Pod Insights The Clark Howard Podcast 06.29.26 Travel Booking Basics / Online Shopping: Spotlight On Dark Patterns About this episode Clark’s first business was a travel agency and he specialized in saving his clients money. Travel costs are challenging now, with airlines facing higher fuel expenses and travelers paying the price. Clark shares his back-to-basics strategy for finding affordable trips, including why flexibility is your greatest money-saving tool. Learn why Clark lets the deal determine the destination, how shoulder-season airfare pricing can create opportunities for savings, and why being a "free agent" when booking flights can help you see more of the world for less. Also, Clark explains the growing problem of "dark patterns" online—those annoying popups, misleading buttons, and sneaky subscription tactics designed to manipulate your decisions. While many of these practices aren't illegal, they are deceptive and can lead to unwanted purchases and recurring charges if you're caught unaware. Know what to watch for and how to avoid getting tricked into spending money you never intended to spend.
Plus, Christa shares your #AskClark questions and Clark gives his take. All this and more on the June 29, 2026, episode of The Clark Howard Show. Submit your questions: Ask Clark.
Clark Smart Travel: Segment 1
Ask Clark: Segment 2
Dark Patterns On The Lit Web: Segment 3
Ask Clark: Segment 4
Mentioned on the show:
How To Beat Summer Sticker Shock and Travel the ‘Clark Howard Way’
Follow Clark Howard’s #1 Rule To Travel Cheap
Best Travel Credit Cards: How To Find the Perfect Fit for Your Spending
How Does Booking Travel Through a Credit Card Rewards Program Compare?
3 Reasons You Should Never Book a Nonrefundable Hotel Room
Dark patterns on the web are designed to manipulate you – why aren’t they all illegal?
Best Free Password Managers: 10 Top Picks - Clark Howard
How To Create and Use Passkeys - Clark Howard
Safe Browser Alternatives That Promise Not To Track You
NYT - Her Life Savings Mysteriously Disappeared After a Systems Glitch
Why You Need Paper Evidence of Your Financial Accounts
Clark.com resources:
Episode transcripts
Community. Clark.com / Ask Clark
Clark.com daily money newsletter
Consumer Action Center Free Helpline: 636-492-5275
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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0:46 Speaker 01 Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time.
0:58 Speaker 02 Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.
1:06 Speaker 03 It's great to have you here on the Clark Howard Show. Our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you to make better financial decisions in your life. If you've listened for a long time or watched me for a long time, you know I love to travel. I'll tell you something funny about that in a second. My first business was a travel agency chain, and my whole specialty was saving people money. That's a shock, right? So today, I'm going to do a back to basics on how I booked travel, which I've discovered because of the massive run-up
1:51 Speaker 03 in airline costs over the last year that people are really suffering sticker shocks. I want you to think about traveling my way. And I'm going to fill you in on what that is in a little while. And later, I want to talk about something that is driving me bonkers. Maybe you too. It's something that is under the generic kind of umbrella term dark patterns.
2:20 Speaker 03 When you're on your phone or you're on a laptop, they're all designed to trick you. And I want to talk about them and how you should handle them. So travel, travel industry is going through a crazy weird time right now. All started by the war in Iran, the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, the attacks on refineries and storage facilities. And so 20% of the world's oil has been really cramped. It's led to enormous disruption. I mean, gosh, I feel so bad for truck drivers. I can't even tell you.
3:04 Speaker 03 People who are independent, over the road, truck drivers. The cost of diesel fuel, brutal for them. And just like a truck driver, where the number one expense is fuel. For many airlines, that's the number one expense. So airlines are doing everything they can to push up fares. And it's been stunning how expensive airfares are this summer. I mean, crazy numbers. And that's before all the junk fees. So there are people like me who just love to travel. And this is a time that that's tough to do when you're going just for fun.
3:47 Speaker 03 You're like, wait a minute, last year I paid X dollars. This year they want X plus 60%. I'm not going to do it. So how do you do it? So here we are, very end of June, and I want to tell you, there is some relief on pricing that comes up in about six weeks. And this is about the calendar, not about the Strait of Hormuz or the price of jet fuel or anything. But travel has certain cycles to it and demand periods. And there's something about summer that is just crazy to think about.
