Travelers know about fake Rolex watches, faux Louis Vuitton luggage and other cheap knock-offs, and when we succumb to temptation in a market or from a street vendor, we are not being gullible or delusional. We know what is being sold, and if we are willing to fork over a bit of cash for a look-alike, we know what we are buying. But when two recent posts by two respected travel bloggers on two sides of the Atlantic took up the topic of "fake" elsewhere on the web, I was reminded that fakery a dismaying trend in the travel-sphere, where the stakes are bigger than petty cash for an imitation brand-name product. It even seems that Internet users who would never send earnest money to some orphaned Nigerian princess or London barrister can be fooled by phony-baloney travel sites.
Today, Darren Cronin wrote "The telltale signs of a fake travel website" on UK-based Travel Rants. His advice is particular germane to travelers booking air and lodging separately. Some of his tips sound a bit like airport security boilerplate. Instead of being asked whether you packed your own luggage, have had it under your control and been asked to transport a gift from someone you did not know, Cronin counsels, "Book your accommodation through a personal recommendation or a company that you have used before."
How to Spot a Fake Site
Another tip that seems obvious to me is to be wary of any sites within "poor spelling and grammar within the content on the website and within emails." I have grammar police tendencies, so maybe this comes more naturally to me than to someone surfing for good hotel rates. This blog has been spammed by travel sites from India and Pakistan so often recently that, having tired of deleting irrelevant comments with links to "travel information" sites on the subcontinent, I re
cently and apologetically instituted "blog owner approval."Cronin also recommended checking out the location of blog owners and how long the blog has been around. He recommended DNS Stuff. Another popular domain name search is WhoIs. One tip that is probably obvious to people more attuned to the intricacies of the Internet but wasn't to me, is "Make sure that the web address starts with https:// and the padlock appears on your browser." I've noticed URLs starting with https but really didn't know what it meant. According to an explanation on Yahoo! Answers, it "was designed by Netscape Communications Corporation to provide authentication and encrypted communication and is widely used on the World Wide Web for security-sensitive communication such as payment transactions and corporate logons."
The Kerfuffle Over Fake Hotel Reviews
As I was musing the issue of fake travel sites created to extract payment for presumably fake travel bookings, I also thought about Christopher Elliott's recent blogs about fake hotel reviews, specifically relating TripAdvisor.com. Just as ballot boxes are sometimes stuffed, hotels have been accused of having friends and employees write glowingly positive reviews of their properties in order to increase bookings. In his most recent post on the topic, "Does TripAdvisor Hotel Manipulation Scandal Render the Site Completely Useless?", he quoted TripAdvisor's April Robb, who wrote, "When a review is suspected to be fraudulent, it is immediately taken down and we have measures to penalize businesses for attempts to game the system. Penalties are handled on a case by case basis."
Then Elliott rhetorically asked, "So should you trust TripAdvisor? Having covered the site since the very start, I think I’m uniquely qualified to answer that question. And my answer is: maybe."
He continued, "Hotels and restaurants are gaming the ratings system, without a doubt. What’s significant about the recent TripAdvisor warnings is that they appear to shift their fraud-detection efforts from an unrealistic, proactive approach to a more reasonable, reactive approach. Which is to say, they do their best to catch bogus reviews as they’re posted, but in the end, they can’t stop them all. "
My post, "Hotel Review Sites: Useful or Misleading," about online veracity in travel reviews, also addressed the topic. Bottom line as many of us have concluded is caveat emptor -- buyer beware, whether it's your credit card number that you are sending out into cyberspace or making a reservation with certain expectations for your vacation or business travel experience.
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