
Vacation Travel Scams Are Up 900%

Vacation travel scams have surged dramatically in recent years. Here is how to recognize and avoid them before you travel.
Travel scams targeting vacationers have surged dramatically in recent years, and the tactics attackers use to target travelers share a lot in common with the business email compromise schemes targeting Minneapolis-St. Paul companies - which makes this a useful, timely lesson for both personal and business security awareness.
Why Travel Scams Have Spiked So Sharply
The rise of AI tools has made it dramatically easier for scammers to create convincing fake booking sites, fraudulent rental listings, and personalized phishing emails referencing real travel details scraped from public bookings or social media posts.
Common Travel Scam Patterns
- •Fake vacation rental listings that collect payment for properties that don't exist or aren't actually available.
- •Fraudulent airline or hotel "cancellation" emails designed to harvest payment information under time pressure.
- •AI-generated customer service chatbots that convincingly impersonate legitimate travel companies to extract personal or payment data.
- •Public Wi-Fi exploitation at airports and hotels, intercepting data from travelers connecting to unsecured networks.
Why This Connects to Business Security
The same psychological tactics - urgency, impersonation, and exploiting distraction - that make travel scams effective are precisely what makes business email compromise and executive impersonation attacks work. Training employees to recognize one helps them recognize the other.
Protecting Yourself and Your Business
- Book travel directly through verified, official sites rather than clicking email links.
- Use a VPN on public Wi-Fi when traveling for business.
- Verify any "urgent" travel-related request through a separate communication channel before acting.
- Extend the same skepticism to travel-related requests from colleagues as you would to financial requests.
Veracity Technologies trains Minneapolis-St. Paul teams to recognize social engineering patterns that span both personal scams and business-targeted attacks alike.
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Published 2025-03-18 · Last reviewed December 2025