Dear Tripped Up,

Last Sept. 26, I booked a ski trip for my family at a Sheraton Vacation Club property in Steamboat Springs, Colo., for December — or so I thought. As soon as I saw the confirmation email, I realized I had actually booked a reservation for that very night, Sept. 26. I assume the dates somehow reset as I navigated the website. I canceled the reservation exactly two minutes after purchase and went about my business, bailing water out of my basement as Hurricane Helene approached our home in the Asheville, N.C., area. We soon lost power for days, and in early October, when I got back online, I found a $560 charge on my credit card for the canceled reservation. I twice called the customer service number listed on the email but could never reach anyone, so I disputed the charge through my credit card, but lost. I have nearly given up. Can you help? Allison, Candler, N.C.

Dear Allison,

Federal rules require airlines to refund any reservations canceled within 24 hours of booking. Does a similar law exist for hotel rooms and vacation rentals?

No. But if it did, it wouldn’t have helped you anyway, because of the nature of your error. The 24-hour cancellation rule for airfare applies only if you book a flight seven or more days in the future; you booked a room for mere hours before your (mistaken) travel dates.

This was a very specific kind of slip-up — and an easy one to make on reservation sites where the arrival date defaults to the present day instead of a date a week later or (very helpfully) a blank field. For those who err in other ways, such as getting the month wrong or confusing Monterey, Calif., with Monterrey, Mexico, most properties offer penalty-free cancellation up to two, seven or even 30 days before check-in, terms that are usually pretty clear on websites. I noticed that the reservation email you received from the Sheraton Steamboat Resort Villas in Steamboat Springs on Sept. 26 said you were free to cancel until Sept. 23, which would have been perfect if you had a time machine.

But should you be punished for such a mistake, especially one you caught, as your documentation shows, in literally two minutes?

It turns out that you would most likely have received a reimbursement if you had called rather than clicked on the cancel option in the reservation email, said Kate Sandossi, a spokeswoman for the Marriott Vacation Clubs, which owns Sheraton Vacation Club (and, by the way, split from the hotel conglomerate Marriott International in 2011). Nevertheless, she said, the company has now granted you a refund.

“While there are some exceptions based on individual locations and special events, guests can cancel a reservation without penalty within 24 hours of booking,” she wrote me in an email. She recommended customers “call the specific resort directly” if they are unable to resolve an issue by calling customer service.

Other major players in hospitality, including BWH Hotels (owners of Best Western) and Expedia Group (whose brands include Hotels.com and Travelocity) said they followed similar, though unwritten, policies.

So where did things go wrong here, aside from your initial error? You thought, not unreasonably, that clicking on a cancellation button would automatically get you your money back. But in these situations, travelers should never assume human logic and corporate-reservation-system logic are the same. Even I, a customer service skeptic, bet that if you had called right away instead of clicking, you would have gotten a refund or at least been able to change the dates to match your December plans.

When you did finally call, about 11 days later, I think you still had a good shot at reversing the error, but here comes your biggest mistake: not waiting long enough on hold. According to phone records you sent me, you waited 14 minutes the first time you called and then 20 minutes the second, and last, time. It pains me to say that in 2025, that isn’t long enough. You should have given them at least 45 minutes or even an hour, during which you could presumably have done chores, taken a walk or, worst-case scenario, caught up on past Tripped Up columns.

Or you could have tried again at a different time. When I tested the same number twice at different times of day, I got through once right away, and once after six minutes on hold. You could have also called the resort directly, as Ms. Sandossi suggested after the fact; that number, which appears on the page where you reserved, also got me through to someone quickly.

Instead, you went the credit card chargeback route. Regular readers know how I feel about that, and here’s why: I read at least a dozen emails a month from the Tripped Up inbox that end with some variation of “Even though I’ve been a loyal cardholder since 2003, the bank sided with the company! I should have known [insert well-known financial institution] and [insert major travel industry player] were in cahoots!”

