Warmer weather often means travel—a fact that scammers know very well. You just want to plan your vacation, so they flood the internet with fake booking sites, phony emails, and bogus deal links to take advantage of the unsuspecting.
To avoid losing your money to fraud, it pays to stay sharp when making reservations or buying gear for your trip. Fortunately, you can do so pretty easily if you ask yourself the questions below.
Is the booking site you’re on legitimate?
Whether booking direct on a carrier website or through a third-party online travel agency, make sure the website you’re on is legit.
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You can save a lot of headache by double-checking the reservation website you’re on before committing to plans.
For direct bookings, make sure the URL matches the known address. Scammers can buy a search engine sponsored link to promote false websites that look like the real ones. Or they can display copies of real websites when you enter the wrong address into your browser.
For third-party travel sites, run a search to see if the online travel agency (OTA) is well-known, as well as what the reviews say about the booking process and customer support. Travel forums and Reddit are good sources for opinions, good and bad.
Is that email deal real?
The first Travelzoo email I ever got was a forward from a friend—and I spent some time checking out the source before clicking on any links.
Travelzoo / PCWorld
You should only be getting travel deal emails from sites you signed up for—and those messages should be easily traced back to legit senders.
A first clue that an email is fishy: The sender email address doesn’t match the official URL. (e.g., deals@expedia.com)
To be more sure, you can dig into the message headers to see if the email was sent from a server owned by an official travel agency. In Gmail, you can click on the three-dot icon in the far right of a message, then choose Show original.
Is the deal reasonable?
ravel sites gush about this $275 suitcase—and it sells quickly whenever it goes on sale.
Even before I looked up historical data, that tells me I’d still pay at least $200+ after the best discounts. (Research on Slickdeals bears that out.)
Away / PCWorld
Maybe you saw a deal shared on social media, or a friend forwards you a link. Whether shopping for a flight or hotel, or a new suitcase or power bank, go into your purchase knowing what a reasonable discount price is.
For flights, hotels, car rentals, and cruises, you can compare costs against the big online travel agencies (Expedia, etc.) or find recent reports from people who’ve visited your destination. If a price seems absurdly low, you can gauge from online discussions if it’s reasonable. (e.g., I saw nonstop flights between San Francisco and Tokyo for under $600 on ZipAir, but didn’t recognize the airline. A little searching showed it was a new budget airline, and people had already tried it out.)
For gear like power banks, suitcases, and the like, you can look up past deal prices for that model (or at least general style of the item) with a quick online search. You can also look up reviews—maybe a discount is unusually high due to a new version having released, or there’s a flaw that caused the product to be unpopular.
Travel booking resources I like to use
Current fares for SFO-JFK on Google Travel—September looks like a good time to visit.
Google / PCWorld
Deal hunting is one of my side hobbies, and for travel, I have a few sites that help me find good discounts with very little fuss.
Google Travel’s flight search engine helps me see which dates have the cheapest prices for a particular route (e.g., SFO to JFK). I like this data because it’s the prices on the airlines’ direct sites, which I can then compare against online travel agency offers. Usually I book direct for better customer support, should something go wrong with my flight.
Google Travel also offers a hotel search feature that lets you scout hotels and their prices near a given location (e.g., 6th and Canal in Manhattan). It gives a list of various third-party booking sites (some I think of as less established than others). I use that info to get an idea of what’s reasonable, and then I look directly on a hotel’s website for equal or better deals. (Booking direct sometimes works out more in my favor.)
Costco comes through strong for its members, especially on car rentals. A second driver is included, and you can cancel your reservation any time before pickup without penalty. Depending on how good a deal you get on a vacation package or car rental, the savings can end up covering the cost of a yearly Costco membership for access.
Finally, searching on Slickdeals.net helps me see historical data for previous deals on a given product. Sometimes none exists though, so then I turn to the Keepa.com extension to see if price history exists for the item on Amazon.