Dear Readers,
Let’s end 2025 with a hypothetical tale of terrible travel luck.
On your way from New York to London and Paris with your partner, someone swipes your bag from the overhead bin. The airline says sorry, but it takes no responsibility for carry-ons. You shrug it off and end up having so much fun in England that you extend your stay, skipping your flight to Paris and catching a train there a few days later. But as you’re getting ready to leave Paris, you notice your return flight to New York no longer appears on the airline app. When you call, the airline says it canceled your flight after you didn’t show up for the middle leg of your itinerary. So you buy new tickets, but in the stress of the situation you transpose your and your partner’s middle names, and when you get to the airport, they won’t let you check in. Now, you have to trade in your tickets for even pricier last-minute ones. Back home, you eventually persuade the airline to give you a credit for the original voided flight, good for a year. Nine months later, you try to book a new trip and find the credit has expired.
Then you write to Tripped Up to complain.
I write back with bad news: The rules governing air travel may be complex and sometimes nonsensical, but the airline did not break any of them.
Here are five of those rules (and one rule of thumb). Disagree with them at will, but ignore them at your own risk.
Skip One Leg, Lose the Rest
If a passenger does not show up for one flight, in many cases most airlines instantly void the remainder of their flights to open up inventory for other travelers. And once those flights are gone, readers report, customer service workers say they can’t bring them back — for the same price, at least.
It’s a plausibly defensible rule applied in an often draconian way. Take Stephen of Lyme, Conn., who wrote to me after he and his travel partner missed the first leg of their round-trip itinerary on Emirates (from New York to Delhi via Dubai) because they confused a.m. and p.m. They ended up paying more than $3,000 extra to rebook the whole itinerary (and stay overnight at a hotel).
Emirates did not respond to my requests for comment, but I suspect the airline might claim it was just following the rules.
Instead of canceling, couldn’t carriers just email or text no-shows and say, “Hey, we noticed you missed your flight. Click ‘yes’ to preserve the remaining legs, or ‘no’ to cancel the rest of the itinerary”?
Until that happens, call the airline as soon as you know you’ll miss the leg and ask to preserve the rest of your trip. (Shout-out to Virgin Atlantic, which, unlike other carriers I checked, explicitly gives passengers two hours after missing a flight to call in.)
Watch Your Stuff
When 92-year-old Virginia of Washington wrote to me in January to say her $180 Ralph Lauren jacket disappeared after an American Airlines flight attendant offered to hang it up, I thought we had an open-and-shut case. Jacket justice for Virginia! But Andrea Koos, a spokeswoman for the airline, helpfully passed along its very clear rules on the matter: Like most other airlines, American takes no responsibility for “items you carry on the plane.” Instead, it’s an issue for the police.
In this case, American did reimburse Virginia in March, but that’s what media pressure and a sympathetic victim will get you. (Sadly, Virginia died in May, her son-in-law told me last month.) If you lose a carry-on item, report it to a member of the crew or — if you realize it after deplaning — to the airport police. And hope your travel, homeowner’s or renter’s insurance will cover it.
Get Your Name Right
Our names are the first things we learn to write, yet many readers manage to screw them up when they purchase an airline ticket. So please make sure your name matches the name on the ID you will use to fly. (It’s all right if multiple names come out scrunched together, but other than that, they generally must be precise matches.)
As is so often the case, things get more complicated if you don’t reserve directly with the airline. Gary of New York City booked flights through American Express for him and his partner, Michael, to fly from Newark to Athens on Emirates, but he filled in “Mike” as his partner’s name. At the airport, Gary told me, an Emirates representative said she could have made the minor change if he had booked directly, but in this case the travel agency had to do it. American Express could or would not, and the couple spent an additional $7,000 to rebook at the last minute.
I received a slightly different complaint from Michael of Fairfield, Conn., who discovered long before a flight on Lufthansa that somehow his Amex reservation had the wrong middle name for one son. In this case, Amex tried, but Lufthansa policy allows travel agencies to make changes only for typos or nicknames, not completely different middle names.
“There are times when a name on a booking can be changed, if the airline allows,” Emily Vicker, an Amex spokeswoman, wrote in a statement. “If a change is permitted, we’ll work with the airline accordingly.”
