The Berlin bear was given a run for its money as the official symbol of Germany’s capital on Thursday. The authorities said that a “free-roaming lioness” in the area had led to a sprawling search with more than 100 police officers, veterinarians and hunters as well as drones and helicopters involved in trying to catch the animal.

“People are encouraged to stay at home if possible and not let their pets outside,” said a statement from the German municipality of Kleinmachnow, in the state of Brandenburg, where the first sighting of the animal was reported. Officials from the town of 20,000 people, about 14 miles from the center of Berlin, said the lioness had been “causing a stir” overnight since it was spotted eating a wild boar along the road.

The animal had not been captured as of Thursday evening local time, and the Brandenburg police said in a statement that veterinarians, hunters, helicopters and drones had gotten involved in the search. The search was focused on the areas of Teltow, Kleinmachnow and Stahnsdorf, three small towns along the southwest boundary of Berlin, where the police had issued warnings about the animal.

“We ask the population in the aforementioned areas to act with the appropriate vigilance and to avoid going in the adjacent forested areas,” the police statement said. Those who see the animal should “seek shelter immediately” and call the police.

The police received reports around midnight on Wednesday of a sighting of a wild animal chasing and eating a wild boar in Kleinmachnow, they said in a statement.

A short, grainy video of that sighting, which was shared with the police and then circulated on social media on Thursday, appeared to show a large wild cat feeding on a wild boar in a grassy, forested roadside area. The police said that the animal in the video appeared to be a lioness, calling that possibility “credible.”

A search for the animal began immediately, the police said, with the Berlin and Brandenburg police forces getting involved and using helicopters. Riot police were on the scene to protect local residents.

Officials from the town of Kleinmachnow said their goal was to tranquilize and capture the animal, rather than kill it. But a hunter was on standby in case the animal were to put any lives at risk.

After the initial sighting and video, the animal was spotted by the police themselves, a police spokeswoman in Brandenburg told The Associated Press. The mayor of Kleinmachnow and the police did not immediately respond to questions about the sightings. Other sightings reported by residents could not be confirmed, officials said.

The authorities said the animal was most likely to be in the forested areas of Brandenburg.

It was unclear where the lion had come from, as lions are not native to Germany. Though there are zoos, animal protection centers and circuses in the area, the police said none had reported a missing lioness.

Commenters online voiced doubts that the animal in the video was a lion, but the police said that it most likely was.

Others had fun with the chaos, and memes abounded: The Twitter page for Deutsche Bahn, the national German railway operator, tweeted a helpful reminder that while house cats and smaller pets did not need their own tickets, larger pets, “other than companion lions,” required their own train passes.

Summer travel is off to a roaring start, with little sign of a slowdown on the horizon. And airline executives say they are doing all they can to keep up, including contending with bad weather and congestion in the skies and on the ground.

Three of the nation’s largest carriers — American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines — set records for quarterly revenue in the three months that ended in June. Profits more than doubled from the same period last year, and the three companies raised their projections for how much they would earn this year.

“We’re still in a world where demand is very strong,” Vasu Raja, American’s chief commercial officer, told reporters and investors on a call on Thursday.

The strong quarterly results underscore the durability of the travel industry’s recovery coming out of the pandemic. June was slightly busier than the same month in 2019, and July appears to be on track to match prepandemic traffic. The Transportation Security Administration screened nearly 2.9 million people on the Friday before the Fourth of July weekend, the most it has ever handled in a single day.

But the recent recovery has been marred by problems, including delays and cancellations around the country.

Airlines and the air traffic control system have struggled to overcome bad weather, technology problems, staffing shortfalls and other disruptions over the past two years, contributing to major meltdowns like the one that Southwest Airlines suffered over several days in late December. Delays and cancellations have often cascaded on themselves, disrupting air travel for days, leaving many people stranded far from their destinations.

Weather has been responsible for nearly 70 percent of flight delays this year, compared with just under 61 percent during the same period last year, according to federal data. Heavy traffic has also contributed to delays.

United struggled to overcome a disruption before July 4, for which it had initially blamed bad weather and an air traffic control staffing shortage affecting its hub at Newark Liberty International Airport, but other airlines in the region did not struggle nearly as much. In the week leading up to the holiday weekend, the airline canceled about 17 percent of all of its flights and delayed more than 51 percent, according to FlightAware, an aviation data provider.

