Foreign Perspectives

Most people will drastically underestimate that number because they’ve installed a spam filter and they just delete any dodgy e-mails as they come in. In fact, over the peak season the real number is probably several per day ie around a couple of hundred over the course of the summer.

However, in amongst those ones that people have deleted are a number of genuine bookings that just look dodgy.

From the spam filter, we find that we get something like one or two genuine enquiries a week that are blocked by it from normal people and one booking site gets all their e-mails to us blocked by it because of the method they use for sending out enquiries (no, it’s not possible to whitelist it).

From the dodgy e-mails we have had some of our largest genuine bookings. For example, would you have considered something along the lines of “i represent a traveling theatre group and i to book want 10 rooms for 2 nights. do you take bank cheques?” from a yahoo address? In fact, it was quite genuine, despite all the “red flags” (bad grammar, large booking, bank cheque payment).

So the question isn’t so much how many fraudulent bookings that you get, because that’s sure to be hundreds, but rather how many have you tagged as fraudulent but which were actually genuine booking enquiries?