4:31 Speaker 03 Because five weeks before summer ends, you know, the real end of summer, which is September 2024, something like that, airfares go down a notch.
4:46 Speaker 03 And depending on the airline sometime around August 15th or so, fares go into shoulder pricing instead of peak pricing. And it's not like there's an official calendar like it used to be forever ago when I was in the travel business. There were specific dates that were peak, that were shoulder, that were off season, all that. Now it's more just a general trend that can be your friend or your wallet's foe. So going back to basics, I want to talk about the ways I save money.
5:25 Speaker 03 All right. So every year I take the staff on a reward trip and also we meet there and talk about what's working, what's not working with the company and stuff like that. But it's a reward trip based on where in the world is on sale. And that is my number one rule for you. If travel is a joyous thing, if you love travel, it's what you want to do, whether the cost of tickets is higher or lower or in between. You start with the fact that fares have no relationship to distance travel.
6:04 Speaker 03 That airfares are based on competition between airlines, new routes, new routes are always your friend. When an airline establishes a new route, nobody knows they fly there. So there's always introductory fares and we as a staff had this year's staff trip to Croatia. Why Croatia? Because it was a new route from the United States on United and they offered great introductory specials. And so that's where we went off to. And so every year, that's the deal. Wherever the bargain is, that's where we go.
6:47 Speaker 03 And we have been to every continent except Antarctica by following the deal. You follow the deal and eventually you will see the whole world. You just may not see it in the order you intended by following the bargains. That's rule number one.
7:06 Speaker 03 Is you let the deal dictate where you go. Completely an abnormal kind of huh to probably 90% of people taking a trip. Historically, people pick where they want to go, when they want to go. And then they look for the price to go where and when they decided. That's the enemy of your wallet. If you want to save money, you follow the deal and then you use the pricing matrix. The pricing matrix is where you're flexible, what airline you fly, when you go, when you return.
7:48 Speaker 03 And you also shop one way versus round trip. Because often the lowest fare will be going domestic, not necessarily international. Going one way on one airline, the other way on another. If you care about money, you want to be a free agent. You don't want to say, well, I only fly on American. And I'm only going to go on Friday, the 17th of whatever. And I'm going to return nine days later on that following Sunday. And I'm going to go to whatever. That's the enemy of your wallet.
8:29 Speaker 03 You always want to be following wherever the bargain is. And that's the thing, hey, you'd be really neat to go there. And then you bring up one of these fare calendars like you can do on Google flights. You see who's the cheapest round trip. Then you look at it one way. You look at different days because with the fare calendar, you'll see there are enormous differences day to day going and returning. So the more you are an opportunist and go where the bargain is, it's funny because this morning I woke up to a new deal to Japan. I love Japan. Been five times and it's not enough.
9:12 Speaker 03 And I don't know that we can make it work right now, which kills me to say. But anyway, the idea is that my impulse is to go everywhere again and again, but only in the order of what's a deal. You want to save money even in a time of higher prices? Use the calendar as your friend. Use the destination as your friend and use flying whoever's best as your friend. If you are only into Americans metal or United's metal or Delta's metal, and that's all you look at and that's all you fly, well, you are a really generous person helping the
9:54 Speaker 03 stockholders of that company. Because by you being a prisoner to one company, I guarantee you will pay too much.
10:05 Speaker 04 All right, let's get to some travel questions. Todd in Florida says Clark always talks about the cheapest ways to book travel, but then he talks so much about travel cards like the Chase Sapphire card with the travel benefits. The thing is, those benefits are if you book through the card issuer, but it's so often cheaper to book directly or through Costco. Is there some benefit to booking through a credit card travel service that I'm missing that makes it a better deal?
10:31 Speaker 03 All right, so Todd, oh man, people get exhausted just hearing how I book like a hotel or a flight. Because if you, if you sat with me and watched me do something like that, you'd say, you're more dull Clark than I thought.