Overall, about 1.8 percent of planned flights were canceled in the two months that ended on Tuesday, compared with 1.9 percent over the same period in 2019, according to FlightAware data. But many more were delayed: about 25 percent over the past two months, up from about 19 percent in the same period in 2019.

Airlines say they have taken steps to prevent disruptions, including spending on technology, hiring and training. After its recent struggles, United said it would fly less during peak times, use more gates and make other changes.

“We’re now doing more than ever to mitigate the impact of weather, congestion and other infrastructure constraints at Newark,” said Scott Kirby, United’s chief executive.

While domestic travel has been strong for quite some time, airlines say more Americans are traveling overseas.

American said passenger revenue from international travel rose nearly 22 percent from the same quarter last year, while Delta said it set a record for international revenue in the second quarter. United said this week that it would add more flights to Asia in October.

Driven by high demand, a round-trip international flight on average costs about $971, up nearly 24 percent from prices at this time in 2019, according to Hopper, the travel app.

Those rising fares have been good for airlines, and American, Delta and United say they expect the good times to continue. Delta, for example, now expects revenue to rise at least 17 percent this year from last year.

Ticket prices spiked a year ago, as airlines struggled to meet demand and the Russian invasion in Ukraine drove up the price of jet fuel. But fuel prices have come back down. American said it spent a third less on fuel during the second quarter than it did a year earlier, saving about $1.3 billion.

Partly as a result, the average price for a round-trip domestic flight was down more than 13 percent, to $261, on Thursday from the same day last year and more than 9 percent from 2019, according to Hopper. June fares fell so much from a year earlier that the drop contributed to a decline in overall inflation.

Even as fuel prices have fallen, labor costs have gone up. American said it spent about 12 percent more on salaries, wages and benefits in the second quarter compared with a year earlier. The airline is negotiating a new contract with its pilots’ union, which is expected to include substantial pay raises.

Over the weekend, pilots at United reached an agreement with the company on a contract valued at $10 billion that would increase pay up to 40 percent over four years, an increase that American said it would match. In March, pilots at Delta approved a contract that would increase wages 34 percent by 2026.

United and American are also negotiating contracts with the unions that represent their flight attendants.

Dear Tripped Up,

In 2021, my husband, my sister and I signed up for a five-day Tremendous Tawas Lake Huron tour run by Pardson, the Ohio company that publishes Bird Watcher’s Digest magazine. We paid almost $4,800 in all. The tour was canceled because of Covid that year, but we were so eager to see the rare Kirtland’s warbler that we accepted a credit. Shortly before the rescheduled trip was to leave in May 2022, the company emailed to tell us it was going out of business, and someone would contact us about a refund. No one did, but through my own efforts I got in touch with Jack Harris, the receiver responsible for the dissolution of Pardson. He told me the only way to get my money back would be through my credit card. But American Express said I was too late. Can you help? Paige, Atlanta

Dear Paige,

My inbox is full of messages from people who, like you, gave no thought to whether the company they booked a trip with would remain solvent until their departure date.

Most of those complaints, though, concern lost flights and cruises, not the missed chance to see a yellow-breasted songbird so rare that it breeds almost exclusively in the shade of young jack pine trees of Michigan and Wisconsin.

What this avian cutie has against the shade of more mature trees is beyond the scope of this column. But I can tell you the frustrating reason behind your money being gone forever — even though many others, in similar situations, can get their money back relatively easily.

We are talking, essentially, about bankruptcy. But I’m not using that term here because, technically, it applies only to cases filed in the federal court system — often using the infamous Chapters 7 and 11 statutes. Pardson, the company that published the birding magazine since 1978 and ran its tours, filed in the Ohio state court system.

But for our purposes, the federal and state processes are, like crows and ravens, more alike than different. And in both systems, there is one pretty straightforward way for travelers to recover their money, and another — with much longer odds — if the first way fails.

The easy way is through a credit card, although only under specific conditions. To begin, the traveler has to have used a credit card — debit cards and other forms of payment won’t work. That’s because credit card issuers must follow the Fair Credit Billing Act, signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford in 1974. Under one provision of this law, credit card issuers are required to refund card holders who were victims of billing errors.

