Travel Warning

The hotel key card is a liar with excellent timing. It works perfectly at check-in, when the front desk demonstrates it, when the elevator accepts it, and when you first open your room like you own the place. Then it retires. Quietly. Without notice. Usually while you are holding coffee, a suitcase, a takeout bag, and the last of your patience.

There is a special kind of optimism required to believe the first delay announcement. The board says your flight now leaves at 6:40 instead of 5:15, and you nod like a reasonable adult. Fine. Delays happen. You buy a coffee, find a seat near an outlet that does not work, and settle in.

Every hotel shower begins the same way: you, naked and optimistic, standing just outside the splash zone while performing a task that should take two seconds. Turn the water on. Make it warm. Get in. Instead, you are confronted by a chrome control panel that looks like it was designed by someone who has heard of showers but never actually used one.

The left lane has a job. It is not complicated, it does not require a meeting, and it was never meant to be a long-term residence. You move over, you pass the car on your right, and then — and this is the part that seems to get lost — you move back. Somewhere along the way, a certain kind of driver decided the passing lane was actually a cozy front porch with a great view and no reason to ever leave.

Airplane boarding is a masterpiece of unnecessary chaos. An airline has a plane with numbered seats, assigned to named passengers, and somehow the process of putting those passengers into those seats becomes a contact sport with luggage.

Think you found the best hotel deal online? A new class action lawsuit against Expedia Group argues that the "deal" was the product of a rigged market, and that millions of travelers may have paid inflated hotel rates for years without knowing it.

Booking a hotel room should not require the detective skills of a forensic accountant, but according to U.S. regulators and a string of lawsuits, a popular corner of the online travel world has been making it exactly that hard. Priceline.com, part of Booking Holdings, is facing possible Federal Trade Commission action over third-party hotel booking services that allegedly charge hidden fees and mislead travelers.

Imagine paying extra for a flight fare because it advertises free seat selection, and then discovering the word free was doing a lot of heavy lifting. That is the crux of a proposed class action filed against JetBlue Airways on August 31, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.