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Travel: Hidden Fees and Quick Fixes

By Christopher Elliott When it comes to new travel fees, the sky’s the limit. Or, in Liz Pollock’s case, the fourth floor of her hotel. Pollock recently checked out of the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Golf Resort Palm Springs Area in Cathedral City, Calif., and discovered a mysterious fee on her hotel bill: a “top-floor” surcharge of […]

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Trip Insurance Trip-ups? Surprising Finds

  By Christopher Elliott Trip insurance with a preexisting condition? Refund on a nonrefundable ticket? What’s possible might surprise you. Connie Matlin wants to do the impossible: buy travel insurance for what she thinks is an uninsurable trip. “My family and I would like to travel to Europe this summer,” explains Matlin, a financial planner […]

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Stuck at the Airport? See EU261 Passenger Rights

  A flight compensation company for passenger rights has found that in 2017 more than 1 million passengers traveling from the US may be entitled to over $555 million in airline compensation due to missed connecting flights.

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Best and Worst Airlines: Passengers Weigh In

Airline travel. For most passengers, just the sound of it allows jolts of PTSD to crack into consciousness. It has become a constant struggle to avoid ultra-tight seating, hefty luggage fees, and itinerary-wrecking delays – a veritable crap shoot on every flight. But a small number of carriers try to deliver consistently good travel experiences, […]

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10 Travel Tips for Surviving Winter Storms

Whether it’s during a winter “Bomb Cyclone” or damaging ice storms and heavy winds, weather has taken its toll on many travelers these last few months. Flight delays and cancellations stall travel throughout the U.S. as “nor’easters” sweep through New York and Washington DC, cause coastal flooding in Boston and other parts of the mid-Atlantic seaboard, and virtually shutter Amtrak […]

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Romancing the World: Luxe Travel Tips

  While Valentine’s Day may be synonymous with romance in some circles, romantic vacations can last well beyond the bounds of Cupid’s arrows. The luxury travel experts with Travel Leaders Group offer five destination tips for romancing couples seeking an intimate getaway, along with ways they can add spice to their life, regardless of when they travel.

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What are the Best Hotels in the World?

  How do you pick the best hotels in the world? First it depends on where they are. Second, it may help to have a way of sifting through data on 24,000 luxury hotels across the USA, Europe, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean for starters. Fortunately, the numbers crunchers at U.S. News & World Report had […]

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Air Travel 2018: Survival Guide

By Christopher Elliott If you thought 2017 was a challenging year for airline passengers, just wait until you see what’s ahead. That’s the consensus of airline experts, consumer advocates and frequent travelers. They say the domestic airlines have charted a course for this year that includes more fees and ticket restrictions and, inevitably, additional confrontations […]

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Got Tickets? Why Use a Travel Agent

Do travel agents earn their keep? Travel Leaders certainly thinks so. At the recent New York Times Travel Show, the travel agent network listed the following reasons clients choose to stick with their travel advisors rather than go it alone:

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Travel 2018: What Lies Ahead

by Bill Becken Travel is becoming less a discretionary activity and more of a necessity, especially if you subscribe to Abraham Maslow’s theory that puts human needs in a hierarchical pyramid. As such, once the basics of food, shelter and safety are in hand, the more complex needs of sharing, belonging, self-esteem and self-actualization take […]