Shauna Kattler thought she’d found the ideal rental home in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, for her Christmas vacation: a two-bedroom penthouse condominium with a hot tub and an impossibly perfect view of the Caribbean. And she was getting it for the impossibly low peak-season rate of $450 a night through HomeAway.com, a popular vacation rental Web site. “Impossibly” being the operative word.
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Watch out. Someone pretending to be a friend is out to make a quick buck today. Don’t fall for it. The scam, which I first wrote about last year, steals email passwords and then sends a message to your contacts, pleading for money. As I noted in a follow-up story, the swindle is relatively easy [...]
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Charlie Leocha alerts hotel guests to a new scam to get credit card numbers and security codes. Plus, he looks at a new hotel guest blacklist starting this month in the U.K.
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In the Big Apple, they do it bigger. Someone once told me that as I was walking through the office-building canyons in midtown. It was a good thing I wasn’t driving through these same canyons in a taxi. I may have been being fleeced without my knowledge.
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Jack Taras and his friends thought they would be checking in to the Occidental Grand hotel on the Dominican Republic’s postcard-perfect Eastern shore for Spring Break. But when Taras, a 19-year-old sophomore from Providence College, arrived at the resort, he was greeted with the hotel industry’s latest trick: he was walked down.
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A true travel professional will be on your side from beginning to end. But what happens when you run across one of the 138,000 plus people that have bought their way into the travel industry by joining an alleged pyramid scheme? Whose side are they on?
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It’s difficult to find a traveler who thinks always-congested JFK is the best airport in the country or that always-late American Airlines is the top air carrier — let alone a competent travel agent. But not according to the World Travel Awards, which has given JFK and American its top honors.
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Travelers planning to rent a car while traveling overseas are probably already braced for the higher gas prices, but the FTC and AAA now are warning of a scam that could cost a lot more than only gas money — fake international driving permits.
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Are sky-high refueling costs for your rental car about to be history? They are if you live in Maryland, thanks to actions to be announced today by the state’s attorney general, Douglas Gansler. And cheaper refueling prices are spilling beyond the boundaries of the Old Line State.
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