Help Yourself! How Readers Fought the Travel Industry and Won.

12.12.2024 - 10:11 / nytimes.com

Who needs you? After we first connected, you said you’d take on my problem. But while you dawdled working on other travelers’ issues, I got my money back from that dastardly airline/travel site/car rental agency on my own.

Sam is right. If you are wowed by my knack for getting answers and squeezing refunds out of airlines, hotels and other travel providers, temper your reaction slightly. It’s the “nytimes.com” part of my email address that does most of the work, an incantation that bypasses the exasperating mess of online bots, interactive phone menus (“Representative!!!!”) and frontline customer-service agents. Instead, I’m connected with a usually attentive media relations department.

What’s more impressive, really, is the number of readers who manage to resolve big travel frustrations without a big name or an influential email address. Roughly a third of readers I initially offer to help no longer need me by the time their issue gets to the front of the line.

So for my final column of 2024, I will share four strategies from do-it-yourselfers who found successful ways to get their cases in front of a sympathetic eyes and ears and receive recourse.

A modest request to the incoming Trump administration: Please retain the U.S. Transportation Department’s surprisingly simple air travel service complaint form — and the federal workers who read the submissions — as the resource helped many readers this year, including Asa of Minneapolis.

Asa and his family traveled to Europe for a ski vacation in February, flying Delta and KLM, but their luggage was delayed. Without winter clothes and ski equipment, the family, Asa said, bought only the basics and rented what they could, but in the pricey ski town of Andermatt, Switzerland, they still spent $5,200. The family meticulously saved itemized receipts and submitted them to KLM. (The airline that flies the final leg is the point of contact for lost luggage, according to the Montreal Convention, an international treaty governing lost luggage on most international flights.)