When a family member is ill and you need to make emergency travel arrangements, two things are important: getting there quickly, and not emptying your entire wallet to make those last-minute arrangements. One traveler on Allegiant Air thought that he had beat the system and made fast travel arrangements while saving money, but it wasn’t that simple. He ended up stranded with no recourse to get a refund.

In this case, we can legitimately blame the consumer for what went wrong. He booked a multi-leg trip from Stockton, California to Bentonville, Alabama. Unfortunately, he booked each ticket separately, and not as part of a multi-leg journey. That isn’t a problem as long as every flight departs and arrives on time. How often does that happen?

The passenger didn’t know that booking each leg of the trip separately means just that: each ticket is separate. The airline has no obligation to get him on another flight or refund his ticket if his flight to Las Vegas is late and he misses a connection.

In order to get the airline to put him on a new flight or refund the ticket of the flight he missed, he needed to buy the ticket as a multi-leg journey.

Even the intercession of Sacramento super consumer reporter Kurtis Ming wasn’t enough. Allegiant wouldn’t budge. “If customers choose to create connections within our network … they do so at their own risk,” they told the news station.

Lesson learned? Yep. If you’re reading this, file this fact away in your brain and you may not have to learn this expensive lesson.

Call Kurtis: Why How You Book Could Ruin Your Trip [CBS Sacramento]

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