As owners of vacation rentals and bed and breakfast facilities our biggest nightmare is someone using the information we put up whenever we list our property and then creating a fake listing and scamming travelers. Frequently these travelers then land up on our front porch feeling that they have made a booking at our property or else contact us through our own website. We get lots of queries on how this menace of phishing can be combated and so we felt we must review this website.
The most important part of your listing that all online phishers want to hijack are your images. When a traveler sees images of a property that are genuine, he feels he is dealing with a genuine vacation property owner and is more willing to part with his money or wire transfer the payment especially if he feels he is getting a very good deal which is going to go away as compared to other websites where he sees your genuine listing.
Tineye is a service which allows you to upload your pictures and which then goes to the internet and searches for websites which have similar pictures and reports them to you. I tried doing a test drive with an image we used on the holiday home times for our Gazebo article and found that the service was able to report back 8 websites using the same image. I felt this was good and of course the service could improve, but it’s a good beginning.
What we would like to see – some ability of alerts and stored searches so I feel since for most vacation property owners the photos tend to be the same, it would be more useful to have an ability for Tineye to store my images and alert me whenever an unauthorized copy appears on the internet. I guess this is a tough thing to do, but well it’s worth dreaming.
All in all, I felt this is a useful service and something that every vacation rental owner should take time off and do with all his images periodically.
To get more information & assistance, please submit the form below and our specialist will get in touch with you at the earliest.
