You are listening to this is Cruise Radio Rewind. Real reviews from real cruisers.

Journalist, author, and consumer advocate, Chris Elliott from Elliott.org, joins us on the program today to tackle a hot button topic.

Travel refunds. Welcome, Chris.

Hey, thanks a lot for having me.

Yeah, man. So your website, which is a great resource, by the way, Elliott.org, is entirely consumer-focused.

So before we jump into these questions, what have you been hearing from travelers when it comes to asking about refunds?

Well, what I'm hearing is that the travel companies don't want to give them any refunds.

You know, in its simplest form, these companies

are trying to conserve cash. They're not able to sell any future vacations, whether that's a cruise

or an airline ticket or even a vacation rental. So what they're trying to do is persuade all of us to take credits instead of

taking the refund to which we are often entitled. How about when it comes to taking the refund

or using the future travel credit? What are your thoughts there? The short answer is take the money.

The long answer, though, is look, there are a lot of companies, especially smaller companies that are suffering right now, some tour operators that if everyone asks for a refund, they're going to go under. And so you should probably be mindful of that. Travel agents are really, really suffering. So if you're dealing with the mom and pop operation and they say, look, could we do a credit

and maybe take this vacation later?

It's something that you should think about.

But at the same time, you're not responsible for a company's finances, and there is a good chance that some of the companies that are

out there right now are going to go out of business soon and so you don't want to be the one holding

a worthless credit so my advice would be always take the credit take the refund don't take the

credit and if you want to book the vacation later, you can do it,

you know, using good old-fashioned money instead of using a voucher. In terms of recourse in using a

credit or a debit card, is one better than the other? Yeah, if you pay by credit card, you're

projected under the Fair Credit Billing Act. And that allows you to do things like dispute a charge within

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