Fed-up travelers seek reckoning over bad service

Ask any frequent traveler if the industry is fair. You’ll likely hear a litany of complaints: Travel companies routinely charge you for services they don’t have to deliver, punish you with onerous restrictions and flout the time-honored rules of American business. And now, travelers are pushing back.

It could be a long-overdue moment of reckoning for the masses of tired and abused passengers.

To get an idea of how bad things are, imagine the following scenario: A new restaurant opens across town that charges you months in advance for your meal but sometimes skips an ingredient — or an entire course. If you should get sick at the new establishment, you have to use one of its own doctors. To add insult to injury, the restaurant automatically adds a tip “for your convenience.”

On land, it would be out of business in hours. “But not a cruise line,” says Miami attorney David Deehl.

True, in a way. Cruise lines charge you far in advance for your berth. Their ticket contract — the legal agreement between you and the company — says it doesn’t have to deliver the product it promises in the brochure. For example, it can omit a port of call if it wants to or just cancel the sailing.

Claire Celsi, a marketing professional from West Des Moines, Iowa, remembers buying tickets for herself and her father to fly to Phoenix to visit her dying uncle. But the uncle passed away before they could leave, so they canceled their flight.

“The change fees were outrageous,” she recalls. “When I called to use the ticket for another flight, the fee was more than the ticket I was trying to buy. Despite the fact that I paid $800 for my original ticket!”

Or imagine ordering a car from Toyota, and when you arrive at the showroom, a salesman says he’s sorry, but they just ran out of Toyotas. Then he hands you the keys to a Ford and says, “Take it or leave it.”

Crazy, right? But hotels routinely do this to their guests. It’s called “walking,” and it happens when a hotel sells too many rooms. Customers are sent to a “comparable” hotel, whether they want to go or not. And it’s perfectly legal, selling more rooms than you actually have.

Now, to be fair, the travel industry has reasons for doing all of this. They’re constantly saying their business is different, because you can’t possibly know the complexities of running a 200,000-ton ship, or a passenger jet, or a hotel with a thousand rooms. Fair point. But beside the point.

For too long, the travel industry has behaved as if the rules that apply to other businesses don’t apply to it. But the anger over its practices are now coming to a boil. Consumers are starting to ask: Why are they doing this? How is this fair? And they’re coming to the same conclusion. It’s not right. And they’re only doing it because we’re letting them.

Maybe calling out the travel industry’s strange and selfish rules is the first step to fixing it.

Christopher Elliott is a consumer advocate. Contact him at chris@elliott.org or visit elliott.org.

Upset travelers are pushing back. GETTY IMAGES