Do yourself a favor and check your name as soon as your reservation email arrives. If there is a mistake, cancel and rebook within 24 hours, which U.S. law allows you to do without penalty, as long as it’s more than seven days before your flight.
When a Year Lasts Eight Months
If you have to cancel a nonrefundable ticket, airlines sometimes offer you flight credit, typically good for a year.
The thing is, some airlines start the clock retroactively on the date you reserved the ticket. Young Ju of East Syracuse, N.Y., was one of many who wrote in about the issue, complaining that her Air Canada credit expired less than eight months after her flight.
I figured there was probably some obscure corporate reason for this rule, and the airline did not disappoint.
In an email, Peter Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for the airline, noted that Air Canada is not alone in this rule — which is true — and explained, “Tickets are a contract that comes with obligations for both parties and as such they are finite, so we need a clear end date, and that date is set at the time of purchase.”
Bonus tip: If you or a family member get sick or injured in the days before a flight, you might expect to receive a flight credit or a refund. Though some airlines will offer one as a matter of policy or common courtesy, there is no rule saying they must. This situation is precisely what travel insurance is for.
You Might Need a Doctor’s Note
Most airlines have pretty similar rules. But there are outliers, and one of the odder ones came from Turkish Airlines. Passengers with Parkinson’s disease had to present a “fit to fly” letter from a doctor. The policy mentioned no other disease, and no other airline I could find had such a disease-specific rule. (Some airlines do require such letters from passengers who are very pregnant, which is not, of course, a disease.)
Judy of Chapel Hill, N.C., didn’t know about the rule when her husband, Carl, revealed he had Parkinson’s while checking in for a domestic flight in Turkey and was directed to an in-airport doctor, who charged him around $400 for a last-minute letter. The BBC reported a similar case of a journalist, Mark Mardell, who could not check in for an Istanbul-to-London flight for the same reason. Mr. Mardell wrote to me in an email that he was also told he could go to an airport doctor, but he thought it was a scam.
Last week, the airline said in an email it had removed the requirement, adding that it was “deeply saddened” that the policy “to ensure the safety of our passengers during flight” was “perceived in this manner.” The airline has also reimbursed Judy and Carl about $400 (in Turkish lira) for the doctor’s visit.
Don’t Take Their Word for It
Finally, not so much a rule but a rule of thumb: Verbal promises are worthless. Jean from Berkeley, Calif., wrote to me with a very typical story of woe. Her trip from San Francisco to Syracuse, N.Y., on United was canceled because of mechanical problems, and a United worker couldn’t find any way to get her to Syracuse on other United flights. Jean found herself, her partner and her son seats on a same-day JetBlue flight for just under $3,000 total and asked the worker to book it. She would not — in the United States, airlines can, but do not have to, book you on other carriers — and told Jean (three times, she said) that United would refund the cost of the original flight and compensate her for the difference.
I’ve read enough of these stories (involving many different airlines) to know what was coming next. United did refund the $656 total cost of the three tickets, as it is required to do by law, but not the difference of more than $2,000.
“Should I have gotten it in writing? Filmed her?” Jean wrote. But I doubt the worker would have agreed with either plan, since frontline employees are generally not authorized to make such promises.
Charlie Hobart, a United spokesman, told me in an email that if it happened the way Jean said it did, the worker was misinformed. “Our agents understand our policies and work to support customers when their travel plans get disrupted,” he said.
This past Sunday, I thought of Jean as I waited in line at the Air France customer service counter after my wife and I missed our connection in Paris on the way home from Marrakesh, Morocco. The calm, professional worker said that if she was unable to book us on a same-day flight, we could submit hotel expenses for reimbursement.
But she stopped short of promising, and I knew why. Our itinerary connected through the European Union but did not start or end there, meaning that the European law requiring airlines to pay for a hotel after a missed connection would most likely not have applied.
She got us on the final flight of the day, which is good because here’s a rule you don’t need me to tell you: Last-minute hotel rooms in Paris don’t come cheap.
If you need advice about a best-laid travel plan that went awry, send an email to [email protected].
Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2025.
Seth Kugel is the columnist for “Tripped Up,” an advice column that helps readers navigate the often confusing world of travel.
The post Help! Can an Airline Really Do That to Me? appeared first on New York Times.
