Fake Booking.com Sites Are Catching Travelers

Scammers impersonate Booking.com more than every other travel brand combined.

That unbeatable holiday deal you just found online might not be that great. Every year, travelers hunting a bargain end up on a fake booking site, enter their card details, and get nothing back. No hotel, no refund, and often a criminal now hold their payment or login information.

Fake Booking.com sites peaked in February, when early-bird summer holiday bookings are at their highest, with NordVPN’s next-gen antivirus detecting around 40 new ones a day. With summer well under way and travelers still chasing last-minute deals, scammers are putting out new ones every day.

“The deals that look too good to be true are the ones doing the damage,” says Marijus Briedis, chief technology officer (CTO) at NordVPN. “Someone finds a hotel at half the going rate; they don’t want to lose it, so they pay fast. The site takes their money and their card details, and by the time they realize the booking doesn’t exist, the trip is ruined, and their bank details are gone.”

Booking.com is the Scammers’ Favorite Disguise

Booking.com was impersonated in more malicious URLs than every other travel brand combined. It accounted for roughly three quarters of everything NordVPN detected across major travel brands this year. Airbnb was the second most impersonated travel brand, though well behind Booking.com.

AI has made these fakes far more convincing. The old advice was to look for broken layouts and bad spelling, but that no longer works. Anyone can now build a fake booking page that’s identical to the real one, so telling people to watch for obvious mistakes is no longer useful advice. The site below was flagged by NordVPN’s research team. At a glance, there’s nothing to give it away.

“Scammers go where the trust already is,” says Briedis. “Booking.com is one of the first names people reach for when they plan a trip, so it’s the name most worth copying. The safest habit is to stop trusting how a site looks and start checking where you actually are, the address in the [URL] bar, how you got there, before you share anything.”

What Happens on the Dark Web

NordVPN and Saily research found that on the dark web, a resold Booking.com reservation goes for $250, and a stolen airline loyalty account holding hundreds of thousands of miles for anywhere between $0.75 and $200. Even login details have a price, with a hacked Airbnb account going for around $130 according to NordVPN’s dark web calculator.

Some dark web “travel agencies” go a step further. They buy real flights and hotel stays with stolen credit cards, then resell them at 40% to 60% off. The deal looks legitimate to the buyer, but the catch is a cancelled booking on arrival, a police investigation, or simply being ghosted once they’ve paid.

How to Book Travel Safely

The best protection is making sure you’re on the real site before you enter a single detail. A few habits make that easy:

• Type the travel site’s address into your browser yourself, or use a bookmark rather than following links from emails, texts, ads, or social media.
• Check the domain carefully. Scammers rely on small changes like an extra word, a hyphen, or a different ending that are easy to miss at a glance.
• Be suspicious of prices far below everyone else. If one site is dramatically cheaper than every other, that is a reason to slow down, not to book faster.
• Use unique passwords and multi-factor authentication on your booking and loyalty accounts.

NordVPN is an all-in-one digital privacy and security app trusted by millions of internet users worldwide. The NordVPN app combines the world’s most advanced VPN, a next-generation antivirus, and other built-in security features, such as Dark Web Monitor™, designed to help users stay safer and more private online. NordVPN helps protect against phishing, scams, malicious websites, trackers, intrusive ads, and malware, while strengthening online privacy. For more information, visit nordvpn.com.