How to Detect and Prevent Fake Reservations on Travel Platforms

Fake reservations are a growing threat to the travel and hospitality industry, causing significant disruptions for booking platforms, hotels, restaurants and airlines. Fraudsters exploit vulnerabilities in online reservation systems to block inventory, inflate prices, and harm platform credibility. For travel & hospitality companies, the consequences are severe—lost revenue, frustrated customers, and operational inefficiencies that ripple across their ecosystem.

In 2024 fake reservations surged, with reports showing a notable rise in sabotage booking tactics, including last-minute cancellations and large-scale bot-driven activity.

As the industry continues to shift toward fully digital and frictionless booking experiences, understanding how to detect and prevent these malicious practices has become critical.  

Why are fake reservations a problem?

Fake reservations are deliberate, fraudulent bookings made with no intention of being fulfilled. These reservations can take multiple forms, such as:

• Sabotage bookings: competitors intentionally block inventory on a platform to reduce availability or inflate prices, leaving genuine customers unable to book their desired services.
• Last-minute cancellations: fraudsters take advantage of flexible cancellation policies to disrupt operations by canceling reservations close to the booking date, leaving the platform and its partners at a loss.
• Automated bot bookings: bots are programmed to execute fraudulent reservations at scale, overwhelming systems and creating artificial demand. But even bot attacks and bot bookings can be mitigated.

This form of fraud is often driven by anti-competitive motives or a desire to manipulate platform performance. By flooding a competitor's platform with fake reservations, fraudsters can make it appear unreliable, redirecting customer traffic to their own or a rival service. Additionally, repeated cancellations and no-shows may strain relationships with hotels, airlines, or other partners, ultimately damaging the platform’s reputation and reducing trust.

Fake reservations pose a unique challenge because they blend into normal user activity, making them difficult to detect without advanced tools or proactive monitoring. This issue highlights the need for travel platforms to adopt sophisticated fraud detection methods to preserve their integrity and customer satisfaction.

Challenges for travel platforms

People wanting to make fake reservations take advantage of the weak spots in travel platforms, often caused by customer-friendly policies and insufficient fraud prevention. 

Take flexible cancellation policies. While designed to offer convenience to genuine customers, they often become a double-edged sword. Fraudsters exploit these lenient terms by making large bookings and canceling them at the last minute, disrupting operations and frustrating both customers and platform partners. Similarly, some platforms allow reservations without requiring upfront payments or verifications, lowering the barrier for fraudulent activity.

Automation adds another layer of complexity. Fraudsters frequently deploy bots to make fake reservations en masse. These automated tools can bypass basic security checks, rapidly fill up inventory, and skew platform analytics. For travel platforms, this results in false demand projections and wasted resources, as staff scramble to address ghost bookings.

While automation enables large-scale reservation fraud, not all fake bookings are bot-driven. Fraudsters can also manually exploit platform vulnerabilities, making their activity appear more legitimate. Unlike bots that generate obvious patterns, human-driven fake reservations are harder to detect if businesses rely solely on surface-level verification of users' contact details. Bad actors may use realistic-looking email addresses, phone numbers, or even verified accounts to make fraudulent bookings, ensuring they bypass basic security measures. This makes deep identity analysis, behavioral tracking, and digital footprint verification essential in uncovering manual fraud attempts that blend into regular customer activity.

Lastly, high-value loyalty programs make platforms particularly attractive to fraudsters. Reward points, promo codes, and incentives tied to bookings can be exploited by creating fake accounts or executing fraudulent reservations to accumulate benefits. This not only causes financial losses but also damages the brand’s credibility with its loyal customer base. 

How do fake reservations impact travel platforms?

The consequences of fake reservations ripple across every aspect of a travel platform's operations, from financial losses to strained relationships with partners. These impacts are far-reaching and can be challenging to recover from, particularly in a highly competitive industry.

Revenue losses
When fake bookings occupy valuable inventory, genuine customers are unable to make reservations. This not only reduces direct revenue but also results in wasted opportunities, especially during peak travel seasons. Last-minute cancellations compound the problem by leaving empty rooms, unused flights, or unclaimed services that can no longer be resold.

Damaged reputation
Travel platforms rely heavily on customer trust. When legitimate users encounter blocked availability, inflated prices, or poorly managed cancellations caused by fake bookings, their confidence in the platform diminishes. Dissatisfied customers are more likely to seek alternative platforms, leaving behind negative reviews and tarnishing the brand's reputation.

Strained partner relationships
Fake reservations don’t just affect the platform—they also create challenges for hotels, airlines, and other partners. High rates of no-shows and last-minute cancellations can lead to dissatisfaction among partners who rely on accurate booking data to optimize their services. Over time, this can weaken partnerships and force businesses to reconsider their affiliations.

Operational inefficiencies
Managing fake reservations creates unnecessary burdens on support teams and booking systems. Platforms must allocate resources to verify bookings, handle cancellations, and investigate fraudulent patterns, diverting attention from more valuable customer service initiatives.

In the long term, the combined effect of these challenges can disrupt growth and leave platforms vulnerable to losing their competitive edge. To mitigate these impacts, travel & hospitality companies need to implement advanced detection and prevention mechanisms that address the root causes of fake reservations.

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Online Travel Fraud Detection

Discover why lastminute.com has chosen Trustfull to enhance detection of booking fraud attempts.

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Preventing fake reservations: key strategies

Preventing fake reservations requires a proactive approach that combines advanced detection tools with tailored booking policies. Travel platforms can minimize fraudulent activity while maintaining a seamless experience for legitimate customers. Here are some key steps to stop fake reservations from hurting your business: 

Booking validation with identity signals

Preventing fake reservations requires more than just surface-level security measures; it’s about understanding the deeper signals tied to digital identity and user behavior.