But the real reason is that the credit card issuers’ investigative powers are limited. Chargebacks work best for very specific and straightforward circumstances, such as shamelessly unauthorized transactions, blatant nondelivery of goods and services (especially useful when a company goes bankrupt), and duplicate charges. Anything more complex is a long shot unless a company is unambiguously in violation of its terms and conditions (and you cite the specific clause) or you get lucky and the company doesn’t respond to the card issuer. Don’t think you’ve won when you initially get a refund; that’s part of the standard process and is very often short-lived.

Let’s end with some good news, at least for readers in Brazil. Unlike the United States and the European Union, domestic travelers in Brazil have a week from booking online to cancel with no penalty. The applies not just to hotels but to Airbnbs, and most other goods and services purchased on the internet.

At airports and land borders across the country, tourists and other visitors coming to the United States have reported being caught up in the Trump administration’s campaign of “enhanced vetting.” Even legal immigrants, like green card holders, and naturalized citizens have been pulled aside for additional questioning and searches.

This has prompted questions about best practices for crossing into the United States, travelers’ rights at the border, and the legality of device and luggage searches.

Here are some things to know before you visit or return to the United States, as a tourist, legal resident or citizen.

Are you a visitor with a visa or ESTA? It should align with your travel plans.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, U.S. border officials have “wide-ranging discretion” to deny entry. That decision can be made based on suspicion that the person is entering the country for a purpose other than what their visa or Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) says — for example, they have a tourist visa, but it seems like they may be planning to work.

“We’ve seen people detained just for saying they’re ‘Open to Work’ on LinkedIn,” said Michael Wildes, the New Jersey-based immigration lawyer who handled Melania Trump’s immigration to the United States. “That serves as proof that they’re not just going to Disneyland or to a wedding.”

Cheryl David, an immigration lawyer in New York City, stressed that no rules have changed when it comes to entering the United States, but she said, there is now a clear “zero tolerance policy.”

This year, the family of Becky Burke, a 28-year-old British tourist, said she was stopped at the U.S. border in Washington State on her way to a work-exchange trip, where she planned to trade house chores for free accommodations. While no money changed hands, those arrangements could still be seen as work, which would violate the terms of a tourist visa. Ms. Burke ended up detained for 19 days before she was deported to Britain.

While detaining prospective tourists is rare, deportations because of incorrect travel documentation is not.

If questions arise regarding passengers’ travel documents, border officials can pull them out of line and submit them to additional screening, at which point luggage and electronic devices such as laptops and cellphones can be searched.

Even green card holders and naturalized citizens may be subject to more screening.

U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents cannot be denied entry to the country for refusing to hand over their devices, but such a refusal could still lead to a longer customs process, the A.C.L.U. said.

Catherine, 67, a naturalized citizen who moved to the United States 45 years ago, said she had never been selected for additional questioning when coming through immigration, but that since the start of the Trump administration she has been stopped twice for reasons that remain unclear to her. Catherine asked to be identified by only her middle name, because of her fears that her naturalized status could be revoked for speaking out.

Most recently, Catherine was returning from Argentina when she and her husband were stopped at an airport in Dallas. Border control there was automated, with passengers scanning passports to get through gates, but when it came time to take a photograph, a big red X flashed on the screen for Catherine. Her husband spoke to border officials, and the couple eventually got through.

Travelers’ social media, text chats and other history on their devices can be searched.

Because border control technically exists outside the United States, travelers with visas or those with ESTAs have limited ability to push back against searches of their electronic devices, according to the A.C.L.U., and if they do, they risk being denied entry.

There are generally two types of searches of an electronic device: manual and advanced, said Tom McBrien, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an internet privacy nonprofit in Washington. Manual searches involve looking through an unlocked phone. Courts have generally seen this as equivalent to going through luggage and have allowed manual searches to proceed without obtaining a warrant, Mr. McBrien said.

