Don't Get Scammed on Your Next Vacation

July 19, 2010— -- On the Internet and in print ads, all suppliers are created equal — or at least, they can look equal. Unfortunately, as I've noted before, you don't have to be good at what you do — or even honest — to publish a great looking website or a slick ad. And as a result, we often get questions such as this one last week:

"I have rented a car for next March through a car-hire company in the UK. How can I check it out to see if it's reliable?"

This reader asked about a company I didn't know, so I checked it out on Review Centre, the website that claims to be the largest such site in the U.K. What I found should give our reader pause: All six comments reported that the company charged a deposit to their credit cards — not just a hold, but an actual charge — and delayed many months in refunding these deposits. Clearly, this is a company to avoid.

Equally clearly, review resources such as Review Centre can be an extremely valuable resource for checking out any sorts of suppliers you don't know. Here's a brief look at the consumer review landscape for coverage of major travel suppliers.

For travel questions, you can potentially use three types of user-based ratings: those that rate just about anything, those limited to all things travel, and those that focus narrowly on an individual segment of the travel industry. For the most part, the wider the coverage, the less detail in any one category. That's why I recommend starting with the specialized sources before falling back on the more general sources for questions the specialized sources don't cover.

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Airline Sources

Of all the main supplier categories, airlines are the most exhaustively surveyed and ranked. I can't begin to list all of the resources available; here are a few of the most popular:

• For the "quality control" elements of airline service — how closely each large U.S. line comes to delivering what it promises — you can't beat the Airline Quality Ratings from Wichita State and Purdue Universities. These annual scores reflect a composite of what can go wrong with an airline: lost baggage, delays, bumpings, and complaints to the Department of Transportation (DOT).