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10 Online Travel-Booking Scams We’re All Sick Of

10 Online Travel-Booking Scams We’re All Sick Of

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Some travel booking websites hire people who are better writers than they are travel experts — writers who can make high prices sound low, small rooms sound enormous, and scams sound like a dream come true. Here are 10 online travel-booking scams we’re all sick of.

brandmill.com
brandmill.com

 

“Lowest Price Guaranteed”

Have you ever noticed how every online booking site guarantees the “lowest price”? How is it possible that a dozen-plus booking sites all promise to be the one with the lowest price? The truth is that a large bundle of the biggest booking sites have access to the exact same rates. So they don’t have the lowest guaranteed price of all the sites. Rather, they’re just part of a large group of sites all offering the same low price.

slate.com
slate.com

“See The Flight After You Book”

These deals may as well be called the “pay about $40 less for an absolutely miserable experience.” The sites that let you name your price, but only reveal the flight or hotel after you’ve agreed to pay for it, make it sound like they have some magical deals hidden away for risk-takers. In fact, these are flights and hotels you’d be able to book yourself — you’d just never want to. Typically flight plans include extremely early or extremely late flights, with outrageously long layovers, and the hotels are in the middle of nowhere.

sheknows.com
sheknows.com

Faulty Coupon Codes

Many online booking sites have banners flashing coupon codes in your face, offering “20% off any stay” or “$50 off stays of $100 or more.” The trouble is most of these will not apply when booking a hotel that simply holds your credit card, and has you settle up the bill at the time of checkout. Which is—oh yeah—almost all of them.

Thinkstock
Thinkstock

“Up to 60% off!”

When a site boasts rates of 60 percent off, 70 percent off, or some ridiculous percentage off, they want you to think their site offers rates cheaper than other sites. In reality, that “60 percent off” off means 60 percent off the rack rate, which nobody pays. If you shop around, you’ll see that the site is offering you the same price as 10 other sites.

travelmamas.com
travelmamas.com

Getting ‘free’ parking, free Wi-Fi, free breakfast etc.

Sometimes you’ll see packages offering things like free Wi-Fi, free parking, or free gym passes and you think “Oh! I better stay at that hotel because the others won’t offer that stuff for free!” But a quick look at that hotel’s website will show you that those things are always free, special package or not. Oh yeah—and they’re free at most other places, too.

orbitz.com
orbitz.com

Being shown the better deals after you book

There’s nothing worse than booking a hotel, only to have that booking website email you after the fact saying things like, “We’ve found hotels for just $80 a night in the city you recently booked in!” Well there is one thing worse—getting hopeful, going back to their site, checking out said cheap hotels, and finding out they don’t have a vacancy on the night you want. Oh right—you already looked at those hotels your first time on the site and they were booked up! That’s why you booked the hotel you did. And that booking website just wasted your time because it didn’t fact check.

ThinkStock
ThinkStock

 

The rate shown does not reflect the real rate

Whenever you search for hotels in a certain city and get that long, tempting list flashing prices next to pretty little pictures of swimming pools and balconies, you assume those prices are what you’d pay. You did, after all, already type in the dates you’ll be traveling. So why wouldn’t that rate reflect the rate you’d pay? But nope: the moment you click on the hotel of your interest, you’re taken to another page that tells you that on your specific dates, that hotel is a $100 more.

ThinkStockPhotos
ThinkStockPhotos

Too-short layovers

You have barely 45 minutes between flights. And of course, the moment you land in one plane is not the moment you get off. It’s at least 15 minutes before everyone has de-boarded. And then of course, you have to board your next flight at least 15 minutes before takeoff, or else you can’t board at all. It might be 15 to 20 minutes from the gate you landed at to the gate for the next flight! This arrangement was the travel site’s doing, and you could end up missing your flight. Suddenly, you have two hours to wait in the airport, during which you spend $60 on food, drinks and entertainment—the $60 you saved by booking this flight.

ThinkStockPhotos
ThinkStockPhotos

 

Personal surveys to get a free gift

You’ll often see banners on the side of social media sites offering a “free gift” from booking sites. So you click on them, only to be directed to a survey that requires you to give your email address, guaranteeing you’ll be bombarded with spam from now on. And at the end of it all is a “gift” you can’t use, like “$50 off when you spend $200 or more.” But you had no intention of spending $200.

ThinkStockPhotos
ThinkStockPhotos

 

Reviews written by the site staff

Some reviews are written just a little too well, with jargon like “colonial-style” and “pristine” that no regular person, hoping to give a hotel a little cyber high five, would ever write. That’s because plenty of booking sites write reviews themselves—reviews for hotels that sometimes pay them to talk them up. And that is not exactly an unbiased review.