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Holiday Rental Scams: Checking For Bogus Holiday Lets
Following the recent holiday rental scams that were exposed and reported by the times, it is important to show caution when booking holiday villas and apartments.
As documented by the scams, holidaymakers are vulnerable when booking holiday lets online, especially when looking for bargains and last-minute deals. Even booking through one of the leading holiday rental and letting websites can offer little consumer protection.
To avoid being scammed by bogus holiday rentals, follow these steps to check if an apartment or villa is genuine before booking.
Holiday rental scams – how to check if an apartment or villa is genuine
- If booking through a rental listing site, such as holiday-rentals.co.uk, holidaylettings.co.uk or ownersdirect.co.uk the adverts should show (near the contact details at the bottom) how long the property has been advertised on the site. The length the advertiser has been on the site is usually a good indicator of the owners experience. The longer the better.
- Although many holidaymakers now book holidays via email and online forms without speaking to owners, speaking to someone on the phone can be reassuring that the holiday home is genuine and as advertised. Ask the advertiser questions about the location, good restaurants, local beaches, nearest supermarket, tourist attractions etc. to get a feel for the place. Serious rental owners will be happy to oblige.
- There are opinions that testimonials and reviews can be ‘phoney’ – but ones that can be verified are a good sign of trust. Some of the rental sites feature reviews from past guests, read through them and ask the owner if you can contact past guests.
- Do you have contact details for the owner, including both their home & holiday let address and landline number. Although some owners will be unwilling to disclose these on their websites due to their own fraud concerns, there should be no problems getting these at the booking contract stage when the owner knows you are serious. If you have concerns, ask for a utility bill for proof of ownership.
- Once you have these details turn to the search engines to do some research on the owner, the property, phone number etc. By entering the address into Google maps you should be able to verify the address and on some instances, use Google street view to see the actual holiday let. Do the photos on the advertisements match the images on street view? Although this is predominantly new to the UK, I expect this will become more mainstream shortly.
- Is there a booking contract? The advertiser should send you a booking contract to sign, which outlines the terms and conditions of the holiday before you book. Can you post this rather than email it. Once booked a contract should be issued.
- Are availability calendars updated? Although some advertisers leave theirs all available to try and sell alternative dates to enquirers, a calendar showing all available could be a ‘flag’ as scammers tend to re-sell peak weeks, as these are the most expensive.
- If the owner has their own website, do a whois lookup which shows details of who owns the website domain. Does it match the owners details provided. How long has the domain been registered for?
Protecting payments
The level of protection you have depends on how you pay for your holiday. Consider the following payment options before you send any money.
- Personal cheques and electronic bank transfers are the preferred method of payment for many holiday let owners, so don’t be alarmed if this is the only payment method available. However, once the cheque or money transfer is cashed, there is very little consumer protection and it will be difficult to recover funds in cases of fraud. Following the steps above and sending a check by post to an address, not a post box can help safeguard against fraud.
- Some owners may have a PayPal account, which allows you pay online via credit card. Payments by PayPal are covered for 45 days after payment, so if you pay your balance 6-8 weeks before (which is standard practice) this should give you enough time to make a claim following a fraud.
- Paying by credit card offers the most comprehensive protection from fraud. There is protection on most payments of £100 and above. The problem is that most holiday let owners don’t offer this facility due to high costs. However, if you are booking through an agency they should offer this facility.
- Debit cards may offer some protection through the chargeback scheme, but this varies so check with your bank.
- Be wary of paying for accommodation by untraceable methods such as a wire transfer company.
- Common holiday rental payment procedure is 25% deposit and then the balance 6-8 weeks before departure. If full payment is requested up front be wary. Obviously late bookings will require full payment, but try and use a payment method that offers protection such as PayPal or credit card.
- Some owners who live on site may allow cash on collection of the keys, although most won’t due to the risk of no-shows
What consumer protection is there for holidaymakers?
Booking through some holiday rental portals and individual owners websites offers little protection, as the accommodation providers are unlikely to be an Abta or Atol bonded travel company. In addition, standard travel insurance does not normally cover holiday rental fraud. So what consumer protection is there when booking a holiday rental?
When booking through a holiday letting website (where you book direct with owners) check whether the rental site offers a rental guarantee scheme to protect against internet fraud, should a property booked via their site turn out to be fraudulent. Some will reimburse up to a specified amount of the rental fee you have paid – note flights, car hire etc. are not covered.
There are also holiday insurance products available that provide more comprehensive protection against rental fraud, but this costs extra.
There is certainly scope for further protection for people booking holiday rentals. The responsibility should not be placed on the holidaymaker to carry out extensive checks.
Maybe it’s time for holiday rentals to be regulated or for an industry wide consumer protection scheme similar to ATOL and ABTA to be developed. If the holiday rental portals offered a credit card facility for advertisers to take payments and provided a rental guarantee scheme for bookers, this would certainly offer more protection than the current situation.
When looking to book your next holiday rental consider the points raised above and holiday home owners, show consumers looking to book your holiday let signs that they can trust you.
As always, we welcome your comments below.