10:49 Speaker 03 Because, yeah, you're right. You got the Chase Portal for travel, Capital One Portal, the Amex Portal, and the Citi Portal. Through these, most often, people use them to get extra reward points booking a flight, or to get a special deal in a hotel. And often, the special is not a special. You're paying more through the card portals than you would otherwise. But not always. So what I do, because you get these, you know, you got $300 for booking hotels through this portal, or that one, or whatever, I check every time. And when there's a deal that's the same price, or equivalent, through one of
11:34 Speaker 03 the credit card portals, that's when I use that as a way to book a hotel. So I get back the 150, or 300, or whatever money it is I'm getting. But for a rental car, you will find that, not quite 100% of the time, but close to it, Costco Travel for car rentals, nobody comes close. If you're going to Hawaii, Costco Travel is almost always cheaper than any other way to book a stay in the Hawaiian Islands.
12:09 Speaker 04 And a lot of times, the points, what they're really good for are transferring them when there's a special to airline rewards programs. If you find a deal on, you know, redeeming miles somewhere. So it's, I've never booked a flight through, I use the Chase card through their portal, but I have transferred points when there's a special to one of the airlines. So you can do it that way.
12:31 Speaker 03 And by the way, the advantage of having free agent points that can be transferred to multiple airlines, it's not at all unusual for travel somewhere outside the United States, that one of the airlines, and it's not always consistent who that airline is, will be far more points for a flight than the next airline. So you want to check to see, what I'm, I'm registered for every airline frequent flyer program, there probably is in the world. And so I'll look, and I'll see, okay, this is the best use of points for this trip is going on blah, blah, blah airline. And that's how I do it. By the way, booking points, a lot of times internationally,
13:14 Speaker 03 The points are per direction and you'll find that your best ticket price is going to be using points one way on one airline and points for another airline coming back. People generally use their points round trip. Normally, that's a big mistake.
13:33 Speaker 04 Jacob in Pennsylvania says, "My family's been cruising together for nearly 20 years, with my first cruise being in kindergarten. To date, I have been on nine cruises with Carnival. With the recent data breach of Carnival passenger data, including passport and driver's license numbers, is there anything I should do to further protect myself? I already have my credit frozen, and I've been reminding my family to freeze theirs for a while."
13:57 Speaker 03 Jacob, you know, you bring up such a good point with the data breach. You know about the Carnival breach. Who knows how many other data breaches there have been that the companies don't know they've been breached and their customers don't know there's been a breach? So you've done the right thing. A credit freeze doesn't solve all problems, but it solves many of them in what people can do with the data they find in a deep dive breach because travel industry data breaches are like gold to hackers because there's so much information you have to provide to travel suppliers. But you've done the most important thing, which is the
14:40 Speaker 03 credit freeze, and your family needs to listen to you and get the credit freeze in place as well.
14:47 Speaker 04 Mike in Delaware says, "I'm planning a trip to London from Philadelphia in January of 27. I'd like to travel business class and stay in the city for sightseeing museums and maybe a show or two. I'm wondering what the best time to book flights and hotels would be, and if you have any information on cheap theater tickets."
15:08 Speaker 03 Theater's a lot cheaper in London than it is in New York. Oh. Same quality of performance. I know that because my wife. Yes.
15:17 Speaker 03 So Philadelphia is such an interesting question you asked because you are so close to the three New York airports for international that's significant is Newark and JFK, but especially Newark. The fares using points are much more competitive out of the New York airports than they are out of Philadelphia. Going in January, so there's a school of thought with points. And that is, remember, points can be redeposited for free. You go ahead now, six months out, and you book the best deal you can find on business class using points.
16:01 Speaker 03 And as long as those points are fully redepositable at no cost, you've got your bird in the hand. Then go through the months, keep checking prices on points. And then when you get closer, a lot of times points open up for business class the two weeks leading up to departure. So as long as you can redeposit, no big deal. You rebook your points with whatever is the better deal you find at the last minute. And being willing to go out of Newark or JFK instead of just Philadelphia may in fact get you a better deal.
