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Hotel front desks are increasingly becoming the front line in the fight against travel scams, with staff often left to comfort travelers who have fallen victim.
Seasoned hotel employees in New York City spoke up about the growing problem in a recent interview with Travel + Leisure (1).
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Paige, a front-desk supervisor, said she’s seen suspicious websites advertising “incredibly low rates” at her hotel. Unsuspecting travelers book through them, only to arrive and discover they don’t have a reservation. The websites, like their bookings, were fake.
“I had a poor customer who I just told, ‘Hey, call your bank, because this doesn’t exist,’” she said (2).
Robin, another front-desk supervisor, had to break the news to a European family on “their big trip to see the Big Apple” that they’d been duped. She knew as soon as she examined the sightseeing tickets they’d purchased online.
“As I started leafing through it, I was like, ‘None of this is real,’” she told Travel + Leisure. “The places they were going to go to were real, the Statue of Liberty is real, but they didn’t actually have the tickets.”
Cheap room scams come with a big price tag
Travel scams come with an emotional cost that can cast a cloud over any vacation. Then there’s the financial toll.
Between 2016 and 2025, travelers lost an estimated $4 billion to fake booking sites, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association. Trade publication Hospitality Upgrade (3) warns that AI is making it even easier to fake sites.
Online consumer security company McAfee report (4)s that this is exactly what’s happening, with fraudsters regularly cloning TripAdvisor, Kayak, Expedia and Booking.com (5) on a grand scale.
Abhishek Karnik, McAfee’s head of threat research, said consumers are especially vulnerable because travel costs remain high, rising 9.8% (6) year over year in May and outpacing inflation. That leads to a fear of missing out and can cloud people’s judgment when they spot what appears to be a great deal.
“When prices are high and availability feels tight, people will likely move faster,” he said. “Scammers take advantage of that by impersonating the travel brands and messages consumers already trust.”
According to McAfee, 90% of Americans are pressured to book any travel deal they can find, often overlooking “too good to be true” warning signs. One in three said they’d book an online deal before verifying the site's legitimacy or the deal itself.
How to protect yourself from fake booking sites
The hotel staff interviewed by Travel + Leisure recommend booking directly through the hotel and making sure you are on its official website. When in doubt, call the hotel’s reservations line directly.
Still, online booking is convenient for busy travelers, so the hotel industry is trying to protect both its reputation and consumers while competing with online booking sites.
The Roomangel Foundation, a London-based nonprofit representing hotels worldwide, offers member hotels a “Verified by Roomangel” stamp on their reservation websites to show that the site and its price are real (7).
Whether you’re booking directly through the hotel or using an online travel agency such as TripAdvisor, double-check the website’s URL. You can use cybersecurity software such as Malwarebytes (8) or McAfee’s Scam Detector (9) to screen for fraudulent sites.
Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission recommends (10) researching the property owner or third-party booking site to see whether there are complaints about them.
Make sure the property you’re booking is legitimate, and never pay for a reservation by wire transfer, gift card, payment app or cryptocurrency. Those are classic signs of a scam, the FTC advises.
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Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
Travel + Leisure (1); YouTube (2); Hospitality Upgrade (3); McAfee (4), (9); Booking.com (5); U.S. Travel Association (6); Room Angel (7); Malwarebytes (8); Google (10)
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.
