Scam hotel bookings have gone from bad-luck anecdotes to a full-blown global epidemic. And the most dangerous part? The fraudsters aren’t lurking on the dark web. They’re right there on Google, in OTA message threads, and in “trusted” search results.
Between June 2023 and September 2024, over 500 UK travellers lost a combined £370,000 to fake bookings, according to The Guardian. That’s just one country, just the reported cases. The actual global number is orders of magnitude higher.
From big names to “who even are they?”
Forget the obvious phishing scams. The new fraud lives inside legitimate-looking booking sites, run by second, third, and fourth-tier OTAs that most travellers, and many hoteliers, have never heard of.
They look slick. They run paid ads. They show up in search. But behind the scenes, they’re often:
- Siphoning leaked wholesaler rates to undercut hotels’ own pricing
- Collecting bookings without passing them on
- Leaving guests stranded, and hotels dealing with the fallout
These operators are growing because they exploit a trust gap: travellers want the cheapest rate, but they don’t always know who’s behind the website selling it. Underneath the shiny interface, these sites are draining trust from the entire booking ecosystem.
AI will put this on steroids
Here’s the game-changer: Agentic AI. Within five years, according to McKinsey, AI-powered consumer agents will handle the majority of travel bookings. These agents won’t just search, they’ll decide, purchase, and confirm – all in seconds.
But AI agents have a critical weakness: they trust whatever the web tells them. And right now, the web has no real-time way to verify if a hotel listing is genuine.
That means:
- A counterfeit listing = treated as truth
- One fraudulent rate = amplified to thousands of users instantly
We’re on the brink of algorithmic fraud at scale.
The fix: The verified agentic web for hospitality
The solution isn’t another marketing campaign or loyalty program. We need a trust layer that authenticates hotel rates, content, and booking paths in real time, a verified agentic web.
That’s what we’re building at roomangel: a trusted travel ecosystem, giving travellers the certainty that what they see is authentic, fairly priced, and safe to book; enabling hotels to take control of their data, protect themselves from wholesaler leakage, and sell direct with confidence; and providing AI agents with a clean, verified source of truth they can instantly trust and act on.
In the agentic era, the difference between a guest walking through your door or arriving to a booking that never existed will come down to whether your data can be trusted.
The stakes for the industry
Hotels have already spent two decades ceding control of their digital presence to intermediaries. The arrival of agentic AI will either lock that dependency in forever or offer the chance to break it.
To win in this new era, hotels need to take control — securing and verifying their source data, working together to set industry-wide trust standards, and ensuring that verified content is effortlessly accessible to both humans and machines.
Because trust is travel’s true currency; lose it, and the damage will last far longer than any booking window.
