Americans have lost over $145 million to fraud linked to COVID and the travel industry is no exception. Fraud has tripled since the start of the pandemic. In credit card fraud alone, the US saw approximately $11 billion worth of losses. As many Americans await stimulus checks and economic relief from the government and refunds from airlines, phishing emails are on the rise with scammers asking for bank and personal information to send “payment.” Phishing emails are also common regarding “charitable contributions,” “vaccines,” “cures for COVID,” and “COVID tests.”
Full Visibility
You might have heard about how Christopher Claypool and Buzz Baldwin Travel conspired together to “inflate the purported costs of Claypool’s international business travel” to receive kickbacks from the travel agents. According to The Company Dime, Baldwin “overbilled more than $500,000 in international fares.”
That’s a horrible example of horrible leadership and in no way representative of how TMCs do business. It is, however, a great reminder to check agency references and partner with a reputable company that you feel confidant you can trust with your corporate travel program. There are a lot of new travel management options on the market, good and bad, especially with the post-pandemic travel rebound ramping up.
As a travel management company, we believe it’s our job to equip you with all the right tools and information you need to better understand your company’s travel spend, which will help you identify fraudulent activity quickly. It also shows you that we’re living up to our side of the agreement. We understand that transparency goes both ways and we’ve made it easy to view live-data analytics right in our Gateway.
Fake Booking Sites
The Better Business Bureau continues to issue warnings about an increase in scammers posing as airline ticket brokers and travel agents through telemarketing calls. Similarly, there’s been an increase in imposter websites that look just like legitimate booking sites for travel, but do not actually deliver the product promised.
Scammers typically follow what people are doing, so if you’re offered a “too good to be true” discount on a resort stay, it might actually be too good to be true – especially if they’re calling you to tell you about it. When you “book” a flight through a fake website or by calling a customer support number, you’ll receive a confirmation email without the ticket attached. Then, shortly after, oftentimes the company will call you and tell you there’s been a sudden price change in the ticket, and you need to increase your payment to finalize everything. This is typically where people come to the realization that they’ve been scammed.
The best way to avoid travel scam websites when booking business trips is simply by booking your travel through a reputable TMC like Gant Travel. We book all our clients’ travel directly through the GDS and other industry-standard direct connections, so we don’t interact with questionable third-party websites. Plus, we know a lot of the warning signs for a scam travel transaction and will alert you if we think someone is trying to use your company’s travel account fraudulently.
Unused Ticket Fraud
In addition to external fraud threats, organizations must also pay attention to potential internal threats as well. Although no one likes to think that anyone within their own company would intentionally steal from the organization, the nature of unused tickets makes it very possible (and easy) to do.
During the pandemic, you probably had to cancel countless flights under different employees’ names. Unfortunately, those unused tickets are not under your organization’s name, they’re under the individual’s name. That means unless you put some tracking or protection in place, it’s incredibly easy for anyone to use their corporate unused ticket on their own personal leisure travel. Jamaica, anyone?
At Gant, we’re able to track all of your company’s unused tickets (so long as you book with us), so that’s one less thing to worry about. Our TicketRetriever tool effectively tracks and applies the value of airline vouchers that had previously gone untracked. We give you full visibility of your organization’s unused tickets and even give you the ability to reassign them to other members from your team right inside the Gateway.
An additional level of asset protection, many airlines now have policy that specifies that business travelers must exchange their vouchers with the agency that booked the initial trip which allows us to ensure they are only used on trips that meet your company policy.
Hotel Authorization Forms
Single-use virtual cards are the newest way businesses are protecting their company card numbers against credit card fraud at hotels. They allow recruits, contractors, and non-card-holding employees to travel with a virtual credit card that can only be applied to a single hotel reservation. End of reservation, end of credit card number – plus it gives a company control over what can and can’t be charged to the card during the stay.
Gant Strategic Pay (GSP) is our automated solution to the third-party hotel authorization process. GSP minimizes the risk of having your company credit card number stolen. By only allowing the traveler and hotel to access a randomly generated single-use credit card, GSPS adds an extra level of security. Additionally, companies can limit purchases by merchant category, total spend, spend type, and expiration date.
There’s always going to be somebody trying to scam somebody, especially in travel, but by utilizing a reputable TMC you can help you mitigate your company’s risk of fraud as your organization starts to travel again. Skilled agents, legitimate booking tools, unused ticket management, and single-use virtual cards could make all the difference.