An advanced, or “forensic” search, involves hooking up an external device to your phone to scan its contents. Some federal districts require a warrant for this, while others do not, Mr. McBrien said.

Mr. McBrien and other privacy experts recommend deleting anything you wouldn’t want someone to read or see from your device before your arrival.

Mr. McBrien also said that he recommends his clients disable the Face ID or Touch ID features on their iPhones, so that it takes more than an officer waving a phone in front of their face or placing their finger on it to open it. Even better, he said, is to turn off your phone before going through border control, because phones tend to require your full passcode when turned back on.

If you refuse to unlock your phone when asked, authorities can seize it and will most likely need to obtain a warrant to open it, he added. However, visitors can be denied entry to the United States for refusing to unlock their phone.

However, Mr. Wildes, the New Jersey-based immigration lawyer, said that the main thing border patrol officers look for is consistency.

If a forensic search shows a deactivated social media account, officials may ask for it to be reactivated, Mr. Wildes said. If an email account was recently deleted, they can request to access it.

Social media has become a major issue, he added, for “so many people who don’t realize how actionable it can be.”

Ms. David, the immigration lawyer, recalled a client with a student visa who was denied entry to the United States during the Biden administration because he had photos on his phone of him posing with guns, which officials interpreted as a threat to the United States, she said.

The best thing to do, Mr. Wildes said, is to be honest and also be aware of the laws.

If you do get in trouble at the border, he said, the best move for visitors may be to withdraw your intention to enter the United States. In most cases, you can return to your home country.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2025.

On a recent visit to Shanghai, I looked up through the canopy of trees in the former French Concession district, and realized the sky was not the customary gray but a bright blue.

At a busy intersection near Wukang Mansion, a century-old landmark reminiscent of New York City’s Flatiron Building, the scene was oddly quiet, as barely audible electric cars and bikes whizzed by.

And along a particularly hip stretch of Huaihai Road that would usually attract as many foreigners as locals, domestic tourists strolled along sidewalks empty of trash.

After a lifetime of loving Shanghai in spite of its pollution, noise and mess, I felt like I had taken off my rose-colored glasses only to discover that the city had turned pink.

Last year, China began opening after its long pandemic closure. It began offering visa-free and transit-visa programs, setting up all-in-one apps like WeChat and Alipay to accept international credit cards and instructing hotels to welcome foreigners again.

In December, the country expanded and simplified the visa program, allowing travelers from 54 countries, including the United States, to enter visa-free for up to 10 days if in transit to another country. (Standard-issue tourist visas, which require an in-person consulate visit and allow you to stay longer, are still an option). It also increased the number of transit-visa entry cities to 60 and is now letting visitors travel freely between them.

All that is designed to make China easier to visit, but on my two-week stay I discovered a place that in some ways was more difficult to navigate. With proper planning and patience, though, visitors to Shanghai will discover a city just as varied and sophisticated in its post-lockdown character.

The country’s near-total transition to app-based life has brought incredible convenience to locals, but has also created a new barrier for travelers.

Before, businesses often had multi-language signs or websites; now, almost everything is digitized and consolidated onto the apps. I have the advantage of speaking Chinese, even if my reading abilities are limited, but for most visitors, this shift will prove challenging.

As usual, I downloaded a VPN service before my arrival, allowing me to bypass China’s “Great Firewall” and access blocked websites, including Google. I also added the messaging platform WeChat and the payment app Alipay and, crucially, made sure they accepted my credit card before my trip.

Both apps are required for the most basic of functions, such as hailing rides or ordering at restaurants. The first few times I pulled up Alipay for a transaction, by either scanning an establishment’s QR code or letting them scan mine, the app was glitchy and slow, but by day two, it was working — most of the time.

One day, I strolled Tianzifang, a maze of narrow alleys lined with converted mid-19th-century shikumen homes, a style of courtyard residence distinct to Shanghai. Some are still occupied by residents, but many are now filled with crafts shops, contemporary art galleries and food stalls that sell everything from crab shell pies to fried stinky tofu.

