Deception Of Utmost By Yahoo! Travel and Travelocity
Monday, August 2, 2010, 6:00 AM | Leave Comment
With all the shenanigans, the deceptions, tricks and pranks in the world going on, it has become customary [hopefully] for millions of folks to not trust the very dubious and dishonest scums and schmucks of the world.
But when you hear that an otherwise legitimate business like Yahoo! Travel and its pranky dearest sister Travelocity would pull tricks on seemingly innocent folks, then I don’t know where we can hide and avoid these scums.
We all presumably know of Yahoo! Travel and Travelocity. The latter is one of the largest online travel agencies offering air, car, cruise or hotel travel packages. The company renewed its contract with Yahoo! Travel back in June and that’s where the shenanigans were introduced.
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What are the shenanigans?…
Randy Abrams of the antivirus company ESET explains: “After customers select their desired flight, this page displays a button that reads “Continue with Flight Only. However, clicking on it takes users to a checkout form where a travel insurance option is already selected and added to the total price.”
If you can catch the website in the act of doing their sleazy add-on, stop. If you don’t stop, a sum of $19.95 will be added to the price of the ticket by default. That money is charged for insurance of the flight.
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Only in America, folks…
This kind of trick happens all over the world, not just America. Maybe more so in the third world than here. Sometimes it just so happens that the scums, in general, are so well-versed in technology that it’s hard for ordinary folks to understand.
The online world has become so sleazy and some actions, on the part of schmucks, are so deceptive that only a thorough observation of websites might prevent you from following them to financial hell.
In a Nutshell
The question remains in our little grey cells: What can the Transportation Department do to prevent something like this from happening to the innocent consumers? Nothing much. My friend from the 60s says: “Hey! man. This is a free country. Everybody should be free to do anything they want. It’s a free and open market. It’s not a communist country where people have been put to death for such crimes.”
