Travel Tips - the Top 5 Travel Scams

Here we are in the middle of the summer holiday travel rush season - a time when everyone is understandably desperate for openings on crowded flights and in booked-up hotels for wonderful holiday destinations all over. In their anxiety trying to snag the last ticket and that at a bargain, people understandably dispense with a little bit of their regular sense of caution . When people are in a rush for something and feel entitled to a little lost caution, you can be sure that there will be scam artists waiting to take advantage of the situation. Here are some travel tips on the kinds of scams that operates around the holiday travel season. You see, you aren't the only one around this hopes for a holiday bargain - its bargain season for the crooks too.

1. You receive an e-mail or regular mail flyer that promotes a special travel deal. The sender claims to be a major travel agency, and offers you a special way to snag a special deal. They ask you to become a kind of home-based travel agent for them; they offer to take care of all the messy details at the backend. For a modest thousand-dollar fee, they'll train you in the art of being a travel agent, and give you your travel agent ID card. Once you have that card, you'll find yourself eligible for any number of the special deals that are open only to travel agents. Now this is a scam; the ID card they gave you is a complete scam too. And every hotel or airline you might approach knowsall about them. And if it were a legitimate ID card, you would still not have any better a time with your reservations.

2. How about the one where some person advertises on Craigslist and claims to have a timeshare somewhere that he doesn't want anymore. He'll try to charge you a hefty sum for it. They'll take your money, and you'll never see your timeshare. Never accept a timeshare sale where you have to actually pay anything more than a couple of dollars. It's always enough if you just take over their timeshare commitment and relieve them of the contract they are stucl in that requires them to keep paying the company.

3. People try to sell you insurance to cover your losses should you ever need to cancel a trip you had reservations for. It sounds pretty good; except that it is funny insurance, and you'll never see any money. Of course there are real licensed insurance deals for this kind of thing; go to a proper insurance website; or try InsureMyTrip.com to check for travel tips around for the best travel insurance companies.

4. There are travel services that operate around that don't accept credit cards; they only accept direct funds transfers. They usually offer you travel deals that are too good to be true; mostly because they are. Who in this day and age would buy a ticket that offered them no proof for what they spent? They wouldn't have any proof of payment to claim as a deduction on their IRS forms. The bottom line is, asw any article on travel tips avoid scams will tell you, never deal with a merchant who will not accept credit cards.

5. Here's something you won't read about it in most articles on travel tips - it's the new future travel timeshare-like system. They ask you to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a permanent spot on their lists for free travel and stay around the world to the end of time. People go and sign right up, and then wait forever for travel arrangements that never occur. Why would anyone believe this? Those people have nothing. Stay away from future travel clubs like this; unless you actually know someone who knows by experience .