Forgoing Forgiveness to Right a Company’s Wrong : Consumers: Two incidents show that with pluck and good manners, you can often turn the inevitable service slip-ups into small victories.

Things go wrong in life and in travel--especially in travel. And because a traveler is almost always preoccupied by where he’s going or where he’s been, many are inclined to let things slide, to let airlines and hotels and others get away with shortcomings that shouldn’t be forgotten.

For years I was one of those forgiving, forgetting travelers. I endured an oversight here and a small extra charge there, vowed to fight or complain later, then got back to home and office, and forgot.

Now that I’m no longer one of those travelers, my life on the road sometimes seems like one consumer case study after another. Sometimes, a wronged traveler can get full satisfaction (see the rental-car case below), sometimes that traveler can get partial satisfaction (see the hotel case), and sometimes the only thing to do is accept defeat, take your business elsewhere next time and say nasty things to all who will listen about the company that done you wrong. Here are two case studies from the last two months:

In late March, my wife and I used a city reservation service to book a night at the Bahia Hotel in San Diego. When we showed up and were led to our room, we smelled tobacco. Either the reservation service or the hotel had forgotten that we were nonsmokers.

When we asked for another room, the front desk clerk told us there were no others available at the hotel. That was theoretically possible; this was a spring weekend, and the Bahia, though its physical facilities are unremarkable, has a great bay-front, beach-adjacent location. But the smell in our room wasn’t getting any sweeter, and we decided to bail out. At the front desk around 5 p.m., I explained that we were going elsewhere and that we obviously didn’t expect to be charged. The man at the desk agreed and checked us out; we found a smoke-free room in another (more expensive) hotel; and that, we figured, was that.

Then three weeks later our American Express bill came, along with mistake No. 2. There among the charges was the Bahia Hotel and a fee for a night’s stay. I called the hotel’s sales department to firmly but politely protest, and the representative pledged that a credit would be issued to zero out the mistaken billing. So it was.

But we were left with an empty sort of satisfaction: True, we didn’t sleep in a stinky room and we didn’t pay any mistaken charges, but we ended up laying out more for lodging than we had planned, and I had to waste my time correcting the hotel’s bookkeeping. It just didn’t feel like a victory.

A few weeks later, we flew to Wilmington, N.C., to visit friends. Planning on a tight budget, I called Avis’ toll-free number and arranged to use frequent-flier coupons to get two days of rental car usage for the price of one.

Then came the night of arrival. We strolled up to the airport Avis counter, and a poker-faced clerk explained, as if this happened quite regularly, that the company’s offer only applies to subcompact cars, and that the Wilmington Avis branch didn’t have any subcompacts. Thus, she said, we had to pay for both days. The same sort of exchange followed when we returned the car.

So I called the Avis service department a day later. I got a very polite representative who conceded that the service had handled this problem before. She’d be happy to credit me for the day’s rental, she said.

I thought about the Bahia in San Diego. Then I said that I appreciated their offer but that I didn’t think it was quite enough. Since Avis had unnecessarily put me through such a hassle, I said, I thought the company should cover the entire two-day rental bill. The courtesy drained from her voice, and she put me on hold. But when she came back a moment later, I had a deal.

The moral here is nothing complicated: When a travel service provider disappoints you, say so, as promptly, politely and briefly as possible. Also say what it will take to make you happy. If that fails, try a supervisor or ask for a name and address to which complaints and compensation requests can be addressed. Then you can continue the campaign by mail, again communicating promptly, relying on clarity, brevity, reasonable expectations and persistence. Reasonableness is a key. Of the many tales of woe this department receives from travel consumers every month, most deal with legitimate allegations--from insensitive airport strip-searches to deeply misleading hotel advertisements. But there are invariably a few from travelers whose expectations are unrealistic. Even when hotels and airlines and cruise ships are doing their best to behave reasonably, things do go wrong in life.