Source: currently in that situation.

Plane tickets are non-refundable or changeable (unless you pay a huge premium for them). Hotels act like this is the first time they are interacting with foreigners and do not accept payment outside of their very specific local methods (like bank transfers, literally the simplest shit ever, but they only accept local banks).

I made an honest mistake booking some plane tickets on the wrong date, and I cannot change the dates now. Nope. Not even gonna look at the one button we need to click to update the database. Thanks for the money sucker please fly with us again.

We’re in a global pandemic, have been for 2 years, and the first thing hotels and airlines did was make sure to say that catching covid was not a valid reason for getting refunds.

This should literally be considered extortion. I gave ample time to both the airlines and hotels when cancelling (guess who caught covid 🙄) so they could sell the room or plane ticket to someone else, but it’s even more insidious. If you tell them you won’t show up they get to sell the room again and keep your money.

Why isn’t it extortion? Well, you can probably guess. Airlines lobby very hard to keep their service as shitty as possible. I didn’t live through the 70s but see how much better airlines were in those times: ample space, premium service. Prices were actually not that different from today (today you also pay a lot of airport taxes, the plane ticket itself is actually really cheap if you get a breakdown of the receipt).

So just to spite them, you are better off being no-show. Then they can’t double-dip, the fuckers.

But the worst was probably my own local rail company (somewhat publicly owned, as all train companies are now under neoliberalism) telling me I cannot get my tickets refunded even with covid. They are essentially saying Yes. Yes you should travel on the train with covid and infect everyone else – no more mask mandates or imposed quarantines here btw. So they don’t consider covid to prevent you from getting on that train.

And it’s not like this company is going bankrupt and they need to watch every cent. Far from it; service is getting both worse and more expensive year after year. Just so the private investors can buff up their portfolio and see dividends.

Thankfully I have travel insurance that I didn’t even know about, and they might be able to take care of refunding me the cancellations. They didn’t get back to me yet. But for the plane ticket I booked on the wrong date, I’m on my own apparently.

This is where capitalism gets us. Always chasing money, no matter the cost. If you could get money from squeezing people, literally squeezing them like you’re making the hardest snowball ever, they would do it to you without thinking twice.