The rising hassle of travel: Fighting fees, fixing mistakes and keeping receipts
Preet Banerjee
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Yesterday
Open this photo in gallery: A traveller wheels their baggage through Montréal–Trudeau International Airport. (Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press)
I used to think the hardest part of travel was trying to balance saving money and knowing where to splurge. Now I realize it’s the exploding administrative load that happens after booking.
My wife and I recently landed in Nice, France, and were hoping to catch a train to our final destination, Menton. Unfortunately, the flight was delayed and the last train had departed so we looked to book an Uber. The app showed a price of roughly €80 ($129).
But when we arrived at the meeting point, we were met by a woman on foot. She had my name and quoted our ride price in the app but suggested that for €45 she could drive us to Menton – if we cancelled the trip on the app and paid directly. Immediately my spidey senses tingled and I declined.
There seemed to be a group of people all running the same scheme so when we tried to find another driver on the Uber app, we had no luck. We eventually went to the official taxi line at the airport and €160 later, we were in Menton.
I reported the Uber driver on the app, because there was a record of them accepting my hail. And that’s why we wanted to use Uber in the first place. There would be a record of the pick-up and drop-off, insurance along the way, and payment would be handled by an established ecosystem with an interest in protecting user trust in the platform.
While we ended up paying double the cost of an Uber, we’ve read enough horror stories of people who tried to save a few bucks by bypassing ride-hailing platforms. It helped lessen the financial sting.
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There are other ways travel has gotten more time-consuming and frustrating.
I’ve qualified for 75K status on Air Canada for years and one of the benefits is that you can select a preferred seat for no cost when booking your flights, even for international flights. That saves me about $150 per flight as I normally book economy seats.
But for the last three flights I’ve had to pay to choose the preferred seat option and then spend an average of 25 minutes on a call to get the charge refunded.
When renting a car recently, I took the time to record a detailed walk-around video to make sure I noted any pre-existing damage. I got the standard brush-off that anything that looked like it would buff out didn’t need to be reported. Nonetheless, I made sure to pause on the badly scratched wheel rims. And I’m glad I did.
A week after the rental ended, I received an email with a damage report that indicated charges were forthcoming, but that I could dispute them if I had any evidence. The email included a picture of damage to the rims that looks suspiciously similar to the damage I recorded. I’m waiting to get the final verdict.
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But perhaps a story from almost two years ago takes the cake. Driving a rental car in Florence, apparently I went down some roads I wasn’t supposed to. I received six notices of infraction, some of which were timestamped within a minute of each other.
If I paid within a few weeks, the fines would be around €200. The problem was that the notices arrived a year after the fact. Now I owed about €2,000 in fines. The notices indicated I could appeal, but my appeal would have to be written in Italian and sent by registered mail.
I used ChatGPT to craft an appeal in Italian that asked for the fines to be considered as one fine, not six, given they all happened at basically the same time (some internet forums suggest they can actually consider this). To be extra certain the police department would receive the appeal, I requested a signature for the registered letter.
A few months later, my letter was returned. Apparently they won’t accept registered letters that require a signature. So I re-sent it and followed up by email a number of times. Almost two years later, I’m still awaiting a decision. I’m informed it should be any month now.
Increasingly, when I’m on vacation I’m finding I work almost as much as I do when I’m at home, except now my job is making sure everyone else is doing theirs.
Preet Banerjee is the creator of YourMoneyDegree.com, a financial literacy program with an AI companion app.
