Fake websites used to be a serious problem for travel companies. Dishonest companies registered names like www.airfarnce.com or www.luffthansa.com aiming to steal visitors who made a small typing error.
Most of these fake sites were pretty amateurish and many have disappeared with the threat of legal action from the owners of the real site. Unfortunately, the practice is not quite dead and one example we have seen is much more sophisticated than most.
Travel Republic is a well-known British agent and their website is www.travelrepublic.co.uk but if you make an error and type in www.travel-republic.co.uk you will end up at the UK site of Expedia.
If you look carefully, you will see there appears to be an affiliate code which suggests someone (obviously not Expedia themselves) has deliberately set this up to skim commission from people intending to visit Travel Republic.
The old fake sites were really pretty obvious – you could probably guess that Lufthansa’s real website does not have links to car hire, cruises and erectile dysfunction cures. Unfortunately, this attempt is much more professional.
It is always an idea to check that the site you intended to visit is the one you actually land at – especially if you are going to spend money on-line.
Note:
We see that the owner of the www.travel-republic.co.uk is a Swiss company. We asked Travel Republic for their comment and they said, “We are not currently in dispute with the owner of this domain name but that is not to say we won’t be in the near future given that Travel Republic is a protected Trademark.”