one more thing …
There's no hedge fund behind the Elliott Report and no billionaire owner. It's a small team of advocates and me.
We can't do this without you.
Our help has always been free for the person who needs it, but that only works when you become a paid subscriber.
Sign up now and you'll get the exclusive Members Only section in every issue, plus the three private Backchannel channels: Ask Elliott, Get Help and Insiders Only. You'll also get access to every book I've ever written.
If this newsletter has ever saved you money, or talked you out of an expensive mistake, please consider upgrading.
OUR UNDERWRITER
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📌 Here’s what you missed this week
Catch up on the latest stories from the Elliott Report
States are doubling down on consumer protections. But why do airlines get a pass?
Washington has stopped fining airlines, so states and cities are writing the consumer rules instead. A 1978 law keeps every one of them out of the airport.
In Queenstown, tourism sustainability comes down to earth
Hotel food waste from 95 percent of the town’s luxury properties becomes 1,200 tons of soil a year. The produce goes back into resort kitchens, and the surplus sells from a roadside stand that runs on the honor system.
StubHub says the Rick Springfield concert was postponed, but it wasn’t. Can I get a refund?
A rescheduled date never made it into StubHub’s system, so his tickets stayed locked on the night of the show. The venue confirmed the concert went ahead, but the company’s records still list it as pending.
Who pays for a flat tire on a Turo rental? It’s complicated
A blowout at 40 mph in the New Hampshire mountains turned up two front tires worn down to the metal. Turo cleared him of fault, reversed itself an hour later and billed him $500.
Booking.com rented him a room with blood on the walls. Why won’t it refund his $313?
A studio apartment in Penang, Malaysia, came with bloodstains, mold and someone else’s hair in the bedding. Booking.com says the refund is the host’s call, and the host says cancel.
The ugly truth about August travel: Why you should stay home—or do this
August travel means thin staffing, dirty rooms and more cancellations, all at peak prices. Why the system breaks down every summer and how to work around it.
Would you pay extra to use the overhead bin?
If you’ve ever wondered what they’ll think of next—at least when it comes to airline fees—here’s your answer: Jetstar announced this week that it will soon charge you to put a bag in the overhead bin.
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💬 What you’re talking about
The first question in our new Ask Me Anything, and what you said about StubHub
Our first Ask Me Anything thread on Backchannel drew a question from Dorothea Cohen, who is spending a week in Canada, then taking an Alaskan cruisetour. She has a doctor’s letter listing all her medications. Does she still need to pack the bottles? She does, and I explain why that letter is the fallback and not the primary document. By the way, our first AMA is still open. What would you ask me?
Thursday’s StubHub case is still getting comments on our Facebook page. Ramón Vera says the lesson is to buy from the venue or Ticketmaster and skip the resellers altogether. Gerri Heiden Hether called it the old third-party booking site debacle, which is about the size of it. A few of you also took the chance to razz our reader for buying Rick Springfield tickets in the first place. What would you have done?
OUR UNDERWRITER
EMBARK Beyond is a luxury travel advisory dedicated to creating thoughtfully designed experiences that go beyond a destination. Focused first on client needs, we have built (and continue to build!) relationships with the world’s most sought-after lifestyle and fashion brands to open the world - beyond imagination - to our clients. Find out more at EMBARK Beyond.
MEMBERS ONLY
Information and insights for Elliott Confidential PRO subscribers
Booking a hotel? Never, ever do this
Before you click on a sponsored search result to book a hotel, consider this: San Francisco just sued two of the sites that live at the top of those results, and the complaint is deeply troubling.
City Attorney David Chiu filed against GuestReservations.com and BookOnline.com and against Booking Holdings, the company behind Booking.com, Priceline and Kayak, for supplying them. The case is People of the State of California v. BookOnline.com, LLC. The complaint and announcement are here.
The city ran a search for the Palace Hotel on an iPhone on July 1. Both sites came up above the hotel's own Marriott page. Guest Reservations wanted $775 for a king room on July 8, cancelable until July 5. Marriott's rate for the comparable room, checked minutes later, was $419. Book Online listed the same room at $526, nonrefundable, when the hotel would have let you cancel within a day of booking.
In 2014 the FTC and the Connecticut attorney general took two of Book Online's principals, Charles Lineberry and Ryan Bagley, to federal court over sites got up as concert box offices. A judge permanently barred them from putting a venue's name in the display address of a search ad. The order covers resale tickets, but it says nothing about hotels.
Here's what it means for you:
Read the address, not the logo. The tell is a hotel's name sitting in front of somebody else's domain. A real hotel site has the brand at the domain level.
One hotel on the page means it isn't a booking site. Expedia and the rest show you options. A page devoted to a single property, with no other inventory anywhere on it, is a lookalike.
A local area code proves nothing. The Palace page displayed a 415 number. It forwarded to Book Online's reservation desk, and the city says agents didn't volunteer who they were.
If your card is charged in full at booking, stop. Hotels usually don't take the money until arrival. Immediate payment in full, paired with a cancellation policy in small type, is the pattern in every complaint the city quotes.
Open the confirmation and read the fee line. One traveler in the filing paid $219 in what the site called “tax recovery.” The hotel's own taxes on that stay would have run about $60.
The reviews won't save you. Around June 24, both sites picked up dozens of nearly identical one-line five-star Trustpilot posts. The city says the companies wrote them.
None of this is proven, and Booking Holdings says the suit lacks merit. We shall see.
The takeaway: Skip the sponsored results and click the first organic listing, or type the hotel's name into your address bar. If you already booked and the rate looks wrong, dispute it with your card issuer immediately, because both sites bury mandatory arbitration in the fine print and you can't take them to court.
FORBES EXCLUSIVE
Japan’s secret to sustainable tourism is in the sauce
Our first report from Japan is live. In Saitama, sustainable tourism means protecting centuries of tradition, from barrel-aged soy sauce and handcrafted hanko seals to historic merchant streets. Here are the details.