Great tips. I have looked into paypal and found one potential pitfall for owners – customers can make a “chargeback” after they have stayed in the property. I hope the people who do this are few and far between though.
Hi Rob,
Interesting point, I’m not sure if this also applies to credit cards?
This could be problem when taking payments for last minute bookings without verifying guests. By posting key collection details to an address, at least the owner will have proof of address to dispute chargeback’s.
Useful Tips
We offer all our owners free online booking software that allows them to take credit cards which connects to Paypal to process the payment.
The owners have the option of charging an administrative fee that covers the credit card costs and I am sure the holidaymaker is only too happy to pay the extra for peace of mind.
We also guarantee the payment in case of any subsequent problems with Paypal but in the years we have been operating this we have never had a holidaymaker making a chargeback claim with Paypal.
Hi Nick,
Thanks for your comment. Seems like you are taking some positive steps to protect payments. Hopefully other holiday rental portals will adopt such measures.
Philip
Validation schemes like the seal of approval scheme run by yourholidaymatters.com can play a very positive part here as well. Equally Visit Britain assessements for example can only be achieved if visited by an inspector, so a VB Star rated property does at least exist, and you can check it’s not a scam by looking for the property on the VB site itself!
Some good advice here. The whois tip is especially good because it provides a way to see who owns the website. I would always advocate paying with a credit card. That way the consumer is protected and can charge back any payment.
I would also suggest that consumers check with listing websites what checks they have done before allowing someone to advertise. It has aleways been my opinion that some of these sites, although clearly not involved directly, actually facilitate the fraud because their checks are simply not good enough. That includes and actually is led by the really big sites; corporate giants that are interested in profit over and above consumer security.
It’s good to see that more and more listing sites are starting to ‘take notice’ of the problem and are vetting owners a bit more before listing them.
Pure Holiday Homes recently launched a scheme where they verify owners and highlight those owners on their website so that they stand out from the rest.
Yes, it’s good to see some sites ‘verifying’ more thoroughly. Should the market leaders offer consumers a form of free ‘booking guarantee refund’ in the event of being a fraud victim via an ad on their site?
I expect the ‘main players’ in the holiday rental market will offer online booking/payments in the future which should solve some of the problems. This is probably a few years off yet though.
Its still a real problem for people who want to rent a holiday home. Just over 50% of the U.K market prefer to book their holiday home direct with a bonded agent to prevent just this problem.
I would agree with all the points in this article. We have two rental villas in Northern Cyprus and frequently rent to people from outside the UK, so it would be particularly handy to be able to take credit cards from our perspective, as much as the buyer. Recently, we thought we had the answer, as one of the major holiday rentals websites now gives us the option of offering payment by visa or MasterCard even when the bookings are from our adverts elsewhere. Initially this looked very attractive, as the cost to us was only 2% of the rental price. However, we discovered that the company forced our guests to pay an additional 4.5% during a lengthy sign-up process, meaning even Paypal would have been cheaper, in absolute terms. If someone were to set up a reasonably priced system to enable holiday home owners to take credit card, they will be filling a very large gap in the market.
Alex, I agree that there is a gap in the market to be filled with regards to online payments for holiday rentals. From what I recall, one of the major holiday rental portals have introduced a solution in the US…not sure when/if it will rolled out to Europe?
Just spent 3 days trying to verify apartment. Owner only been advertising on website 3 weeks, lots of availability, very little detail. 50 % deposit and wanted Bank transfer to wifes account(different name). Asked lots of questions and queried address, owner stopped communicating! Was this possible fraud or did he get fed up with the questions, I’ll never know. Wish there was an easy way to verify, we may have missed out on the best apt. we’ve ever had the chance of OR maybe narrowly missed being a victim. We’ll never know.
We went to stay in a holiday villa in Sayalonga in Spain in June 2011. Beautiful villa and the property managers very friendly but they had placed a gas cylinder underneath the BBQ that was too big for it so after it had been lit for awhile the rubber pipe leading from the cylinder caught alight ! Luckily we were quick to act and got the fire out before the cylinder exploded. At the time we had 2 children on the patio near it so the outcome could have been very serious. The property manager took responsibility for this stating it needed a smaller cylinder and that he didn’t know anything about gas BBQ’s. All would have been ok except on our return we did not receive out deposit back so we contacted the owner, from here the correspondence from him was extremely rude and blamed us for the accident and he never gave us an apology. I contacted the rental website where we booked and they said complaints needed to be dealt with through the owner! Which of course was never going to happen. We wrote a review which never got put up or did I receive any response from when we asked what had happened to it. We feel completely helpless – we were not looking for anything but we didn’t expect to be treated such contempt.
Hi Carolyn,
It seems very harsh that a you haven’t received your deposit back, was a deduction made for the replacement pipe or the whole amount not refunded?
Although there are two sides to every story, I expect most holiday rental owners wouldn’t deduct for such damage.
In these situations one option is the small claims court, but for nominal amounts or when the owner lives in a different country, it’s usually not worth it. I would pursue an explanation from the owner for the deduction and the rental site for not putting the review up.
For future reference, if there is an incident, always take photos/gather evidence to prove your case in the event of disputes.