Ed Perkins on Travel: Travel scams

From the Book of Ecclesiastes to George Shearing and the Ray Charles Singers, folks have been reminding us “There’s nothing new under the sun.” That was my take when I started this column; many of the “latest” travel scam warnings could be from decades ago – timeshare buy-out scams, ingenious ways pickpockets try to distract you while grabbing your wallet, forcing you to buy a worthless trinket. And many more are the usual suspects of internet and smartphone scams that have been around almost as long as the internet and smartphones and can get you no matter where you are. But a few are recent enough to warrant a mention in the at least “sorta new” group.
These days, when you search online for a travel company – hotel, airline, or whatever – you expect that the search will prominently return that hotel’s or airline’s website. Not so. All too often, the top listing will be for a third-party agency. I got caught on that a few years back, when I wanted to reserve a room directly with a hotel in Inverness, Scotland, and instead was led (misled) to a hotel reservation agency site. I didn’t look carefully enough at the site’s URL.
I wasn’t cheated; I got a booking at the same price as I would have found on the hotel’s actual site. But the hotel was cheated out of the revenue slice the agency took. And I wanted to buy direct: Buying through an agency always complicates things if you have a problem.
Today’s most widespread deception remains mandatory hotel fees. Instead of posting a rate of $150, a hotel posts the rate at $110, with fine print somewhere that you must pay an additional “resort” fee of $40. In areas such as midtown Manhattan where using the term “resort” would be ludicrous, hotels use “facility,” “destination,” or some other nonsense term.
No matter what you call them, mandatory fees are clear cases of deception, designed to lead you to the wrong choice. Your best defense is to compare rates on Kayak.com, where you can opt to have all hotel rates displayed, including all fees and taxes.
The latest variation on this theme is mandatory restaurant fees. As with hotels, restaurants give some plausible reason for charging you 10 percent or more over menu prices, but the deception intent is the same: make you think the restaurant is less expensive than it is.
Foreign exchange has long been a fertile field for scamming unwary travelers. Since I started international traveling decades ago, you could count on losing 5 percent to 10 percent exchanging U.S. for local cash at an airport exchange desk or downtown bureaux de change. For a while, you gained the upper hand with a surefire way to minimize those exchange losses: Get whatever local currency you need from a large bank’s ATM using a card from a US bank that doesn’t surcharge foreign withdrawals. But lately, some large international gateway airports have thwarted that system by kicking out the legitimate bank ATMs and instead limiting all airport ATMs to those operated by a retail exchange outfit such as Travelex. And – surprise – those ATMs give the same exchange rates as the retail exchange desk. I’ve seen surprisingly little about this scam in the blogosphere – and I’ve been frustrated when a search returns something I wrote a few years back among current listings of coverage of the topic. At any rate, your best defense is to avoid such ATMs and wait until you get downtown to find a big-bank machine. Fortunately, you can now pay for many airport transit systems by tapping a US-issued credit or debit card without the need to pre-register or set up an account – just make sure to use the same card to get into the system as to get out of it.
Beyond these, look out for all the golden oldies of scams, along with new variants such as smartphone charging stations that actually load malware along with a few amperes to your phone. Whether or not you’re paranoid, they really are out to get you.
(Send e-mail to Ed Perkins at eperkins@mind.net. Also, check out Ed’s new rail travel website at www.rail-guru.com.)