16:44 Speaker 03 So as far as hotels, my rule on hotels, always book a refundable hotel. Even if you have to pay upfront, but the money's fully refundable. What I do with any trip, not just international, when I book my airfare, that's my initial airfare, that's when I go ahead and book a hotel. And then closer to travel, I reshopped the hotel. And most of the time hotel prices go down closer to travel, just like car rentals do. But occasionally, demand will be stronger than they anticipated and rates won't have dropped. No problem because you still have a booking.
17:28 Speaker 03 They do drop, no problem because you booked a fully refundable rate and you just cancel it and rebook. I'm a nightmare for the hotel business because my initial hotel booking, I use less than 10% of the time. I wouldn't say it's 0% of the time, but it's less than 10% of the time because I want the bird in the hand and then I want the better deal as I get closer to travel. Yeah, I do have a problem with wanting the best deal all the time. Sorry. Coming up ahead, what's the deal with dark patterns? What does that even mean? Sounds pretty sinister, doesn't it? We're going to talk about it.
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18:25 Speaker 02 Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.
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20:28 Speaker 03 Leave it to marketeers to be able to figure out a way to annoy us all. All right, I have a pet peeve. I'm sorry, this is really a pet peeve of mine. I can't stand it when I'm on my phone or on a laptop. And suddenly the content I'm looking at vanishes in a blink. I don't even realize what happened. And what it is, is suddenly the screen is full with some kind of pop up. And the pop up is trying to get me to buy something or something like that. If you ever buy a ticket on Southwest Airlines, after you get your confirmation for a ticket now,
21:09 Speaker 03 you have to endure not one, not two, not three, but four pop ups. Four. They're trying to sell you other junk after you already bought your ticket. And think about how often you'll be looking at something on a laptop or a phone. And suddenly you're looking at something, whatever it is, an ad or trying to get you to buy an ad on or something. And you're looking around and you want to X out of it. And there's no X. It sits there, seems like forever, but really it seems like 10 seconds. It sits there and then you gotta hunt around for the X.
21:49 Speaker 03 And then the sneakiest ones of all may have two X's there. Have you seen this yet? Be one in the left corner, one in the right corner. And you guess wrong and you click the wrong one. It then takes you to sell you whatever was blocking what you're looking at. You know what's funny about this stuff? It's not illegal, at least not anywhere I know yet. But it's out of desperation for so many, particularly any information site, looking for any way of creating revenue. And one of the newspapers, the New York Post, now does this dark pattern stuff where you'll
22:33 Speaker 03 be looking at a story and all of a sudden that screen is completely covered by an ad of some kind. And again, there is no X to get out of it. You have to just sit there and count to 10 or whatever, wait for the X to appear and X out. And truly, you think about newspapers. So there are newspapers that are so successful, like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, they can just put everything behind a paywall. You gotta pay them. And then there are others that can't make money, enough money from any kind of subscription.
23:14 Speaker 03 And so this is part of their desperation to try to get you to pay. Not through paying a subscription, but pay indirectly by saying, oh, well, that's interesting. Maybe I'll buy one of those. That's what it's about. The biggest problem, though, are not the ones like that. It's the ones where people are trying to trick you to subscribe to something through one of these pop-up type of things that you don't even realize by clicking, you've said yes. So you can't just mindlessly do something when something pops up and covers up your screen.
23:58 Speaker 03 Every time, to protect yourself, you've got to look, see what you're doing, and make sure, most importantly, you're not agreeing to something by clicking wherever you click on it. Is this a beef of mine that's not a beef of yours?
24:14 Speaker 04 No, I don't like it at all.
24:16 Speaker 03 How much are you having this?
24:17 Speaker 04 I don't go to sites that do that. Once I see they do it, so I don't get it that often, but when I get to it, I immediately just X out of the whole tab. Just annoys me.
24:27 Speaker 03 I wonder, I'm thinking about the Southwest Airlines thing. Their image is already a little shaky from all the changes they made. Why would they do those four pop-ups?
24:37 Speaker 04 Well, and I was thinking when you were talking about that, you're probably focused on that a little more because you're so bitter about the whole...
