Merchant dispute with airline over missed flight, and which credit cards offer protection?
You have no grounds for a refund. The flight took off on time, and you chose not to be on board. The fact that the airline could not guarantee ahead of time that the flight would leave on time is not relevant. You can certainly try to dispute the charge with the airline, and it sounds like you have done so. The airline correctly indicates that your dispute is unfounded. You can call up your credit card company and explain the situation, and they may accept your dispute. However, I am not aware of any credit card that would reimburse you (that is, issue a chargeback) in this situation. I'm not trying to be unsympathetic. It sucks that you felt you could not rely on the airline, and are now out some money. Fundamentally, though, this was your choice. The airline would be obligated to reimburse you the cost of your flight, or book you on another flight, if the flight was cancelled due to bad weather or other issues, but they owe you nothing if the flight took off on schedule. What you are looking for is travel insurance. I have never heard of this being offered as a credit card perk, but there might be something out there.  You can buy this separately, but only you can decide if it is worth the costs. To me, it would seem to only be worth it for something quite expensive, like a cruise that costs thousands of dollars. The more you travel, the less likely it is to be worth it, since at some point the cost of one canceled trip is less than the insurance paid on the rest of the trips that went through fine. As a frequent traveller, I recommend that you build some flexibility into your plans, especially during the winter. It is not always possible, but try not to need to be somewhere the day of or the day after your flight.  Try to book flights early in the day, as they are less likely to be delayed by problems in flights before them, and you have more options for rebooking. Flight delays due to weather and mechanical problems are not uncommon, and with generally full flights it is sometimes hard to be rebooked in a reasonable amount of time.  Finally, be nice to the gate agents and other airline personel.  In general, they aren't any happier about delays than you are (flight crews want to get home too) and don't have any power over weather or mechanical delays.  Being rude to them will not help, and will make them less likely to go out of their way to find a solution. Be assertive in asking for what you want, but a smile and a kind word goes a long way. EDIT To answer what I think you question is: I do not know of anything other than trip cancellation insurance.  And you must be very careful that the policy you purchase for your trip covers the circumstance you described.  Essentially, you opted not to take the flight.  Not all trip cancellation policies will cover that. How to Find Trip Cancellation Insurance Getting Your Money Back Now This is an Act of God in the insurance world.  You cannot reasonably expect the airline to know the future weather pattern anymore than you could, and therefore, since the plane did fly, you owe them the money based on the ticket you bought.  You didn't just buy a ticket, there is a contract with rules about refunds and transferring and such. It is a bummer situation, and I understand you point of view, but this isn't the airline's fault. If anybody is to blame for you missing your flight, and therefore not getting a refund, it is your employer.  Their requirements for you be in one city and then another are the cause.   While your employer cannot predict the weather, they are ultimately the ones who could give you the okay to be late.  If you absolutely cannot be late, and it was critical that you drive out and miss your flight, then your company gets to pay for the flight AND the car.  That is the cost of doing business for them. This is also why, when flying for business, that you pay the higher price and get the refundable / transferable ticket.  They cost more, but situations like these illustrate they are worth it for the company.
