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How to get a travel company to stop spamming you

July 6, 2007

When you make a reservation online, your e-mail address is captured by the airline, car rental company, cruise line or hotel. Where it goes after that is anyone’s guess. But Mark Stechbart knows where his address ended up. After making a reservation at a Ramada property last year, it landed in an enormous marketing database, which has been spamming him with unwanted messages ever since.

“Please make them stop!” he asked me in a recent email.

Here’s his story:

“I visited a Ramada in Fort Collins, Colo., last summer,” he wrote. “Big mistake — a truly horrible property. While making the phone reservations, I asked the agent to not send me any e-mails other than the immediate reservation confirmation.”

That didn’t happen. He received one e-mail after the confirmation, then another. He wrote to Betsy O’Rourke, senior vice president for marketing and communications at Wyndham Worldwide (Ramada’s parent company) and to the investor relations department. Both times, he received form responses — but the spam kept coming.

“Can you embarrass them into stopping?” he asked.

Probably not. But I do have a few ideas on how to end the spam:

» Opt out. Every commercial e-mail message should have an “unsubscribe” function at the end. Click on it, but be patient. It can take several weeks to clean your address out of every database.

» Block it. A lot of e-mail programs will let you label a particular message as spam. If there’s no “unsubscribe” feature then I would consider it to be malicious spam — sent with the knowledge that the message is unsolicited and probably unwanted. Block the sender and the sender’s domain.

» Escalate your case. Sending a friendly “please stop” e-mail to the powers that be in the marketing department might work. Then again, it might not. (In Stechbart’s case, I’d say the jury is still out.)

» Report ‘em. You can forward unwanted spam to the government at spam@uce.gov. The Federal Trade Commission uses the spam stored in its database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive e-mail. You can also report it to spam databases such as SpamCop.

Bottom line: you don’t have to put up with spam. Especially from a legitimate travel company.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

5 comments

  • Dina G.

    Note that unscrupulous spammers will have what LOOKS like an “opt-out” link at the bottom, but it may just lead you to more spam. If you have to enter your email address into a box, you may be better off not “unsubscribing.” Similarly, if when you hover over the link, the address that shows up in the address bar is different than what the email says it is, you may not want to click.

  • Al Iverson — www.spamresource.com

    Reporting spam to the FTC is near worthless. It helps give them data to sift through someday, but it brings no immediate relief, and it brings no relief at all unless a bad actor rises to the top of their list based on a billion complaints (or something).

    Reporting them to your ISP is a much better idea, though. Use the report spam button. If you click the report spam button, you register a black mark against them. Enough black marks and they get blocked/diverted to the spam folder. It’s entirely reasonable and tends to work in your favor, if a bit slowly. Additionally, if the sender, or their email service provider, is whitelisted with that ISP, or has a “feedback loop” set up, they are generally required to unsubscribe you when you register that complaint. If they don’t and continue to send to you, some ISPs will pick up on that, negatively coloring the sender’s reputation, and you’ll likely continue reporting it as spam, and the black marks will tally up faster.

    If your ISP doesn’t have a report spam button, try contacting your ISP and asking them for help. Most are sensitive to user pain about spam (perceived or otherwise) and are looking for ways to help. A block by the ISP against the sender will stop the mail for ALL the ISP’s users, and likely wake up the sender. It may not last forever, and it may not drive the reform you want, but it is more likely to help than to hurt.

    Hey Elliott — having this blog post email addresses on comments is lame. You’re setting it up so peopple like Dina are going to get more spam. (Me too, if I had put my real email address.)

  • Chris

    I heartily agree with Al Inverson’s post–this blog should NOT post commenters’ email addresses!

  • Nigel Appleby

    Another preventative which is a little time consuming is to open an extra e-mail account to use for the booking and trip process and then close it down with no forwarding. Hotmail offers free e-maial accounts which can be used for this purpose. Depending how many time a year someone travels would determine how many e-mail accounts are needed. Alternatively open the Hotmail account, use it until the spam starts close it down and open another free one.

  • Christopher Helwig

    I have 2 solutions to deal with companies that do that sort of thing. First, I pay $30 or so a year for Yahoo! Mail Plus, which allows me to set up as many email addresses and I want. Each time I need to give my email address to a company, I create a new one just for them, with their name in it so I can recognize it later. As soon as I start receiving spam at that address, I cancel the address. I also call or email the company and advise them I know they sold my email address, and
    that I will never do business with them again. Some, like Borders Books, really don’t care and hang up on you. Others, like Celebrity Cruises, are quite apologetic and actually investigate what happened.

    Second, if you use Apple’s mail application, you can add a “Bounce” button to your button bar. Highlight any spam that makes it to your inbox and click Bounce. The email is returned to the sender with a bogus delivery failed message. Some of these bogus mesages end up bouncing back to you, but many of them don’t. Bouncing spam may not actually do anything to reduce the amount of spam you get, but it sure feels good!

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