The toughest travel problem - a travel supplier based in a foreigncountry

The toughest travel problem
Ed Perkins on Travel
by Ed Perkins - April 3, 2008

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You prepay for an all-inclusive vacation in Mexico, but when you
arrive, instead of a dream vacation, you encounter a nightma air
conditioning that doesn't work, rooms full of mosquitoes, no hot
water, a surly staff that ignores your needs and instead hits on your
teenage daughters, and on and on. Your repeated complaints to the
hotel's management fall on deaf ears. After a few days, you decide
you've had enough and move to a different hotel. But the first hotel
refuses to refund the balance of your prepayment, and stonewalls your
further requests.

That's not a made-up scenario--a reader recently recounted it to me.
And it exemplifies the toughest situation for getting some resolution:
a travel supplier based in a foreign country that ignores your
requests and says, in effect, "you can't touch me, so go (fill in your
destination or activity of choice here)."
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With some foreign-based suppliers, you may have recourse, provided
that supplier has some kind of official corporate footprint in the
United States--a subsidiary, a parent company, a sales office, or such.
In those cases, if all else fails, you can file suit in regular or
small-claims court against whatever U.S. presence you can find.

But when the foreign supplier has no U.S. footprint, your options are
severely limited. And that's about the toughest travel nut to crack.
My lawyer friends say that attempting to file a court action in the
United States is futile.

If the amount of money is large enough, you might want to hire a
lawyer in the supplier's country to file a suit on your behalf. Just
the suit from a local lawyer might be enough to prod the supplier into
action. If not, and depending on circumstances, you would probably
have to show up in that country at least once during the legal
process. Keep in mind, also, that personal injury and other tort
claims typically do not result in the sorts of monetary awards that
are common here in the U.S. Even if you win, you might get very
little.

In most ordinary cases, your best approach is to try to find a base of
leverage. Your best chance for recovery, of course, is when you book a
resort (or air ticket, sightseeing tour, or whatever) through a U.S.-
based wholesale tour operator or other packager. In that case, you
stand a pretty good chance of recovery, or at least some sort of
compromise.

You may also find some leverage when you buy a travel service through
a U.S.-based booking system. My reader, for example, booked the hotel
through a large online booking site based in the United States, so one
approach is to bring some pressure on that site. Chances are that a
large booking site will have a good bit more clout with a big foreign
resort than an individual customer. Your hope is that the site would
exert some pressure on the supplier to rectify the problem. Don't
start with a court claim, but hold that possibility in reserve. You'd
take the same approach if you booked through a tour operator for an
airline package. As of now, my reader is still exploring this avenue.

If you can't find a U.S.-based seller, you can complain to the tourist
office that represents the country, region, or city where the problem
occurred. You can take a chance with one of the travel ombudsman
features, but you have to figure they respond to only a tiny fraction
of the complaints they receive. And unless the supplier actually
failed to give you a room (or flight, or rental car, etc.), you won't
have much luck with a credit-card chargeback.

Beyond those options, about all you can do is to try and give the
supplier a black eye. That means posting an unfavorable review on a
user-generated hotel-review site such as TripAdvisor, or one or two of
the more general online gripe sites.

I wish I could end on a more upbeat note, but the sad fact is that,
for the most part, prying compensation out of a foreign supplier
ranges from difficult to impossible. Be forewarned.

(Editor's Note: SmarterTravel.com is published by Smarter Travel Media
LLC, a member of the TripAdvisor Media Network.)

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