Dangerous New Practice: Hotel Adding 3% To Bill For Accepting Credit Cards

by Gary Leff

Jun 20 2020

The Home2 Suites by Hilton at the Kansas City airport adds 3% to customer bills for ‘credit card processing’ though apparently when pushed they’ll remove the fee.

The truth is that it’s cheaper to accept credit cards than other payment methods, and it’s an underhanded tactic no different than a resort fee to impose a hidden add-on on customers. Why should a customer have to cover a business’s cost to accept their money, on top of the cost of the product they’re buying?

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Spirit Airlines Fined For Lying About Bumping Passengers

by Gary Leff

Jun 20 2020

The Department of Transportation fined Spirit Airlines $350,000 for pretending that passengers who were involuntarily denied boarding had volunteered to take later flights, and undercompensating those passengers. The U.S. government found ”a pattern of non-compliance with the compensation scheme” at Spirit.

Spirit referred to involuntary denied boarding “as the “volunteer option”, and customers were forced to sign an “acknowledgement form” stating so.”

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American Airlines Surveying New Ways To Compensate Passengers For Service Failures

by Gary Leff

american airlines lounge
Jun 19 2020

Compensation may not be gone for good. The airline appears to be surveying what sort of compensation they should be offering. The new options aren’t likely to incur liability on the airline’s books – although they may add crowding to the start of the boarding process, and to the airline’s lounges, at precisely the time when the airline’s best customers will value distancing most.

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COVID Will Change My Airport Security Checkpoint Routine

by Gary Leff

lego tsa agents
Jun 19 2020

Sometimes I depart the U.S. flying an airline that doesn’t participate in PreCheck. And when I do, I still ‘opt out’ of these nude-o-scopes on principle. Maybe I’m the last person that does.

I take a pat down instead of going through the machine. The screener will tell me what to expect, saying to me that they’re going to ‘run their hand up my leg until they meet resistance’ and they’ll ask if I have any sensitive areas. “Only where you meet resistance” I’ve offered, a hundred times. Covid changes all of this.

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4 Reasons Normal Travel Is Just Around The Corner

by Gary Leff

Jun 19 2020

The novel coronavirus has cast a shadow on the whole world since January, though not everyone realized it until late February or early March. It’s led to a deeper recession than we’ve seen in any of our lifetimes, and one of the industries hit the absolute hardest has been travel.

The good news, though, is that we’re not that far away from a real recovery – in travel and for the world.

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