Booking self catering apartments or villa rentals is often a cheaper and more flexible way of enjoying a holiday in comparison to hotels. Unfortunately, there are some potential issues and scams that you should be aware of when booking holiday rentals online.
No matter how hard travel companies and authorities try to prevent scams, there will always be fraudsters who will try and make money illegally. Unfortunately, this often results in innocent people having their holiday dreams shattered.
1. Choosing A right holiday rental Service Provider:
Finding the right holiday rentals website for booking apartments, villas and other forms of holiday accommodation online is extremely difficult. Your first piece of advice is to find a trustworthy website. To trust a company or website, you could check the age of the website using a domain age checker tool. Another way to check the credibility of a company is to visit your favorite search engine and search using the full holiday website domain name followed by 'scam'. This search should return all results that relate to the rental company and scams, if any exist. Do a quick check on the first two pages of results to see if your chosen company appears in the results and whether any negative stories about them exist.
2. Contact Details
When you have found a Holiday rental website that advertises a choice of properties, before you make any enquiries to property owners, have a quick check to see if the holiday rentals website displays their contact details. If the site does not display a phone number, address or email address then it means this website does not want to be contactable. If you ever have a problem or a query, how can you contact the site? Do yourself a favour and avoid sites that offer no support or a means to contact them.
3. Be Realistic
If a website is displaying holiday accommodation with exceptionally low prices or huge discounts, be wary. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
4. Research the Property
Before you part with any money for deposits you should obtain the owners full contact details including their home address, the holiday home address, phone numbers and email address. Once you have received the address for the holiday home, it is worth checking that the property address actually exists, using Google maps. It is also worth doing some searches using the owners name and email address, in case this returns some negative PR or bad experiences from previous guests. Request to see some references from previous guests, and contacting them directly should give you some added comfort.
5. Travel Insurance
Most travel insurance companies do not cover fraud, so if you have been caught out by a bogus scam then it is likely that you will be left on your own to retrieve the money. To safe-guard yourself, check with your current insurance provider what your policy covers. There are some travel insurance companies that do cover fraud, especially in situations where visitors have booked a property that is wrongly described or does not actually exist. It is well worth taking time to find an insurance company that covers this before you book your holiday.
6. Payment
It is advisable to pay your transaction by credit card, as many card companies do provide some form of protection. Check what your card provider actually covers.
7. Refundable Deposits
Many owners request a deposit to cover damage or breakages should they occur during the holiday. The deposit should be a refundable deposit and returned to the visitor upon satisfactory inspection and exit of property. When booking the property, make sure you are comfortable with the amount of deposit being requested, and have an agreement on how soon the money will be returned. It is also a good idea to take some photos before you exit the property, and request that the owners agent checks and agrees with you in writing that the property has been left in a good condition with no breakages.
