by When Shelley and Byron set off on their adventures across Europe, a little light art was par for the course. The Grand Tour – a visit to major art sites in Italy, traditionally led by young men of the 18th and 19th centuries – was seen as a way for the nobility to mature and learn life skills. And, if they were in trouble along the way, so much the better.
Writing i Adventure and Danger on the Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century, Sarah Goldsmith notes: “In the era of fashionable fairy-tale games, the Great Tour was understood by elite families as a huge, expensive jeux de societé; wrong with the family finances, with the lives and reputations of their sons, and with a whole range of dangers.”
A fabled version of Italy that inspired the fire. Visitors are taught to expect fights and robberies – but, in reality, they may be more likely to stumble upon a guide’s plot to swallow a dark ancient amphora. The country may have been known as a place to find cheap antiques, but there was a reason prices were so low.
Tourism has become more mainstream over the centuries, but some drawbacks are as old as time – and new research suggests that Italy may be the most likely target of petty crime against European tourists. Travel insurance website Quotezone.co.uk’s European Pickpocket Index 2024, which sets the number of incidents reported at a country’s top five attractions against the number of visitors, put Italy at the top of the table. and France and Spain in second and third place. Founder and CEO Greg Wilson warned people to be wary of “iconic attractions like the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Trevi Fountain in Rome”.
Traditional scams to be aware of include the Parisian gold ring hoax – where a stranger pretends to pick up a ring you’ve accidentally dropped as a distraction technique. In Granada, tourists writing on review sites report being fed up with a “pigeon milk” scam, where a man sprays fake bird droppings on an unsuspecting tourist while pretending to clean it, stealing valuables in the process.
Other disadvantages take an old fashioned loop as well. In Venice, unscrupulous gondoliers are forever raising the price of a trip on their boat – once you’re out on the water, that is (the price should be €90 for 30 minutes during the day and € 100 after sunset).
But the scammers had no small idea before – some of them had more ambitious ideas. Notorious con artist Victor Lustig (best known for falsely selling the Eiffel Tower) allegedly plied his trade on ocean liners traveling between France and New York City, where he conned passengers rich to invest in a Broadway musical that didn’t exist. Meanwhile, the American scammer George C Parker was famous for hawking New York landmarks to new boat immigrants and clueless tourists: his fraudulent sales included the Statue of Liberty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as Brooklyn Bridge.
The timeshare years
Fast forward to the 1960s and a new real estate property scheme of controversy began: the timeshare. One of the industries that profited from cheap flights to the Continent, these developments spread through Spain and the Canary Islands as they faced aggressive sales measures and attractive contracts. Among them was one run by John Palmer, famously involved in the Brink’s-Mat robbery featured in a recent BBC television series The Gold.
By the end of the 20th century, the image problem of the timeshare industry needed an overhaul and terms such as “vacation clubs”, “vacation ownership” and “fractional ownership” appeared on the scene. The idea behind these schemes was basically the same, although customers often bought “points” to spend at resorts around the world rather than fixing weeks at a single property.
“Basically, you get your points, you pay your maintenance fee and you can go on holiday – if you can find the availability,” says Keith Dewhurst of the Timeshare Consumers Association (TCA). “The product itself is quite transparent. When it goes wrong, it’s the sales methods used by the timeshare industry. People know what they are buying. They will be told that if they buy a week in Benalmadena in Spain, they can go to Bali next year. It doesn’t work like that. If you buy in Bali, you can live your life in Benalmadena if you want – but if you buy in Benalmadena, you’re not going to Bali.”
Another con erupted at the end of the 20th century. Travelers parted with thousands of pounds without even knowing it as credit and debit card cloning became mainstream. It was simple: staff in restaurants could take out a card on the premise that the machine wasn’t working and then make a copy, or thieves would use skimmers at ATMs. This type of card fraud hasn’t gone away – but chip and pin technology means it’s on the decline.
A web of lies
These days, travel scams are big business. From inflated taxi fares to adding extras to a restaurant bill, some are almost par for the course. But something else has made it easier for scammers to get their hands on our money – the internet.
ABTA’s Sean Tipton saw a surge in calls from people being scammed on social media, where fraudsters advertise villas and holiday apartments that don’t exist (or belong to someone else), and trade association UK Finance reported the purchase . scams were on the rise in 2023.
“Like everything else, post-pandemic costs have increased,” Tipton said. “So people are more inclined to look for great deals. If you look at this time of year that fraudsters target, they go for Christmas and New Year and summer – they know that’s when the number of people looking for a holiday increases, and they have they know these will be more expensive.”
He noted that the fraudsters do not price too low, and that they have reduced just enough to offer a deal without sounding the alarm. And, in some cases, victims don’t find out they’ve been ripped off until they arrive at their holiday accommodation and discover it’s gone.
Another growing industry is fake websites that sell flights, often to people visiting family and friends. “The websites used to look amateurish but now they’re much more commercial,” says Tipton. “They are very determined. We used to say that terms and conditions were one of the warning signs, but now they just copy someone else’s copies and paste them on their site. I’ve seen sites with pictures of sales staff and they were just random people plucked from the internet.”
The psychology of the holiday scam
Vicky Reynal, psychologist and author Money on your mind, which reveals why we fall for holiday scams and how they affect us. “The colorful glasses we bring on holiday make us less likely to see signs of deception,” she says. “But we can also be tense and on edge because of the unknown. This can make us vulnerable because, if a scammer comes to us who is friendly, kind and helpful, we may feel relieved that someone has put us at ease and be more likely to trust them. recommendations to follow.
“Feeling scammed can cause a mix of emotions, including anger, sadness and shame. Anger can be more difficult to handle without a physical person in front of us to express it – when they are an ‘entity’ behind the screen, we cannot express our anger to them. We feel guilty when we make a mistake – but shame is about how we feel about ourselves, a feeling that we are ‘bad’ or in this case stupid, naive or gullible. It’s a shame and it’s taking a long time to sort out.”
