Protect yourself from travel fraud
The stories have abounded recently and center on cruisers with Royal Caribbean reservations (we’ll explain why shortly. HINT: It’s not Royal’s fault, really.) The stories are similar enough — someone has a cruise booked and wants to make a change through the cruise line. So they hit up Google and call the number.
Next thing they know, they have unwittingly given a scammer their cruise booking number and sometimes their credit card info before realizing it. What’s a traveler to do about this and other scams out there?
First, let’s say part of the problem lies in the wonderful world of Google. When one enters “Royal Caribbean phone number” into Google, the official Royal Caribbean customer service info comes not in the first return, or even the second. It comes FIFTH in the results. If one is scrolling on a phone, that’s quite a ways down.
(United Airlines is in the same position — fifth in the search for its own name. The top return in our Google searches for Royal Caribbean and American Airlines is the same company, and it’s not related to either travel provider.
Someone has figured there is a lot of money in travel vendor search terms. Fortunately, many travel providers still turn up at the top of their own searches.
How do you protect yourself?
First and foremost, don’t blindly trust a search engine to give you the most legitimate results first. Ensure you are clicking on an official web page, which is normally quite close to the vendor’s name. And, there is rarely anything between the company’s name and the dot-com. The website norwegianvoyages.com is not a scam, but it is NOT affiliated with NCL, either. It is a site run by Vacations to Go, a legitimate company that probably loses little sleep that people might mistake it for the official NCL website.
Use your booking documents. You received paper copies or online attachments of them, and they will have the customer service number for your vendor.
Don’t overshare information. This one gets tough in the above situation — even we travel agents are grilled by cruise representatives to provide a booking number and names when we call on a client’s booking. Beyond that, though, the travel company has everything they need to know, so the person on the phone should be telling YOU the details of your reservation. If they can’t, there is a good reason.
If it sounds too good (or bad) to be true, get off the phone and off the hook. Check comparison sites for pricing trends. If you are being pressured to book something at a fraction of the going rate, resist the pressure. On the other hand, some people were tipped off to the above scam because they were asked to pay charges that far exceeded what they knew to be customary.
Pay with a credit card. As an agency, we encourage clients to charge travel transactions instead of using a debit card. Credit cards offer protections (and points if you play that game), that are a huge asset in case of fraud. On the flip side, DO NOT pay with one-way, hard to trace and even harder to recoup means such as gift cards, crypto or wire transfers.
If you suspect you have compromised your booking through a scammer, contact your travel vendor immediately to safeguard the reservation.
If you use a trusted travel advisor, we’re filtering through the junk for you. For more information on fighting travel scams, visit:
Rick Steves’ list of tourist scams and rip-offs
and
