Shauna Kattler thought she’d found the ideal rental home in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, for her Christmas vacation: a two-bedroom penthouse condominium with a hot tub and an impossibly perfect view of the Caribbean.
scam
Tania Rieben thought she’d scored a bargain on a one-bedroom condominium in Maui for spring break. She’d found the vacation rental through a popular Web site called VRBO.com and then negotiated directly with the owner.
Spirit Airlines’ “$9 Fare Club” is probably one of the most controversial legal travel clubs in the country. Scratch that. It is the most controversial travel club in the country.
Renting a car in Europe can take some getting used to for the average American visitor. The vehicles are smaller. Gas is more expensive. And most of the cars have manual transmissions.
When Enterprise rents Janice White a car in Chicago, there’s damage to the fender. No worries, says an associate. It will be noted. But a few days after she returns the car, she’s being asked to pay for the dent. What now?
Watch out. Someone pretending to be a friend is out to make a quick buck today. Don’t fall for it. The scam, which I first wrote about last year, steals email passwords and then sends a message to your contacts, pleading for money. As I noted in a follow-up story, the swindle is relatively easy [...]
Nancy Miller considers herself an experienced traveler, so on a recent trip to Bangkok, the last thing she thought she’d get suckered by was a scam aimed at gullible tourists.
Anthony Lipschitz is the chief executive of iStopover, a site that connects homeowners who have spare rooms to rent with travelers looking for affordable accommodations. With several high-profile cases of vacation rental customers being ripped off — including, ahem, some of my colleagues — I wanted to find out how to avoid becoming a victim.
Think you’ll never fall for one of those email scams — you know, the ones where someone hijacks a friend’s Gmail account and pretends to be a traveler in distress?
Ray Sandoval paid $650 for his wife and two young daughters to fly from Sacramento to New York on Southwest Airlines.
Neither should you. And while there are more than enough scams that await travelers when booking their trips — covered in excruciating detail on this site — the’s also danger on the ground.
Recent news that Hertz would begin photographing its rentals got me wondering: What about the “ding” scams that have made the car rental industry millions of dollars over the last few years?
Remember Prime Travel protection, the Colorado travel insurance company that shut down amid allegations it sold unlicensed policies? Turns out it’s not dead yet.
Next time you cancel a hotel room, get a number. Otherwise you might have to pay for your reservation, whether you show up or not. Cancellation numbers, like reservation numbers, are verifications of a transaction. They’re useful not only for the hotel, but also for your credit card company in the event of a dispute.
Jack Taras and his friends thought they would be checking in to the Occidental Grand hotel on the Dominican Republic’s postcard-perfect Eastern shore for Spring Break. But when Taras, a 19-year-old sophomore from Providence College, arrived at the resort, he was greeted with the hotel industry’s latest trick: he was walked down.
Elliott is consumer advocate 
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