When I tried to buy a qipao, a traditional silk dress, the vendor’s QR reader wouldn’t accept my code. After multiple failed attempts, including a last-resort swipe of my foreign card that no one expected to work, we both gave up. I would have offered to pay in cash, but I hadn’t gotten any after being told that most businesses no longer accept it, a reality affirmed by the most humble of street-food vendors using Alipay.

Within Alipay are various other essential apps, including ride-hailing Didi, ubiquitous enough that it’s now impossible to physically hail cabs. The rides are so affordable — around 200 yuan ($27) for an hourlong ride from the airport, and often a few dollars for inner-city trips — that I rarely took the metro. Use of Didi comes with slight barriers for visitors: Drivers are only allowed to stop in approved areas and confirm riders by asking for the last four digits of their phone numbers instead of their names.

Many language-related issues can be resolved by using WeChat and Alipay’s translation functions, which interpret app features as well as images and speech. I found the tools most helpful at hole-in-the-wall restaurants whose menus wouldn’t have featured English even before the pandemic. At a seafood spot in Zhujiajiao, an ancient water town turned living museum on the city’s outskirts, the tool helped me discover dishes for which I wouldn’t previously have been able to read the Chinese characters.

Other travel infrastructure has also been slow to adjust. Though hotels have been instructed to accept foreign cards, it’s best to stay at an international brand or to call to reserve a room at a boutique hotel to ensure the payment process goes smoothly. Some online booking platforms will accept a card, only for the hotel to not accept payment upon arrival. This, along with other changes, such as the now-ubiquitous surveillance cameras, can feel discordant with the country’s desire for more visitors.

A New Waterfront

Along with growing outward, Shanghai continues to create new pockets of character at its centers. One example is along Suzhou Creek, a tributary of Shanghai’s central Huangpu River. The creek begins just north of the Bund, the waterfront promenade that continues to function as the city’s tourism focal point, home to a Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurant and almost every big-name hotel.

For decades, the areas along Suzhou Creek housed Shanghai’s industry, which moved outside the city in the 1980s, leaving behind run-down warehouses and a polluted waterway. But a $5 billion revitalization of the creek concluded in 2020, and at its heart is a 26-mile pathway that acts as a green link connecting both established and new arts and culture spots.

At the confluence of the creek and river is the recently opened Regent Shanghai on the Bund, a 135-room hotel with gilded interiors and views of the Bund’s Art Deco facades to the south, Pudong’s glassy skyline to the east and Suzhou Creek’s casual charm to the west (from $380 a night).

I spent a day biking westward from this point, stopping first at Rockbund, a series of alleyways flanked by red brick buildings containing galleries, shops and restaurants. At the center of it all is the Rockbund Art Museum, showcasing genre-bending works by Asian artists.

On my way to the newly opened Fotografiska, an outpost of Stockholm’s photography museum, for lunch at its all-day bistro Mona, I passed the former General Post Office building and the Sihang Warehouse, an important site of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which took place from 1937 to 1945.

I followed lunch with a drink across the creek at Beer Lady, a cavernous space lined with fridges and taps of brews from more than 50 countries, before spending an hour wandering the graffiti-covered lanes of M50, where assorted galleries fill former cotton mills and factories. The day’s final stop was 1,000 Trees, a complex created by the British designer Thomas Heatherwick that houses an over-the-top mall.

The city’s other visitor strongholds were bustling but free of the crowds I was used to. At Yuyuan, a Ming dynasty-era garden surrounded by a bazaar and teahouses, the wait for soup dumplings at famed Nanxiang Steamed Bun took a fraction of the usual time.

Crowds were also sparse in the restaurant and shopping hub of Jing An, except for the Friday night I spent at INS, a new nightlife complex in Fuxing Park. It offers music-festival-like access to all kinds of venues for a single entrance fee, and has been a hit post-lockdown with locals looking to dance more and spend less.

