Booking a cruise involves a lot of moving parts. Between the cruise fare, final payment, online check-in, excursions, drink packages, airfare, hotels and transportation, cruisers may receive dozens of emails, texts and payment requests before they ever step onboard.
That also creates plenty of opportunities for scammers.
Cruise fraud can range from fake customer-service numbers and bogus final-payment calls to phishing emails, fake upgrade offers and websites designed to steal your credit-card information. In some cases, a scammer may even know which cruise line you’re sailing with or enough about your trip to make the contact sound legit.
The best way to protect yourself is to verify anything that seems unusual and stay alert for requests you weren’t expecting. To help, we’ve put together our top 10 tips for preventing cruise fraud, so let’s cruise right into them.
1. Never Make a Payment From an Unexpected Call, Email or Text
If someone contacts you claiming there’s a problem with your reservation, don’t provide a credit-card number or payment information on the spot.
A scammer may tell you that your final payment failed, an additional balance is due or your cruise will be cancelled unless you pay immediately. Another trick is to offer a last-minute cabin upgrade that supposedly disappears if you don’t act right away.
Instead, log in to the cruise line’s official website or app and check the reservation yourself. If you booked through a travel advisor, contact that person using the phone number or email address you’ve used before.
If the payment request is legitimate, you’ll be able to verify it without relying on the person who contacted you.
2. Don’t Trust the First Customer-Service Number You Find Online
One extremely popular travel scam starts when the passenger goes looking for help.
You head over to Google, search for a cruise line’s customer-service number, look at a result near the top of the page and call a number that appears to be for the cruise line. Scammers use fake websites and paid advertisements to place fraudulent phone numbers in front of travelers looking for assistance.
Once you’re on the phone, the scammer may ask for your booking number, password or credit-card details while pretending to fix the problem.
Always go directly to the cruise line’s official website and use the contact information listed there instead of blindly calling a number that appears in a search result.
3. Avoid Clicking Links in Unexpected Cruise Emails and Texts
Phishing messages can look very similar to legitimate cruise-line communications.
You might receive an email claiming your online check-in is incomplete, your payment failed, your account has been locked or you’ve been offered a discounted drink package or cabin upgrade. The message then directs you to a website where you’re asked to log in or enter payment information.
Do not click any links! Instead, go to the cruise line’s official website or app and check the reservation there. If the offer or warning is legitimate, you should be able to find it through your account.
4. Be Careful What You Share Online
Cruise Facebook groups and social media can reveal much more than people realize.
Cruisers regularly post screenshots of reservations, luggage tags, boarding passes, upgrade offers and similar things with far too much information. Sometimes those images contain booking numbers, barcodes, cabin numbers, loyalty information or other details that should be kept private.
Even posting your exact sailing date and cabin number gives a scammer information about where you’ll be and when.
Before sharing anything cruise-related online, crop or cover identifying information and take a close look at what else appears in the image. Scammers frequently scan cruise Facebook groups in search of this type of content, so keep it to yourself.
5. Protect Your Email Account
Your email inbox contains just almost everything someone needs to learn about your vacation, including cruise confirmations, flight details, hotel reservations, excursions, insurance documents and payment receipts.
Use a strong, unique password for your email account and enable multi-factor authentication if it’s available. Avoid using the same password for your email, cruise account and other websites, because a password exposed through one compromised website may be used elsewhere.
Your cruise reservation may be valuable, but access to your email account can be a jackpot to a scammer.
6. Verify Unexpected Messages From Your Travel Advisor
Scammers can also impersonate travel agencies or individual advisors.
An email may appear to come from someone you recognize while asking you to use a new payment link, send money somewhere different or provide information you haven’t previously been asked for.
Email addresses can be spoofed or created to look nearly identical to legitimate ones, so any unusual payment request is worth verifying.
Call your travel advisor or the cruise line using a number you already know and never reply directly to the suspicious message.
7. Be Cautious With Excursions, Transfers and Cruise Parking
Cruise fraud isn’t limited to the cruise reservation itself.
Fake websites can advertise shore excursions, airport transfers, hotels or cruise parking, take your payment and disappear faster than a Guy’s Burger at lunchtime. In other words, the website may exist solely to collect credit-card information.
Before booking with an unfamiliar company, look for a real business history, legitimate contact information and reviews from multiple sources. Be particularly cautious about prices that are dramatically lower than comparable options or companies demanding payment methods such as Venmo or CashApp, and never hand over your debit card information.
Saving a few dollars isn’t much of a deal if the excursion van never existed and you’re now spending your vacation disputing charges with your credit card company.
8. Be Suspicious of Unusual Payment Methods
A legitimate cruise-related business should never require you to pay an urgent balance using gift cards, cryptocurrency or some other hard-to-reverse payment method.
If someone claiming to represent a cruise line, travel agency or excursion company tells you to buy gift cards or send cryptocurrency to prevent your reservation from being cancelled, that’s a major warning sign.
Credit cards provide much better fraud protection and make suspicious charges easier to dispute. Again, never use a debit card.
9. Don’t Rely on Caller ID
Just because your phone displays the name of a cruise line or travel company doesn’t guarantee that’s who’s calling.
Caller ID information can be spoofed, making a fraudulent call appear to come from the cruise line. If an unexpected caller starts asking for payment information, reservation details or passwords, end the call and contact the cruise line yourself using the contact number on their official website.
10. Watch for Anyone Creating a Sense of Urgency
One thing many scams have in common is pressure.
Your cruise is going to be cancelled in an hour. The balcony upgrade disappears in 15 minutes. Your reservation has been suspended. Your payment has to be reprocessed right now.
That urgency is designed to stop you from verifying whether that’s actually the case.
When someone starts pushing you to make an immediate cruise-related payment, that’s exactly when you should hang up and call the cruise line directly to verify.
If You Think You’ve Been Scammed
If you think you’ve given information to a scammer, act quickly. Change any affected passwords, especially if they’ve been reused elsewhere, and contact your credit-card company right away if you’ve provided payment information.
You should also contact the cruise line or your travel advisor through a verified channel and let them know what happened so they can help secure the reservation.
Finally, review your accounts for suspicious activity and keep a close eye on them over the next several days.
At the end of the day, most cruise fraud becomes easy to identify and avoid, but far too many people keep getting scammed.
If someone says there’s a problem with your cruise, check the reservation yourself. If you’re offered an upgrade, verify it through your account. If you’re asked for payment, contact the cruise line or travel advisor using information you already know is legitimate.
A little skepticism can save you a lot of aggravation and potentially a lot of money.