24:45 Speaker 03 I'm over my bitterness.
24:46 Speaker 04 No, you're not. Not one bit.
24:48 Speaker 03 Are you sure?
24:49 Speaker 04 You just said to me the other day, "I can't believe what Southwest did to me." You were so upset. I don't blame you. Okay, we'll go to questions. Lynn in California says, "I just received an email seemingly from Google saying that some of my passwords were found on the web and I should change them. I have dozens of passwords for many things like credit cards, bank accounts, investment accounts, et cetera. Does this mean I'm supposed to change all my current passwords? I'm totally stressed just thinking about it. What should I do?"
25:19 Speaker 03 Okay, so Lynn, there are a lot of things we've signed up for that don't have a financial angle to them, where we probably are kind of lazy with the password we use. And those things end up showing up when Google is searching the dark web. So they send you a thing with the Google password manager saying, "44 of your passwords have been compromised." So a lot of those are ones that are not going to matter. The ones that matter and the ones you should spend some serious time on are the ones you named.
26:01 Speaker 03 Investment accounts, bank accounts, brokerage, retirement, credit cards. Yeah. So those, if you're using Google, Google has password manager and they will create the most crazy, ridiculous password for you and they'll save it for you password protected. Also, a lot of financial sites, you can now go to pass keys. We have an explanation of pass keys on Clark.com that explains that the techno stuff in simple English, but pass keys for your financial accounts are fantastic. That's where access is granted, not by a password that could easily be hacked at some
26:46 Speaker 03 point, but instead by biometrics, your eyes, your fingerprint, things like that.
26:54 Speaker 04 Chris in Wyoming says, hello Clark. The past week I've been getting emails from websites that I visited. I did not sign up for accounts nor provide my email address. I just browse their products. This is creepy. Can you explain what is going on? I've been watching and listening to you for decades and I appreciate all the hard work you and your team do. You guys are the best.
27:14 Speaker 03 So Chris, Chris, thank you. And you're making a perfect case for doing incognito browsing or private browsing when you're shopping because a lot of sites you go to, e-commerce sites, pay, let's call them data brokers who capture information from your cookies on your computer or your phone, and they're able to personally identify who you are, your email address and the rest. Creepy, creepy, creepy, no doubt. You use the word creepy and you talked about it because.
27:55 Speaker 03 You go somewhere, you think you're just you anonymously at this site. But because of all the sophistication of the Internet data brokers, they know who you are. And they can make money selling off what's called lead generation. A lot of these are what are called lead generators. And so they personally identify you, supply your email address, charge whatever e-commerce site it is for giving you as a qualified lead to them because you've already shopped there, even though you didn't buy anything. And that's why you're finding this happening.
28:36 Speaker 03 One thing, and I'll ask you, if you clear your cache, does that help if you regularly do that?
28:44 Speaker 04 I don't know, honestly. I'm not an expert on that stuff.
28:48 Speaker 03 Right, so somebody who is in data security or whatever.
28:52 Speaker 04 Who clear all your cookies, but then you're not, but then if you want things to remember you, like sites and stuff, you won't have that. So you have to just keep that in mind.
29:00 Speaker 03 Privacy is a tough thing right now. So if you use a VPN, that doesn't help with that, right? Okay, we need an expert to answer these questions. So we want to know. But I think this is a valid question.
29:13 Speaker 04 I do too, I do too. I'm just saying like, we don't, we don't.
29:15 Speaker 03 VPN's help, I mean, what is the way you cloak yourself so you don't have that happen?
29:21 Speaker 04 Casey in North Carolina says, Dear Clark and team, your recent story about a failure with Fidelity's customer service and a lost account scares me. We got a few of these, by the way. You have mentioned before that we should just have credit cards from varying institutions, but what about our accounts? I thought my life was complicated enough after having my high-yield savings account with one bank, a TSP, and a Roth IRA, and a taxable brokerage account at different places. For a while, I was thinking about consolidating and simplifying, especially for my husband or family in the event of my untimely passing. I can't help but to want to avoid doing that in case everything disappears or there's a serious cybersecurity incident. I have my Roth and taxable brokerage with the same firm.
