Episode Details

Travel booms during the holiday season and between winter weather and large crowds, delays and cancelations are to be expected. U.S. airlines are not required by law to compensate passengers for flight delays, and refunds are only guaranteed for flights that are canceled. There are, however, things you can do to get some compensation for travel disruptions. On the latest episode of PennyWise, host Nat Cardona is joined by Sally French of NerdWallet who shares the script that worked for her to get compensation from airlines for cancelations and delays. 

Read more on NerdWallet here!

About this program

Nat Cardona is host of PennyWise as well as Lee Enterprise's true-crime podcast Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles. Lee Enterprises produces many national, regional and sports podcasts. Learn more here.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Welcome to Pennywise, a Lee Enterprises podcast. I'm your host Nat Cardona.

Ah, air travel. It's stressful at times, especially when you're hit with seemingly endless delays or a cancellation that will leave you sitting in an airport chair staring at that God awful carpet pattern while you wait. Nerdwallet Traveler Awards expert Sally French joins us today with two personal flight anecdotes that prove maybe, just maybe, you can be compensated for your time in trouble through your airline if you follow her script.

Sally we're talking about flight delays and two experiences that you had going off of a script to get compensation because of those two flights. So flight delays and cancellations happen. They seem like they're happening more and more often or more. Maybe people on social media are complaining about it. Whatever. Have you. So you're in the airport, your flight's delayed and delayed or delayed.

Let's talk about your anecdotes first and we can just pop in tips along the way. So just go for it.

Yes. So I've been caught up in two fairly significant flight delays this year. The first one happened because I was trying to fly from my home in Oakland, California, to Saint Louis, and I had a layover in Denver. So what happened is the flight departing from Oakland departed late, and it turned out that it ended up being so late that we missed the connecting flight to Saint Louis.

We missed it by just barely. In fact, 20 of my now closest friends who were also trying to make that connection. We ran off the first plane and we saw the plane taking off from the jet bridge and rolling on to the tarmac just there, and they couldn't wait for us. So what ended up happening is we got rebooked on the next departing flight.

But that meant an irritatingly long layover, many hours in the Denver airport, plus a 2 a.m. arrival time in Saint Louis was not ideal. So my question was, what can I do? What can I get out of this other? The flight was on Southwest and they did automatically rebook me to my next flight, but it was still pretty annoying.

So I headed to the customer service desk and I basically said, Hey, it's because this flight is leaning so late, my ride isn't going to be able to pick me up. Do you offer any sort of compensation? And they said, No, we can't get you a ride to your next destination, but how about we offer you an $100 voucher?

And I was