Growing Access

For travelers who want to see more of the country, it’s now possible to reach most of the country’s provinces by bullet train. I took the train from Shanghai to nearby Nanjing, an experience that was so easy and comfortable that it felt illusory.

Even Beijing is now only 4.5 hours by train, compared to the previous 12-hour drive or 2.5-hour flight. International travelers taking the bullet train for the first time have to present their passport in person at the train station to be able to purchase a ticket; following trips can be booked directly through Alipay.

This new ease of access made me excited to come back and see more of the country, but some of the remaining hurdles left me feeling like China’s reality hasn’t quite caught up to its tourism goals.

After two weeks, my Mandarin was regaining fluency, and so was my ability to use the apps. The city beneath the surface felt just within reach.

Firemen from Highland Beach, Fla., were heading to a conference in Miami, a money manager to his office in Boca Raton. Families with young children wearing Mickey Mouse ears and toting Little Mermaid backpacks, filled the train’s sun-soaked four-seaters on their way to or from Disney cruises and various theme parks.

Florida, of all places, has been rebooting intercity passenger rail travel in America. Back in the late 19th century, the oil tycoon Henry Flagler built a railroad down the state’s Atlantic coast that fast-tracked Florida’s growth and put cities like Miami and Palm Beach on the map. Then the automobile proliferated.

Now a privately owned service called Brightline, operating on Flagler’s old line, is making a 21st-century pitch for the enduring virtues of train travel, moving passengers 235 miles between Miami and Orlando, with a few stops in between, and hopes to reach Tampa.

The company is pursuing a second service, too: a $12.4 billion, 218-mile, all-electric train that will link Las Vegas with Los Angeles, or more precisely, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., where riders can connect with the California Metrolink to L.A. It aims to be America’s first genuine high-speed rail. The project, unlike the one in Florida, whose construction costs have nearly all been paid by Brightline, has received $3 billion in promised federal grants. The company’s hope was to have service up and running before the 2028 Summer Olympics in L.A. The goal now, according to Brightline officials, is the end of 2028.

With intercity rail travel struggling in America, is a private company the fix? It’s a truism that trains are potent engines of urban and economic development. But can they make money?

These questions arise as the Trump administration targets public services like Amtrak and New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, threatening to pull federal funding. A potential calamity for millions of American commuters, and the economies they support, the threat also creates an opportunity for private railroads to stage a comeback.

During the mid-1800s, three private companies, exploiting migrant labor, completed the first transcontinental railroad in six years, the 19th-century equivalent of a moonshot. Private passenger rail in America chugged along for another century, until airplanes and the interstate highway system crippled the business. Congress stepped in during the 1970s, establishing Amtrak, which took over the last remaining private intercity passenger train — the Rio Grande Zephyr between Denver and Salt Lake City — during the Reagan era.

Today, Amtrak’s ridership is up after years of decline, but its annual operating deficit last year topped $700 million. The state of California has proposed a bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco, that is now years behind, tangled up in regulatory and legal battles, and staring at a price tag north of $100 billion, without a clear strategy to raise the money.

Nearly every public metro, commuter and intercity train, aside from Amtrak’s Acela service between Boston and Washington, runs at a deficit. Brightline has itself been spending hundreds of millions of dollars more than it is earning, because of build-out costs, its officials say. But they predict the service should “approach break even” this year or next.

The company is the brainchild of Wes Edens, the billionaire co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks. Mr. Edens co-founded the Fortress Investment Group, whose freight rail acquisitions include Flagler’s old Florida East Coast Railway. After coming across a book about Flagler’s train a little more than a decade ago, Mr. Edens had the idea for Brightline.

This was around the same time that Florida’s then-governor, Rick Scott, a Republican, rejected $2.4 billion the Obama administration offered the state to undertake high-speed passenger service between Tampa and Orlando. Mr. Scott said the train would be too costly to operate.

