Avoiding becoming part of a fraud statistic yourself
When you’ve been marketing your property for a while you’ll find that you begin to get what eventually becomes a flood of fraudulent bookings.
In some ways, that’s a good thing in that it’s an indication that your marketing is working. However, it can quickly become a major pain.
Replying to these people has the disadvantages that they now know that they have a valid e-mail address and secondly that it wastes time that you could be spending on getting real guests. Therefore it’s worthwhile considering how you can weed them out.
The first action of most people is to activate a spam filter. This does thin out the numbers considerably but it has the major downside that it also blocks e-mails from genuine guests. Now, granted it lets the vast majority of genuine e-mails through but you obviously don’t want to block any genuine enquiries ie in activating a spam filter you need to accept that you will lose genuine bookings.
What’s considerably more effective is a two stage process for most people. First, change your booking e-mail address and then replace any references to your e-mail address by a link to an encoded form. For example, to e-mail me you can click here and anyone listed on the OurInns sites can do the same thing. This has the advantages that 1) your e-mail address is never displayed on the site and therefore can’t be captured by automatic scanning programs and 2) e-mailing via the form is difficult to automate ie it’s less likely that you’ll get spam that way. The OurInns system provides adds automatic blocking of bulk e-mails and a check for the location of the sender.
However, regardless of what you do, you’re still going to get some of these fraud bookings coming through.
Once you’ve seen a number of them you’ll get a feel for what’s real and what’s not. For example, many will be from some (usually) religious organisation, there will be major grammar errors in them and they’ll use free e-mail addresses such as hotmail or yahoo. That said, organisations obviously do make bookings, real people have dreadful grammar and they use hotmail and yahoo addresses but, on the whole, it’s an overall view of the enquiry that’ll ring bells for you.
The other type of fraudulent booking that you’ll get is from people who require a visa to enter the country. Generally speaking you’ll get these if you offer an instant booking facility on your site because they require proof that they’ve booked accommodation to get the visa. The characteristics of these are that they are 1) from nationals of countries that require a visa and 2) they are usually for unusually long periods for your cheapest room. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to separate these out from the real bookings: clearly you can’t just reject bookings from, say, non-Europeans as that would include a great deal of real bookings. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to reject unusually long bookings as some people from distant countries do stay longer than average.
What you need to do in these cases is to add an extra paragraph to your booking conditions requiring all visa nationals to 1) provide you with a copy of their passport and their visa and 2) charge them the full balance upfront on a non-refundable basis. Most European countries require you to record the passport details of non-Europeans that stay with you so legally you’re fine on the first point and it simplifies any required visa application if they can prove that they’ve paid a non-refundable deposit so genuine guests are OK with the second point.
Finally, you’ll usually find that the number of fraud bookings increases dramatically in the peak season. Clearly that’s the most lucrative time for most of us and we don’t want to be holding rooms for duff bookings so over the peak periods, it’s usually best to ignore any bookings that you’ve any doubts about as the rooms that you’d have to hold for them will be taken by real people making enquiries that you’re happy with.
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