1) I bought lift tickets for a mountain resort, and when I showed up I couldn't find the confirmation email to scan at the self-serve kiosk. I also wasn't able to find my online account portal to see my bookings, so I bought lift tickets on the spot on my phone. As soon as the transaction completed, I was redirected to the account page that I was looking for where I found my original booking. At the end of the weekend, I took up the issue at the ticket window, and got the issue resolved (mostly) to my satisfaction: they refunded me the discounted pre-order amount instead of the full-price I paid; normally they only issue an account credit, this was going above and beyond as they saw it. I believe the reason I didn't get an email the first time was that I used a gmail +tag (name+resort@gmail.com) which their system accepted but didn't know how to use.
Lessons:
i) Stop using +tags with my emails, the utility of these tags (maybe tracing what company my info was leaked from) is far outweighed by the possibility of incidents like this. I don't use them to organize my email, like others do, so this habit has only cost me time, money, and stress so far.
ii) Don't be afraid to ask for help, try to talk to a human next time something like this is happening.
2) Booked a hotel through super.com because they had the lowest price. I didn't read the fine print, so when I showed up to check in, I was informed that I owed a resort fee or something that more than made up the difference. I ended up paying slightly more booking through super.com than I would have going direct.