Brian Lairer on WNYC, and to close out several of our shows this week, we're talking travel

tips with a travel expert.

It's Brian Kelly, who founded the travel website, The Points Guy in 2010.

His work focuses on finding the best travel deals and specifically how to leverage credit card

points for travel, but also not overspent. In his new book, How to Win at Travel, he provides

a broad range of advice, everything from budgeting for travel to

handling flight anxiety and what to do if your flight is delayed or canceled. So we're taking

advantage of his knowledge on a few different things this week. Yesterday, we talked about how to

budget and save money on booking flights, and we continue now with how to win a travel when travel goes wrong.

Thanks again for doing this with us, Brian. Welcome back to WNYC.

Thanks for having me.

And this chapter of your book gets into your rights as a traveler, and those are governed,

I see, by two different forces, the first being the contract of carriage, as it's called,

the agreement you signed with the airline, and they vary, I see, from airline to airline, but are there any general

protections or not really? Not really, unfortunately. That's the bad news. In the U.S., we don't

have a passenger bill of rights like they do in Europe that, you know, specifies compensation when things go wrong. Our Department of Transportation under President

Biden did push through in the last year. At least consumers, if the flights delayed three plus

hours, they're owed a refund if they don't want to travel. Same thing for canceled flights.

The airline cannot give you a voucher. You are owed a cash refund when you request it if what they offer to you is not what you want to take. So it's always good to know you can at least get a refund, but that doesn't fill the gap of getting you to where you need to go or compensating you for hotels, ubers, etc. So consumers need to either get travel insurance, which will cover the gap or use credit cards.

So many travel credit cards come with trip delay and cancellation coverage, meaning if your airline strands you overnight, don't wait in that hour-long line begging for a motel six free night. Your credit

card will pay up to $500 or $1,000 per person traveling for hotels, meals, and everything in

between. You say travel credit cards. What about if we have credit cards that are not explicitly

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