Many people enjoy the convenience of mobile brands when planning vacations. Hackers have taken advantage of this to implement all sorts of travel-based scams. This is frightening both to consumers—who may find themselves facing financial and emotional repercussions—and business owners—who may lose customers because of these scams. Discover travel safety tips and cybersecurity best practices to protect your business and customers.
How These Scams Work
Say you’re a consumer. You get an urgent message from your bank while on vacation. You click the provided link to try to fix the problem, not noticing that it doesn’t lead you to the correct app.
Or say you’re trying to book a hotel. You click on a familiar URL; it’s slightly off, but that’s easy enough to ignore when you’re in a hurry.
Unfortunately, things like these may be scams. Hackers use these fake sites to run off with consumers’ sensitive information — and unfortunately, these scams are on the rise. Booking.com reports a 500%-900% increase in travel-related scams, and Lloyds Bank reports a 7% increase in banking scams. These scams can leave consumers feeling scared and confused — not to mention experiencing the tangible consequences of money loss and identity theft.
How Brand Owners Need to Respond
Basic travel safety tips (like booking reservations only through a trusted app) can help consumers stay safe. However, that’s not enough. Business owners need to be on top of things, too, to prevent their customers’ sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands.
Have an Educated and Quality Team by Your Side
Teaching social engineering tactics and holding regular training sessions help employees deal with new and evolving threats. For instance, they can learn scam awareness through red-flag reference sheets, simulated phishing exercises, and more.
Partnering with a reputable IT team also helps with constant monitoring, rapid response times, and proven solutions.
Educate Your Clients, Too
You shouldn’t just make sure your team knows what’s going on. Send out emails notifying consumers of potential scams and what they can do to protect themselves — for example, reminding them to only book through the verified app and not to click suspicious links.
Use Proper Security Measures
Installing antivirus and other malware detection and protection services helps prevent most threats from reaching your team. You should also update all programs and mobile applications with the latest developer patches.
Travel safety for your consumers also hinges on your employees using multi-factor authentication, which makes it harder for unauthorized third parties to access database information.
Use Built-In Mobile Brand Protection
Finally, design mobile apps with built-in mobile defense systems. These pre-built protocols and libraries detect issues and remain alert without your developers or IT team manually creating or working on them. It also helps the company find solutions to problems arising without crashing the site or making it difficult for consumers to use the app.
As a travel brand, your biggest concern is travel safety for your consumers as you build trust and loyalty. So, consider these and other forms of protection!
