Beware of Travel Scams

I rarely, if ever, win anything of import. Whether raffles or those "be the 4th caller" type competitions, it's always been a waste of time or money.  But I recently entered a radio station's on-line competition, then promptly forgot about it until I received a call from the station saying I was the winner -  4 roundtrip tickets anywhere in the 48 contiguous states, worth $1,600 dollars (or $400 per person) and $1,090 to spend on hotel courtesy of  Delta Vacations.  I was thrilled, to say the least, drove down to the station picked up the paperwork and now all I have to do is figure out where and when. Considering the cost of airline tickets has skyrocketed, I'm not sure if I will wind up owing some money, but it shouldn't be much. 

But not all give-away deals are legit, and some are downright scams.  You have the timeshare scams that make you sit through a long presentation and then hardsell you into buying into the timeshare, that you may or may not ever use. And the "robo-calls" that travel guru Arthur Frommer talks about in his blog.

The lesser form of scams involves the use of robo-calls. Your telephone rings, you pick up the receiver, and in quick order you first hear the sound of seagulls, then of waves breaking on the shore, then various bars of maritime-like music, and then the stentorian speech of a gravelly-voiced announcer saying: "This is your captain speaking and I'm inviting you on a cruise -- a free-of-charge cruise".

You ultimately pay the small amount of taxes and fees associated with that cruise -- the actual sailing is supposedly free of charge -- and find yourself confined to the deck of a ferry traveling from a port in eastern Florida to the Bahamas, a "cruise" of about two hours. You don't receive a cabin. The small amount you've paid for phony fees and taxes is actually triple the size of a ticket for deck passage that you could have bought on the very same ferry.

I've never encountered a robo-call, but I have had my fair share of phone and email scams telling me I just won a 2 night stay in Las Vegas, or some other destination. I've also received them in the mail, and they immediately get tossed in the garbage. Frommer also discusses those attempts at scamming the unsavvy, wannabe traveler :

The scams currently on view in the world of travel are endlessly ingenious. Some of them tell you that you are the lucky winner of a contest -- that you will be receiving a free vacation simply for paying a registration fee. The reason so many people succumb to these phony announcements is that there actually are legitimate contests, and some people are correctly chosen as winners. But those people receive a registered letter announcing they have won -- and not a recorded phone call. The receipt of a registered letter is perhaps the only persuasive evidence that a contest is on the up-and-up.

Although I did not receive a registered letter, I knew mine was legit because I did not have to pay a thing to win the competition.
Another type of scam, which I'm sure everyone has encountered at some point in time, are those emails from friends or relatives claiming to be stranded in a foreign country, pleading for money. Over the years I have  received several from friends and cousins, and they actually looked legit. One from a cousin mentioned she was in London, had lost all her money and needed help to pay the hotel bill. The email address was hers, but it obviously had been hacked. I contacted her son who said it must be a scam because she was not in London.  Many claim that with the advent of social networking, it's very easy for scammers to get very personal information from people, though Joanne did not have a Facebook account at the time.
Then there's the shameful grandson travel scam that targets the elderly. These range from bogus traffic accidents in Canada, to being bailed out of jail in Spain and Mexico.  Unfortunately, many fall for it.

You'll find a great list of how to tell if something is a potential scam here.

Remember, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. But don't let that stop you from availing yourself of the legit ones, as I intend to do. Just do your research.

Happy travels.