Finding help with your travel complaint

All too often, travel suppliers stonewall your legitimate complaints, knowing that you have little recourse against giant corporations. A few government agencies and trade associations offer limited assistance to consumers, and several enterprising businesses have mounted independent complaint forums. Unfortunately, while it's easy to compile complaints, finding someone to help you with your problem is far more difficult. Here's my run-down of third-party complaint options.

Government

The Department of Transportation's Aviation Consumer Protection Division accepts complaints about airlines from individual travelers, compiles them, computes complaint scores, and publishes those scores for the bigger U.S. airlines. Although it does not mediate individual consumer complaints, reports about a widespread practice may lead to additional investigation and possible enforcement action.

The Federal Maritime Commission accepts complaints from travelers and provides some "assistance in resolving their problems" with cruise lines, although it cautions that the provisions of the contract between traveler and cruise line exclude many complaints. Submit a complaint through FMC.gov.

No government agency of which I am aware deals with complaints about hotels, rental cars, or other travel services.

Trade associations

The American Association of Travel Agents mediates disputes between travelers and individual travel agencies—but only agencies that are ASTA members. The U.S. Tour Operators Association forwards complaints to individual member operators, but does not promise mediation. To my knowledge, trade associations for airlines, cruise lines, rental car companies, and other travel suppliers provide no assistance whatsoever to consumers with complaints against their members.

Independent assistance services

Of the very few services that actually go to bat for travelers, Conde Nast Traveler's "Ombudsman" feature is undoubtedly the best known. Generally, in each issue of the magazine, the Ombudsman column reports on a traveler's complaint and its resolution. Send your complaint to Ombudsman, Conde Nast Traveler, 4 Times Square, New York, NY 10036. I found no online submission form. Travel writer Chris Elliott has performed a similar service through several venues over the last few years; currently his most accessible forum is the website The Travel Troubleshooter at Elliott.org. Some TV and radio stations in major markets air consumer programs that take up travel complaints along with all sorts of others.

The upside to these services is their excellent track record in reaching a satisfactory settlement—even when the supplier initially stonewalled the complaint. The downside is that they accept only a very small number of complaints. And it's clear that, absent third-party intervention, the suppliers would have provided no redress whatsoever, no matter how justified the complaint.

Gripe sites

Several websites provide some combination of complaint services to travelers: submission of complaints, posting and indexing those complaints, forwarding airline complaints to the DOT's consumer office, providing addresses for and links to complaint offices of major travel suppliers, providing general advice about submitting complaints, and providing guidance about travelers' rights. Among them are Airsafe's How to Complain about Your Airline Service, Complaints.com, ConsumerAffairs.com, My3Cents.com, My Travel Rights, Planet Feedback, and TravelDirt.

As the names indicate, some are specific to travel; others handle complaints in a variety of markets. Unfortunately, none of them provides any meaningful follow-up or assistance in problem resolution: At best, your complaint will give the supplier a black eye among a small audience—which the supplier may or may not ever note, much less take any action.

Last resort

Giving a supplier a black mark may be as far as you want to take an unresolved complaint. But if you want real redress, there's no substitute for legal action—a lawsuit for a big complaint, small claims court for a small one.