30:04 Speaker 04 This almost makes me feel I should limit this to just one account per institution. I would love to hear your thoughts and thank you and everyone else behind the scenes for what you do on the show. That's very nice.
30:15 Speaker 03 That is very nice of you to say. And Casey? We can't prevent every last thing in life. I believe that there's a real benefit to consolidating accounts, not having accounts all over the place. I think about people now that are losing track of old 401ks as often as people change jobs and may lose access to that money forever. I mean, it's crazy to say. So I don't want you to add additional complexity to your life. The whole purpose of talking about the Fidelity Investments misadventure and how poorly I thought they handled it, the aftermath, and the media in the aftermath of what went wrong.
30:59 Speaker 03 The woman involved did have her money restored, don't know about other people that were affected as well. But the point is, you want to have some kind of documented record of the accounts you have. So it could be the most recent statement, you keep that. Could be that if you don't get paper statements, when the notification comes that the monthly statement is there, you add a copy as a PDF so you have access to it. Because for those of you who didn't hear the Fidelity story, the money was just lost in space to the point that Fidelity said the woman profiled never had had an account
31:41 Speaker 03 with Fidelity and actually had multiple accounts with Fidelity. And Fidelity never has really come clean about this. Her money was eventually restored, but the problem for her was she had no record of her accounts because everything she was doing was electronic. She wasn't getting paper statements, she wasn't keeping PDFs of her statements, and she was left just terrified that all her hard work, saving money over the decades, was going up in smoke. So that is really the warning is that you keep good records.
32:22 Speaker 03 Having to have an additional multiple accounts of all different kinds, all different places. That's more work than I want you to do in life.
32:31 Speaker 04 Okay, I want to add a little to the prior question. Clearing your cookies does not completely prevent websites from tracking you. It resets your identity on a website, so it treats you like a new visitor. But companies can still follow you across the internet using your device details, IP address, and login profiles. So IP address, I mean, that gets blocked with a VPN, so that may be helpful. Someone I'm sure will tell us. And then the cache is just like your stored, like websites may slow down for you when they load because it might store in images and things like that in the website so it quickly loads. So that's not gonna
33:03 Speaker 03 That's not gonna help.
33:04 Speaker 04 Really. So yeah, that's what we know for now. We'll try to get an update.
33:08 Speaker 03 I'm sure we will get some very good suggestions from people. This is one of those areas, we know there's a problem. We don't know the best solution. And that's what it's all about. Us working as a team, all of us together, listeners, viewers, readers, all helping each other. This is an area I hope we can help people because what a, what a creep out thing. You just decide, oh, I'm going to look at this website. I'm interested in potentially buying something like that. And then you bail from that website. You don't buy anything. You have no contact with them other than you look. The next thing you know, they're emailing you. That's really creepy.
33:51 Speaker 03 Well, anyway, I want to thank you so much for joining us on our last podcast of the first half of the year. I mean, we'll broadcast again on Wednesday, but it's the second half of the year, July 1st coming up. So I hope that we've served you well these first six months of the year, that you have learned things that have been helpful to you, that have empowered you. And I also want to tell you, I mention this every once in a while. We hear a lot of stuff and you hear some from me of companies behaving badly.
34:34 Speaker 03 And I don't want you to surrender to cynicism or alienation and know that it's all about trying to get organizations to do better, to be better, to tell you how to protect yourself when a company or an organization is not behaving well. And most important, what we're really about is you taking knowledge you can act on here to improve your life, improve your finances, and ultimately create more freedom and independence for yourself, your friends, your family. I want you to be empowered so you can save more, spend less, and don't let anyone ever,
35:18 Speaker 03 ever, ever, not ever rip you off. And we'll see you July 1st.
35:29 Speaker 01 Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5, only at McDonald's for a limited time.
35:41 Speaker 02 Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.
35:44 Speaker 05 They're running a cover two defense. But you're running to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go to restaurants or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats, order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.
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