The Hustle - Coronavirus refunds get complicated

The pandemic put a pin in your Parisian vacay and you want your payments back, pronto.

It sounds simple, but forking over cash to frustrated consumers can be complicated -- and controversial.

There are rebate riddles everywhere...

...and they’re especially touchy in the travel and live-entertainment industries, whose itineraries have been totally scrambled.

One reason why travelers are angry: The refund might not actually BE a refund. Some airlines are offering vouchers instead, but some customers say we don’t want no stinkin’ coupons.

• This week, 9 US senators sent letters to airline CEOs pressing them to offer customers full refunds (since, y’know, the industry just got a whopper of a bailout).
• Some international carriers are getting stingy. Thirty of them told a ticket-processing company that only the airlines themselves can give the money back.
• On the high seas, cruisin’ took a bruisin’. Cruise companies are offering extra perks (shipboard credits, ahoy!) to entice customers to reschedule. But if you do postpone, you lose the right to a refund.

Another wrinkle: When a middleman is involved, things can get REALLY hairy.

Just ask Airbnb and StubHub

Airbnb is basically letting customers who booked trips through the end of May cancel them for a full refund. But the new policy wreaked havoc on the OTHER end of Airbnb’s business -- its hosts.

• So this week, Airbnb said it was committing $250m to do right by them. Bookings have disappeared fast, though, and some sellers have said the money isn’t enough.
• VRBO, an Airbnb competitor, has taken a more laissez-faire approach -- and pissed off LOTS of customers in the process. It’s nixing service fees and “strongly encouraging” property owners to issue “at least a partial refund,” but otherwise says it’s just a middleman.

As Axios reported this week, the giant online ticket broker StubHub said fin to refunds for now.

The ‘hub’s president said they’ve had more than 20k events called off. She said the old canceled-gig refund policy (which involved issuing refunds to ticket buyers for canceled events before collecting money from sellers) wouldn’t work at such a high volume.

We asked readers to tell us about how their businesses are coping with the coronavirus. We’re featuring highlights of those conversations here.

Hospitals in the hardest-hit US cities are straining to care for a rush of COVID-19 patients. Next Move, a 1-year-old agency that places travel nurses, is helping to fill shortages -- and seeing business take off as a result.

The company is part of a rare club. Unlike others that have drastically lowered their revenue projections this year, Next Move is doing the opposite. 

Its founder, John Nolan, expects to do $13-14m this year, up from the $8.5m in revenue the company was shooting for at the start of 2020.

He’s frank with the nurses who have approached the company asking where they can help.

“There’s no way to comprehend what it’s like to go to work for 18 hours and have all your patients die, not be able to take any breaks, be way understaffed, and not have enough protection equipment,” he says. 

Next Move is also fielding lots of questions about those shortages of protective gear: What happens if I get sick? Nolan says he’s reserving extra money that’s coming in to support nurses who fall ill.

Trends subscribers get access to the whole story -- and much more. Start your trial today.

Top 5 Reasons to Become a CMA

Okay, so you’ve been in your accounting or finance position for a few years now and are ready to level up. 

The good news is, the CMA® (Certified Management Accountant) certification can inject a little jet fuel into your career and get things moving up and to the right faster than you can say “earnings premium.”

Don’t believe us? Here’s what it can do for you. 

1. Earn more: CMAs earn 63% more in median total compensation compared to non-CMAs (according to IMA’s 2020 Salary Survey)
2. Boost your career: Earning a CMA immediately shows CFOs that you are prepared for advanced strategic roles.
3. Prove expertise: Fortune 500 companies hire CMAs due to their ability to strategize, plan, and execute.
4. Open doors: Build useful professional connections with over 125K accounting and finance pros around the world.
5. Prep for the future: CMA certification will prepare you to evolve with any new technological advancements, so you can help lead companies into a new world.

If you’re a high-level thinker, a game-changing strategist, or just really dang ambitious, you gotta check out the CMA today. 

Our national stockpile of trashy television is safe. Whew!

So say the execs at more than a dozen ringleaders of the remote control, who told Variety that their programming pipeline will flow smoothly -- even though the pandemic punched huge holes in TV-production plans.

How are they doing it?

Fins up for a Shark Week marathon, baby

This weekend, Discovery is compressing its summertime hit Shark Week into a 2-day-long marathon.

It’ll feature fan favorites from years past. (Did you know the first Shark Week aired in 1988? For the love of Jaws, we’re gettin’ old.)

Change the channel already!

OK, OK, don’t get your sweatpants in a wad. 

Stacked episodes of E!’s “Botched,” a show about plastic surgery that went, um, as well as the title suggests, are up 40% from before the Bad Times.

Hungry for somethin’ else to binge watch? Kathleen Finch, chief lifestyle brands officer at Discovery, told Variety that the Food Network’s viewership is going bananas: “I have enough ‘Chopped’ episodes to go well into 2021!”

At this rate, she may need ‘em…

...because people are spending a LOT of hours zonking out in front of the tube. Time spent on streaming platforms was up 34% in the beginning of March, and total TV usage wasn’t far behind.

Get $80 off America’s #1 meal kit for eating well -- talk about a sweet deal

Not sweet like sugary. Sweet like “you save a bunch of money on meals full of organic ingredients and can pick from diet types and get it all delivered straight to your doorstep.” That kind of sweet.

Yep, right now GreenChef is offering homebound Hustlers $80 off plus free shipping on your first box. Here's how the #1 meal kit for eating well works:

1. Pick your meal plan (Keto, Paleo, Balanced Living or Plant-Powered).
2. Choose your favorite weekly recipes -- chef-crafted, no less.
3. Get your pre-portioned organic ingredients and easy recipes delivered -- goodbye, grocery store.
4. Follow their simple instructions, and you’ll whip together the kinds of healthy and delicious meals that’ll impress your friends and family.

If you’re reading this, Ma, sorry about the puns. I’ll FaceTime you later.

For everyone else who’s still with us: Condom-makers are cranking up their operations to meet global demand for contraceptives, at a time when lockdowns are disrupting the rubbery supply chain.

Here’s a crazy stat you probably didn’t know

A company based in Malaysia -- Karex Berhad -- makes 1 out of every 5 condoms in the world. You may not be familiar with Karex, but you’ve probably heard of Durex, one of its most well-known brands.

Karex recently restarted its factories with a reduced workforce. Prior to that, The Guardian said its 3 Malaysian facilities hadn’t produced a single condom in more than a week. They got permission to resume because condom factories do count as essential businesses.

Elsewhere, Bloomberg reported that Thailand’s biggest condom manufacturer is at “maximum output.” 

• The Thai Nippon Rubber Industry Co. expects to churn out as many as 1.9B condoms this year -- a 27% increase from its average annual supply.

The pandemic is causing problems for other forms of contraception, too -- social distancing measures (not to mention layoffs that disrupt access to health insurance) have made it more difficult for some women to get birth-control prescriptions.

So is a coronavirus baby boom in our future?

You’ve heard the jokes: The generation of babies born 9 months from now will be christened coronitas, right? 

Keep your pants on. The fact-checkers at USA Today found that there’s not much evidence to support the idea that a boom is inevitable. Experts said people tend to postpone kids in times of economic uncertainty. At best, it might be a “baby blip.”