Verifying the identity of who is making the booking without creating unnecessary friction is the first strategy to implement. In particular, validating email addresses and phone numbers and cross-referencing them to spot suspicious signals allows travel platforms to differentiate between genuine customers and high-risk actors, identifying telltale signs of fraud before a reservation is even confirmed. For instance, checking whether a phone number is disposable, linked to multiple fraudulent attempts, or tied to a synthetic identity provides critical insight into the legitimacy of a booking. Similarly, email verification can reveal patterns of abuse, detect burner accounts, and flag high-risk domains, ensuring that fraudulent actors—whether bots or manual bad actors—don’t slip through undetected.

Advanced validation techniques, such as cross-checking digital signals like IP addresses, browser fingerprints, and device activity, offer an additional layer of protection. For example, booking platforms can assess whether a device is linked to multiple suspicious bookings or has been flagged in previous fraudulent attempts, blocking that user from operating on their website.

Dynamic booking policies

Travel platforms can further protect their systems with the strategic implementation of flexible yet secure booking rules. For example:

• Limiting bulk reservations during peak demand periods can deter fraudsters from monopolizing inventory.
• Requiring pre-authorized credit card payments or deposits for high-value bookings ensures that only committed customers make reservations.
• Setting stricter cancellation rules for new or unverified users reduces the risk of last-minute disruptions.

Booking policies based on customer behavior and risk profiles create a pool of valuable information. This is how platforms can make it harder for fraudsters to exploit their systems without alienating genuine customers.

Using behavioral analytics to identify fraud

Fraudsters often exhibit patterns that differ from legitimate users. Platforms can leverage behavioral analytics to detect anomalies, such as:

• Unrealistically fast booking times: bots can fill out forms far quicker than humans.
• Unusual interaction patterns: erratic mouse movements or minimal interaction with key elements on the booking page may indicate automated activity.
• Booking time inconsistencies: fraudulent bookings often occur outside normal user activity hours.

Analyzing these behaviors provides valuable insights that can help platforms flag suspicious reservations in real-time, enhancing their ability to respond to potential threats effectively.

Leveraging Trustfull's digital signals to detect fake reservations

Many existing fraud prevention solutions focus primarily on detecting bot-generated traffic, using automated systems to flag rapid, repetitive booking attempts. While this is essential, it doesn’t account for fraud committed by real human actors, who can manipulate reservation systems while appearing to be legitimate customers. Fraudsters using real-looking contact details and behaving like typical users can easily bypass traditional bot filters, making identity verification a crucial missing layer in fraud detection.

Trustfull offer travel platforms the ability to detect and prevent fake reservations by analyzing subtle, yet highly informative digital signals on any user trying to complete a booking. These advanced insights create a multi-layered defense system that goes beyond traditional security measures, enabling travel platforms to stay ahead of sophisticated fraud tactics and ensuring that fraudulent reservations—whether automated or manual—are stopped before they cause damage.

Phone number intelligence
Phone numbers serve as a crucial identity marker in fraud detection, helping businesses assess whether a reservation is legitimate or part of a fraudulent scheme. Fraudsters often use recently activated or frequently ported numbers to obscure their identity, making it harder to track them across platforms. Similarly, prepaid or no-KYC SIM cards, which don’t require personal verification, are commonly used to carry out large-scale fraud operations without leaving a trace.

Another red flag is the use of disposable or virtual phone numbers, which enable fraudsters to create multiple fake accounts without needing a real, traceable identity. Checking whether a phone number is linked to an established email address, online profiles, or messaging apps can help platforms distinguish between genuine customers and high-risk accounts. A number with no digital footprint or history of real interactions is often a sign of fraudulent activity.

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Email address verification
Fraudsters often rely on disposable or temporary email addresses to create fake accounts and make fraudulent bookings. Trustfull enables travel platforms to assess the credibility of email addresses used during the booking process. This includes:

• Verifying domain trustworthiness: identifying whether the email domain is associated with legitimate providers or flagged for suspicious activity.
• Correlating with breach history: detecting email addresses exposed in a suspiciously high number of data breaches, which are more likely to be used for fraudulent activities.
• Assessing online presence: checking for social media or web profiles linked to the email address, helping confirm whether it belongs to a real person or whether it's been newly created with the exclusive purpose of creating fake reservations.

Behavioral biometrics 
Understanding user behavior during the booking process is one of the most effective ways to detect anomalies that signal fraud. Fraudsters, whether using bots or manually inputting fake reservations, often exhibit patterns that deviate significantly from genuine customer behavior. Key metrics analyzed by Trustfull include mouse movements, scroll activity (fraudulent users may interact minimally with pages, avoiding elements designed for real customers), and time on page. Other aspects that put a spotlight on fraudsters is typing speed, as well as flight & dwell times.

Trustfull's behavioral analytics can capture and easily visualize these interactions in intuitive heatmaps, instantly revealing irregular patterns and helping identify and block fraudulent reservations early.

Device & IP intelligence 
Fraudsters often rely on advanced methods to obscure their true identity, such as masking IP addresses or using compromised systems. Trustfull helps uncover these tactics by analyzing device and network-level data, including user agent analysis (i.e. Identifying mismatched or suspicious browser and operating system details), spoofing detection (detecting manipulated device characteristics or fake browser information), and the use of VPN or proxies to detect a user's real location.
The Trustfull platform combines these and many other verification methods to provide a clearer picture of every reservation, forming a crucial line of defense against fraudsters. Suspicious activity doesn’t just get flagged—it gets stopped before it impacts availability or brand reputation.

Want to learn how Trustfull levels up your fight against fake bookings and fake reservations? Get in touch with our team of fraud prevention experts.