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Ok, so this probably sounds like a very obvious piece of advice, and to a lot of people reading this it probably is, but a recent experience has left me with a little bit more sympathy than I normally have for people who are taken in by websites who pose as the airline or agency with whom they wish to book.
I’ll admit it: Just about every time I’ve been told about or read about someone who has gone online to book a flight and who has ended up paying too much or who has ended up getting scammed because the site they used wasn’t the site they thought it was, I’ve had the same thought – how little attention were you paying that you fell for this?
Yes, that’s not a particular charitable thought to have, but I’m being honest. After having booked hundreds of flights online, I have always struggled to understand how someone could be taken in by some of the fake sites that we frequently see being highlighted. To my eye, most of them look nothing like the genuine thing, so to me, the mistake is often inexplicable.
I may have been wrong.
If you’re planning to book with one of the better known airlines (United, Delta, KLM, BA, Cathay, Singapore Airlines, etc …), I still think that it should be quite hard to accidentally end up on a site pretending to represent one of those airlines and then get overcharged or scammed.
These airlines spend a lot of money (a) ensuring that they appear at the top of a search results page for a whole variety of search inputs (so even if you brutalise their name, the first links that your search results show you should still point you to the real site) and (b) they spend a lot of money having impersonators closed down – even if I type “French Airlines” in to Google instead of Air France”, the first links I see in the results are to Air France pages.
But what about some of the less well-known and smaller airlines?
Well, even when searching for these airlines it’s usually quite hard to go very badly wrong, but that’s not always the case.
Take the example of Bangkok Airways with whom I booked some flights the other week.
Having done quite a bit of research in the weeks leading up to my booking, I knew that the airline through which I wanted to book was Bangkok Air, Bangkok Airlines, or Bangkok Airways, but I couldn’t remember which it was, so I simply typed “Bangkok Air” into Google trusting that I’d recognise the site that I wanted (I had visited the airline’s site in the past, so I knew what I was looking for).
This is what my search results page looked like:
The very first result (admittedly it’s a sponsored result) linked to a site that, to a casual observer, could easily look like the genuine official site of the airline I was actually searching for. It even calls itself the “Bangkok Airways Official Site”.
This is the page that the link opened:
That could easily pass for a genuine airline webpage.
Yes, the .org web address should be a bit of a giveaway, but to someone who has never used Bangkok Airways before, who isn’t really paying close attention, and who can’t remember what the airline’s full name really is, this would probably look like the site they wanted to reach.
Out of interest, I performed the search with “Bangkok Airways” as the search term, and this was the results page with which I was presented.
Even when I typed in the correct airline name in full, the first link with which I was presented was for the same site which, unsurprisingly, was still falsely claiming to be the Bangkok Airways Official Site.
I have no idea what this site is or what it does – I didn’t feel like poking around as I get uneasy clicking around a site that I know is pretending to be something that it isn’t – so I have no idea if this is just a travel agency trying to boost bookings or something more sinister, but I can see how someone could be fooled into believing that it’s the Bangkok Airways official site. Especially if they weren’t 100% sure what the airline’s full name is.
Sure, if you were paying close attention, you would probably spot some of the warning signs, but how many people see the words “official site” and click through to that site without a moment’s hesitation? At a guess, it’s probably thousands or tens of thousands, and that’s how people get caught.
Bottom line
I don’t know if bangkokairline.org is a scam site or just a very unethical travel agency, but the way it markets itself has shown me how in some circumstances, it can be relatively easy for someone to believe that a site they’re visiting is the official site for the airline they’re hoping to book with when, in reality, it’s something else.
I wasn’t caught out because I noticed the oddities in the web address and because I recognised the genuine logo in the second link down in the search results (I had visited the Bangkok Airways site before), but someone who has simply had Bangkok Air/Airline/Airways recommended to them (they can’t remember which), who has never visited the genuine official site, who doesn’t know anything about the airline, and who isn’t really paying attention, could easily be taken in … so be careful!