"You don't need to have a bunch of credit cards lying around; just a couple is fine. Get a ""rewards"" card (without annual fee) that pays you back for use, and use it regularly to buy groceries, for example. Pay it off promptly each month, using the rewards, if you like, to reduce the amount you have to send in. Or you can use the rewards for other purchases; some merchants offer $25 worth of merchandise for $20 in rewards. It used to be the case that you could negotiate a discount for paying cash rather than use a credit card, but that is a lot harder to do now, in many cases because credit-card company contracts with merchants prohibit this practice. Also, merchants often prefer credit cards rather than cash because money-handling is an issue (pay for an armored car to come pick up the day's receipts, or risk getting mugged on the way to the bank, possible burglaries if you leave the money overnight in the store, daily balancing of cash-register trays, etc.) So, not being in debt and being rich enough to not need to be in debt are laudable goals, and you have my best wishes that you will reach them soon, but getting rid of all your credit cards as a part of not being in debt may be more trouble than it is worth. Keep a couple, pay them off promptly, and if you are concerned about being in debt, you can time your charges so that you are in debt at  most 2 or 3 days each month." "I'm going to go with ""ridiculous notion.""  :) The vast majority of businesses are legitimate, run by honest people trying to earn a living for themselves and their employees.  These days, almost all of them accept credit cards.  Crooked businesses are a very small minority. When a bad business over charges you, you dispute the charge, and you get your money back.  But that's not all that happens.  The bad merchant pays penalties for this, and if it happens more than a couple of times, the merchant loses their merchant account with their bank, which means that they lose their ability to accept credit card payments anymore.  A crooked business is not able to rob people via credit card for very long at all. A whitelist would certainly not be able to include every legitimate business.  And a blacklist would never be able to be kept up-to-date, as bad businesses come and go continuously; as soon as a business was added to the blacklist, they would lose their merchant account and would no longer need to be on the list. What you are describing is very rare.  My brother once had a bad experience with a tech support company where they were repeatedly charging him for a service they never performed.  But a credit card chargeback took care of it.  If that company made a habit of that, I'm sure that they got in trouble with their bank. Instead, the most common credit card fraud happens when crooks use your credit card at perfectly legitimate businesses.  But your whitelist/blacklist wouldn't help you with that at all." a free $50 looks too good to be true. As others already pointed out, these offers are common to many cards that want you to build loyalty towards a particular company (e.g. airlines cards give lots of mileage for a decent initial spend). Should I get this card for the $50? Why and/or why not? How much do you spend on Amazon, or are planning to do so in future? This offer has been around for ages (earlier they used to offer much smaller amounts of $20 for signing up) and you never saw it. So probably, you won't be really using the site frequently. In that case, its just a matter of whether $50 is worth the hassle for you to sign up and then later cancel (if you don't want to manage another new card). The hit to credit score is likely to be minimal unless you do such offers often. As such, for a person who rarely buys on Amazon I wouldn't advise you to sign up for this card, there are better rewards cards that are not as tied to a particular site (such as Chase Freedom, Discover etc.) If however, you are a regular shopper but just never noticed this prompt earlier; then it is worthwhile to get this - or even consider the Prime version, which you will get or be automatically upgraded to if the account has Prime membership. That gives 5% back instead of 3% on Amazon. Yep. Definitely troll.   Deregulation made it possible for anyone to start an airline and then airlines without unions kicked the snot out of unionized airlines. Same plane, same airports, and the flight costs $350 to fly on an airline with unionized employees or $300 to fly on an airline without the unions.   Guess which one the public picked? Thats because I'm a tax accountant. I handle things on the tax side. There are other accountants that handle books and financials. I hear how they handle certain things, but I don't know specifics. I've been in meetings, but it doesn't spell out each and every detail.   I've actually heard about that purchase. I think I read that on Reddit, but other than that, I have not heard of those cards. I would suggest opening a new account (credit card and bank) for just your business. This protects you in multiple ways, but is no bigger burden for you other than carrying another card in your wallet.  Then QB can download the transactions from your website and reconciling is a cinch. If you got audited, you'd be in for a world of pain right now.  From personal experience there are a few charges that go unnoticed that reconciling finds every month at our business.  We have a very strict process in place, but some things slip through the cracks. "Do you guys know any options that are accessible to any global citizen? Prepaid and stored value cards are anonymous. For an arbitrary reason, the really anonymous ones only allow you to load $500 but there is no regulation that dictates this amount. In the USA, these cards are exempt from being declared at border crossings. Not because they look like credit cards, but because they are exempt by the US Treasury and Customs. The cons is that there are generally fees to use them. US DOJ has done research showing that some groups take advantage of the exemption moving upwards of $50,000 a day between borders, but Congress is fine with this exemption and the burden is always on the government to determine ""illicit origin"". Stigmatizing how money is moved is only a 30 year old phenomenon, but many free nations do not really have capital controls, they only care that you pay taxes and that the integrity of their stock markets are upheld. Aside from that there are no qualms about anonymity, except from your neighbors but they dont matter for a global citizen. In theory, the UK should have more flexibility in anonymity options, such as stored value cards with higher limits." Generally there's no ultimate protection against charge backs. Some methods are easier to charge back and some harder, and there's always the resort of going to courts. The hardest to contest is, of course, a cash payment or wire transfer. You need to remember that imposing unnecessary/unreasonable difficulties on your customers will drive business away. I can buy diamonds in the nearest mall with my credit card - why would I buy from you if you want cash, BTC, or any other shady way to pay? I'm pretty sure that whatever that is you're selling, anyone can buy elsewhere as well.