Scam Websites in the Travel Industry: How to Spot Them
The travel industry is one that sees millions of consumers every year, thanks to the ever-expanding number of website and online booking companies that have cropped up in recent years, offering everything from flights to hotels and cruises all over the world at extremely competitive prices. But what happens when some of these sites turn out to be scams? Unfortunately, this happens far more often than you might think, as we’re about to see in this article on how to spot a scam website in the travel industry.
7 ways to spot a scam website
URL name is unusual … eg www.r4yhde4.trav
the price is too good to be true
It’s missing information and spelling errors and poor phrasing.
It has bad reviews
It has unusual payment methods.
Its missing a padlock and trust seal.
Scammers are developing more convincing merchant websites to trick customers into thinking they are making online purchases from reputable companies. It’s also doubtful that you will ever find any evidence of your purchases or your money after being deceived.
The website looks unprofessional
Authentic company websites will take considerable care to have a polished appearance. A high number of grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes could indicate that the website was launched rapidly. Typos do arise occasionally on websites, but frequent errors could indicate a fraudulent site.
Sometimes it pays to check all the menu options on the site to see if they function and work accordingly.
The contact information is missing or incomplete
Despite having a realistic appearance, how well does a website read? There are numerous spelling and punctuation mistakes on scam websites.
Important user privacy information, the website’s terms and conditions of use, and seller contact information can also be vague, scant, or absent altogether.
You can even try contacting them to see if they are genuine or not.
Verify that the website has a “Contact us” page and that the information is accurate if it does. When a website just provides a contact form for customers, buyers need to exercise caution. Companies that offer products or services should list both a phone number or email address and a physical address where customers can visit them. It’s important to confirm that they have a returns policy and that it is reasonable; if not, this may be cause for concern.
A trustworthy business would never provide sloppy or mistake-filled content on their website. Therefore, it would be a good idea to avoid it if you study the fine print and find that it isn’t as professional as it should be.
A professional travel company would never have sloppy details on how to connect.
The website is full of grammatical errors
Quite often they have spelling and grammar mistakes because the sites are hastly written maybe using a translation website and the person doing doesn’t have English competency, possibly from another country.
The website offers too-good-to-be-true deals
The products will be so undervalued to tempt you to buy without thinking it through or doing all the necessary backgrounf=d checks. If it is too good to be true then it probably too good to be true. With the other checks it could always be true but it pays to check.
The website uses pressure tactics
Quite often they will have a pressure tactic such as a time related sale which has an unrealistic value
Url name is unusual
Scammers may use a URL that is very similar to a known legitimate website but with small, easy-to-miss differences such as an extra dash, underscore, a capital I instead of lowercase L or an extra letter – so pay attention to detail
Unusual payment details.
The way a website collects payments is one of the major warning signs that it is a fraud.
Alarm bells should go out if a website requests payment via money order, preloaded money card, virtual currencies like Bitcoin, direct bank transfer, wire transfer, or direct debit to an unusual account.
Some con artists will employ conventional payment methods; if this happens, you might be able to get your money back. However, it all depends on the payment method you chose. Debit cards typically don’t provide the same amount of buyer protection as other payment methods like credit cards or PayPal, which has a mechanism in place for buyer protection. I didn’t realise this years ago, that if you pay for something on credit card and you don’t get the product within a certain time period you might be able to get a refund.
Its missing the the padlock sign near the URL.
The URL bar in the upper left corner of your browser window ought to display a padlock icon. If it’s not there, the website is not safe, and you shouldn’t enter any personal or financial information there.
The padlock serves as a security and code warning to users of the website. Secure sockets layer (SSL)-enabled websites feature a green padlock next to their URLs and use the more secure https:// prefix rather than the less secure http:// (without a “s”).
But that does not imply that all websites bearing the tiny padlock are trustworthy. Despite this, con artists have found ways to obtain fictitious security certificates and add those tiny URL padlocks to their websites. Therefore, even if it exists, you should maintain your scepticism.
It has bad reviews
check review sites which has user reviews such as trust pi;ot and google to get a general trend of user satisfaction . Not all reviews can be trusted however but it one source to check.If some of the reviews are word for word copies, or it doesn’t give detail on the product it may be a fake review.
Social media presence
Check to see if they are contactable and have valid accounts such as twitter, instagram and Facebook.