Travel Scams tips

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Red Lobster and Inside Edition. Two names I never expected to utter in the same sentence. Or, actually, in any sentence.

According to technology solutions company Asurion, 19 million phones are lost or stolen each year, and traveling puts you at higher risk for theft. Don’t wait until it’s too late—know what to do if your phone is lost or stolen on a trip so you can recover faster, protect your identity, and not lose all those great vacation photos.

Last summer I warned you about public Wi-Fi networks and the most vulnerable tourist hot spots susceptible to this scam—reminder: it’s Times Square—and this summer is no different.

Say you reserve at a hotel that looks nice in its online display, but when you arrive, you find a surly receptionist, inoperative AC, and cockroaches. And say that you report what you experienced, accurately and honestly, on TripAdvisor. Would you then be shocked to receive a $500 credit card charge as a “penalty” for violating the hotel’s contract prohibiting bad reviews? That’s actually happened to a few travelers, but it won’t happen any longer after the Consumer Review Fairness Act outlaws “no bad reviews” language in consumer contracts.

According to USA Today, Orbitz.com suffered a major data breach that may affect up to 800,000 customers who booked during 2016.

Effective immediately—or whenever it was that Delta posted the new rule to its website, with no notice to SkyMiles members—SkyMiles award tickets for travel that doesn’t begin or end in the U.S. or Canada must be booked at least three days in advance.

By now, you’ve likely heard about the massive data breach of Marriott’s Starwood guest reservation database. If you haven’t: The info of nearly 500 million people may have been compromised in the hack, making it one of the largest breaches of consumer data in history, and one that might have spanned over the past four years.

Booking holiday travel usually means watching vigilantly for the lowest-possible fares of the busy season, but it turns out this should also be a time to look out for travel scams. As the holidays bring an uptick in online purchases like travel booking, the risk of online fraud rises as well, online travel fraud prevention company Forter reports. A new report by the company found that e-commerce fraud rose 13 percent in 2017, with travel-related fraud specifically rising 37 percent—and holiday travel scams comprising a large part of it.

You know that old saying “there’s a sucker born every minute”? Don’t be one of them. Stay ahead of these surprisingly effective travel scams to keep your vacation plans from falling apart. The schemes below may be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to travel cons, but preparing yourself for these common swindles is a good place to start.

By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard that Thomas Cook Group, the British travel operator—which encapsulates retail travel agencies, wholesale tour packagers, and even airlines—has shuttered under bankruptcy. This is the largest tour operator failure in not-so-recent memory; it’s left some 600,000 travelers stranded at their foreign destinations, and many tour buyers who haven’t started their trips yet are unlikely to see the tours they bought or any money they prepaid. The issue raises the question: What happens to customers when a tour operator they paid shuts down; are there any legal guarantees of reimbursement? The short answer: only for some people.

When you purchase travel from an airline or another operator, you enter into a contract for a service or goods. And if some unforeseen calamity prevents the seller from delivering the promised goods or services, the seller can claim “force majeure” as a basis for terminating the contract without incurring any liability for breach of contract.

As travel resumes, so have travel scams. Scammers are getting more sophisticated, and can easily trick travelers out of their hard-earned vacation money. We’ve uncovered five of the most common travel scams for 2021, so you can outsmart the scammers.