travel scams

I still travel a lot in my vicarious way via the internet and by reading books, though not much in real life now.

I've stayed in a mix of places, from extremely inexpensive but charming places not in any guide book and if they were, would be sans stars, to a couple of dizzying one day stays at gorgeous and wonderful places in very off season dates. My bias is for interesting over standard places, and maybe for uninteresting over standard places. So I suppose that if I were going to do a lot of traveling now I could be in line for a travel scam because I'd be searching out the non standard.

I'm fairly ignorant about online hotel or motel selection and booking since my last month long trip was worked out in the days of the fax machine and guide books, though I did research online for my trip from CA to NM in late 2005 but even then I didn't book online.... but I'm not completely ignorant since I follow bunches of travel blogs.

Today, there is an article on being scammed by the NY Times Frugal Traveler, Seth Kugel. There's a lot of useful info in the article, and I trust more handy information in the comments section that I've just started reading.

http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/burned-a-london-vacation-rental-scam/

Have you ever been travel scammed? I can't say I have, guess I'm lucky.