BHUBANESWAR: When Supreeth Rao, a marriage planner of Bengaluru-based Panigrahana Weddings, zeroed in on Mayfair Hotels in Puri for the destination wedding of his two clients scheduled in December this year, he was offered a quotation of `15 lakh for 50 rooms including the wedding venue on the ‘hotel’s’ sponsored website.
While the offer seemed to be too appealing for Supreeth and his clients, the purported hotel staff who spoke to him, asked for payment of 50 per cent of the amount to book the hotel for December 7 and 8. However, the wedding planner and his clients decided to have a look at the hotel’s property before making the payment.
But, much to their surprise, on arriving at the hotel last week, the staff told them that they had received no such inquiry from Panigrahana Weddings for booking the rooms and wedding venue. The price for 40 rooms for December was `37 lakh. Besides, all the rooms were already sold out, they informed.
“Thankfully, we didn’t lose any money but my clients and my team had to go through the pain of coming all the way from Bengaluru to Puri for booking the property,” Supreeth said.
He further informed that instead of going to the actual website, his back-end team went to the sponsored Mayfair website that appeared first on the page during a Google search. “That sponsored link was where all the fraud began,” he added.
Despite Puri police and the hoteliers trying to catch hold of the online hotel room booking frauds since last year, cases continue to be on the rise. Till April this year, three such major cases have been reported. In fact on April 1, a Kolkata-based doctor Kunal Shah lost `2.28 lakh while booking Mayfair hotel online for three days.
Such is the extent of the menace that even the neighbouring Kolkata Police in December last year issued a set of dos and dont’s for its tourists booking hotels in Puri online and ran a campaign called ‘The Hotel That Never Existed’. Puri Police has also issued a tourist helpline 6370-967100 for people to report such frauds. Puri SP Kanwar Vishal Singh said one or two cases are reported every month on an average.
Hotel booking frauds on the rise in Odisha
Cyber criminals list fake hotel websites on search engines and defraud unsuspecting customers into making payments for room bookings. Explaining the modus operandi, Singh said the prices quoted in these fake websites are usually low as compared to the actual prices of hotel rooms. “The fraudsters offer too many attractive amenities and offers but keep the room rates very low to attract tourists,” the SP said.
Informing that this trend started a year back, the SP added that hoteliers have been asked to keep an eye on fake websites in the name of their properties. “It takes two minutes to find out such fake websites in a simple Google search and the hoteliers are doing the exercise. As a result, we have been able to deactivate many of these fake websites and even refund money back to the victims,” he said. The SP, however, expressed concern over the fact that the incidents are still on the rise and so more stringent measures would be put in place soon.