Mr. Edens’s private line sped ahead. Crucially, the company owned its rights of way, avoiding the long, costly property battles that have plagued California’s high-speed train. “That was “a crucial advantage,” Mr. Edens said.

Construction began in 2014. Passengers started boarding a little more than three years later.

The news hasn’t all been rosy. Some Floridians have taken to calling Brightline the Death Train because more than 100 people have died crossing the tracks. Nonetheless, Brightline attracted three million riders in Florida last year, and expects to serve four million this year, double that number by 2028. Its Orlando station, in leased space at the airport, opened late in 2023. More than a million customers have since ridden the train between Orlando and Miami.

“A breeze,” is how Joanna Cheng described the experience when we met en route one morning. She and her two young children had flown to Fort Lauderdale from New York City to visit friends on their way to a gymnastics competition in Orlando. They had planned to drive, but Ms. Cheng’s rental car reservation was canceled when her flight out of New York was delayed.

At the suggestion of a stranger in the rental car line, she checked out Brightline’s app. The service prices its tickets dynamically. Premium seats, with more room and meals included, can top $300. But prices across all routes average $55. Thanks to online discounts, the train ended up being not just quicker and more convenient but cheaper than a car.

“We lucked out,” Ms. Cheng said. “It reminds me of trains in Europe.”

That was Mr. Edens’s hope: for Brightline to be compared to services like Eurostar and Italo. It’s not high-speed rail. But the company leans into customer-friendly service and good design, having hired Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the global architecture firm, to design its imposing hub called MiamiCentral, and enlisting the New York-based Rockwell Group to design efficient, stylish stations and roomy, tech-friendly cars offering in-seat dining.

Brightline still isn’t on the level of the most luxurious, faster European and Japanese rail lines, but it is a leap above Amtrak and most commuter lines that Americans ride. Whether the business is financially viable remains a topic of much speculation and some schadenfreude in transit circles.

Like Flagler’s railway, Brightline is, in truth, not just a train but also a real estate venture. The company has built, then sold, three towers on top of MiamiCentral and another next door, and also erected then sold an apartment complex near its station in West Palm Beach. West Palm and Boca have become boom towns for high-end development along a coastal corridor now serviced by Brightline.

In Las Vegas, Brightline West, as the Los Angeles-to-Vegas service is called, will arrive at a new terminal on the Strip where the company has purchased more than 100 acres it plans to develop.

“In hindsight,” Mr. Edens told me, “if I could do one thing again I would buy all the land around the stations.”

But, of course, a private rail outfit gets to cherry-pick its stops and routes. It exists to benefit stockholders. Public railroads serve a wide public, including people in places where stations may not be profitable. Privatizing intercity rail travel across the country in lieu of any public service would disenfranchise vast swathes of the country.

“We’re at a moment when funding is getting frozen,” observed Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City’s former transportation commissioner, “so we need as many new models of transit service as we can get. Brightline is one. It’s great, not just for getting around but for economic growth around stations.

“But,” Ms. Sadik-Khan added, “a private company doesn’t have the same priorities or obligations as public systems.”

Mr. Edens sees future, potentially profitable opportunities for high-speed trains between other heavily trafficked pairs of cities that are now long drives but a pain to fly, like Charlotte to Atlanta or Dallas to Houston. Brightline West’s business plan imagines converting 8.6 million of the 50 million people a year driving or flying between Los Angeles and Vegas. That should cut travel times for passengers and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by some 325,000 tons a year, company officials say, and also make money.

.

In Florida, I spoke with Brightline commuters who grumbled about the cost. But I didn’t meet a passenger who complained about the ride. Walt Gates, resplendent in a Razorback T-shirt, had flown in from Little Rock with his wife, Lydia, for a Disney cruise in Miami with their daughter and son-in-law.

I ran into them on Brightline to Orlando. “I have lost so many hours of my life driving the highway between Little Rock and Memphis,” Mr. Gates said.

He had a message for Mr. Edens: “We could use one of these in Arkansas.”

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2025.

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