The law’s definitions of “billing error” includes a company’s later failure to deliver a good or service. How does a bankruptcy retroactively turn what was a legitimate purchase into a billing error? I don’t know, but I’m not complaining.

You did use a credit card, an Amex with an annual fee of $500. But it turns out the magazine gave you bad advice when they canceled the tour in 2022 and told you to wait for someone to get in touch about a refund. If they had instead recommended you contact your credit card company immediately, you would likely have gotten your money back.

That is true even though the Fair Credit Billing Act technically requires you to get in touch with your card issuer within 60 days of purchase. In an email, American Express spokeswoman Jessica Defilippo wrote: “Generally, the 60-day limit can be extended to give card members up to 120 days from the time of purchase, or in the case of pre-booked travel, from the date travel was intended to take place.”

That last part is the key, since many people book travel far in advance. Spokesmen from Bank of America and Chase told me their credit cards have similar policies.

That’s great for everyone but you. You mentioned Mr. Harris, the receiver with Pardson, advised you to try American Express and explain to them you only just found out about the company’s collapse.

That was nearly 11 months after your travel date, though, and as you know, American Express rejected your claim, likely because it had just been too long. (Ms. Defilippo wrote that “every case is evaluated uniquely,” but that she could not comment on your specific case.)

That leaves you with the second and more treacherous road to a refund: to file a claim on the liquidated assets of the company, now controlled by Mr. Harris and subject to approval by the Court of Common Pleas of Washington County, Ohio.

Marvin Sicherman, a longtime bankruptcy attorney who also teaches law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, sought to dampen any expectations. His take, after I described your case:

“I like to tell people who are creditors, ‘Close your eyes. What do you see? Nothing? Well, that’s what you’re going to recover.’”

Mr. Harris declined to comment. I knew the court documents would contain the information, but struggled to access them until I got a deft assist from Brenda Wolfe, Washington County clerk of courts in since 1979. (She picked up my cold call on the first ring.)

The documents showed that when Pardson failed, it had very few assets beyond a van and computer equipment. When I forwarded the documents to Mr. Sicherman, he said that those assets would likely cover little more than Mr. Harris’s fees. Anything beyond that, he said, would go to employees or secured creditors, like a bank that could repossess property from a mortgage or car loan. For you, as an unsecured creditor, filing a claim is unlikely to be worth the time.

The court documents did reveal that Mr. Harris got the judge to approve the sale of the magazine itself to a new owner. But that owner, which renamed the magazine BWD, only took on the responsibility of fulfilling about $200,000 in unfulfilled subscriptions to subscribers, not any liabilities with tours.

The new publisher also did not respond to my emails, but a local NBC affiliate report from March 2022 noted that the new publisher had taken on some of the old staff, and — frustratingly for you — that one of the reasons the magazine went under was “having to issue refunds to birding tours due to the pandemic.”

That leads us to a two-part lesson. Part I: When a trip is canceled and you are given the choice between getting your money back or accepting credit, take the money. Part II: When you are not given a choice, plead for the money anyway, since if the company fails or never runs the tour, you’re out of luck.

Here’s a small piece of good news for everyone: the scenario above typically applies when a company is dissolved, never to be seen again. There is more hope for consumers when a corporation reorganizes through bankruptcy, since companies may strive to not alienate loyal customers.

And then there’s the lesson Jenn of Brooklyn, another Tripped Up reader, learned earlier this year. Her family’s New York to Sicily trip was disrupted when Flyr, a two-year-old Norwegian carrier, filed for bankruptcy in January, foiling her husband and sons’ plans to fly a major airline to Oslo and then hop Flyr’s bargain Oslo-to-Palermo route. When Flyr went under, they were stuck with round-trip tickets to Oslo and no easy way to get from there to Italy. After writing to me, but still within 60 days of purchase, Jenn sought and received a refund from her Chase Sapphire Preferred card. But the cost and inconvenience of piecing together new, indirect flights has left her ruing the day that she tried to save money with an untested airline.

When I suggested to Mr. Sicherman that travelers might want to avoid newer, untested companies, he told me it wasn’t that simple. “The typical consumer has no way of determining the creditworthiness of any business entity they do business with,” he said.

But thanks to that Ford-era law, you can minimize your risk by using the best credit card you’ve got.

If you need advice about a best-laid travel plan that went awry, send an email to TrippedUp@nytimes.com.