After months and months of work or study daydreaming the arrival of feriethey can come nasty surprises shortly before the fateful departure. Through the Internet, the way of booking flights, hotels and cars has been greatly simplified, but the scams are always around the corner: at the last one there could be a unexpected increase about the car to rent or the news of thenon-existence of the structure request. So the advice is never trust too much and learn to navigate the sea of the web.
A striking case happened just last week to a journalist from the French radio station Rtl, Laurent Marsick. The journalist was in Florence and a few days earlier had bought an entrance ticket to the Uffizi, the famous Tuscan museum, on the Internet. On the site they were asked well 74 euro, – just over triple – compared to the 24 euros on the museum's official website.
The explanation for this story is simple: the site where the journalist had looked it was not the official one, even if it appeared in the first places on search engines. It is not the first case, but there are some precautions that can allow you to avoid fraud.
HOTEL AND RESERVATIONS
Fewer and fewer people go to travel agencies, unless it's an exotic or difficult-to-plan trip. For everything else there are online sites, but you have to be careful. The most trusted can be counted on the fingers of one hand: from Booking on Trivago, Kayak and Expedia.
Indeed, the advice is call the hotel once you have identified the structure you want to book, to confirm that the offer exists. Once the goodness of the opportunity has been confirmed, it is possible that the hotel itself completes the booking operation by telephone or, if it is an offer only online, after receiving confirmation of its validity, you can complete the booking via the Internet.
AUTOMOBILES AND RENTAL
Another field in which scams are increasingly common is that of vehicles. In this case however it is a simpler one find itand: if a car rental agency's rate is too low compared to all the other results, it's probably a scam.
If, for example, you want to book a car for a week on August 7th in Ibiza and you find 70 operators who offer it for 150 euros a day and only one who offers it for XNUMX for the whole week, the latter will risk making you get stuck in the airport upon arrival on the island.
THE CHOICE OF FLIGHTS
There are three websites most used to book flights: Google Flights, Skyscanner and Expedia. Here too, prices, routes and timetables are compared to guarantee the best offer.
On the official website of the carriers there is always a cross-check with the offers offered by the airlines. It often happens that when one or more stopovers are planned, the price is significantly reduced, even if this would certainly make the journey more tiring and long.
However, there are applications considered by users to be quite safe, including: Hopper which is an application that advises what is the best date to buy the flight or Rome2rio, a huge database with over 4.800 transport operators in almost 160 countries: it is capable of displaying all the options of flights, trains, buses, ferries and cars to move from one place to another.
