As the summer vacation season approaches, American travelers face a great deal of uncertainty, from the state of the economy to whether U.S. tourists will be welcome abroad. So, what should you expect? Where can you find the deals? And how do you avoid the barrage of travel scams?
I asked travel expert and consumer advocate Christopher Elliott those questions on the latest episode of Checkbook’s Consumerpedia podcast. Elliott writes the syndicated “On Travel” column.
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Here are some highlights, edited for length and clarity. Click here to listen to the entire episode.
Q: What’s the travel outlook for summer 2025?
Christopher Elliott: This is one of those years where you have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen because of the economy. Travelers are concerned about prices and inflation. We’re also seeing a lot of people worried about traveling overseas because of the anti-American sentiment.
Q: Could there be a silver lining to all this?
CE: What [consumers] don’t realize is that this year we have some really amazing opportunities for travel. Airfares are probably going to come down because they normally do at a time like this. You might find a really inexpensive airfare. Also, fewer people are visiting the United States because of the political situation. So you might find a great bargain if you decide to travel domestically. Maybe wait until next year to do your international vacation?
Q: I’ve read articles about how dramatic the drop in travel has been from Canada and other countries to the U.S., [since travelers are] afraid of what could happen at the U.S. border. So, hotel reservations are down. Could we see some price breaks on hotels in the U.S., and maybe rental cars?
CE: That is exactly what I’m saying. Right now, it’s very unadvertised and people are hush-hush about it. Normally what happens is, if travel demand drops, prices go down as well. People don’t realize that consumers are in control of the prices that they pay. So if there are fewer people traveling and lots of inventory, the prices have to come down. In the summer, we’re [probably] going to be seeing some bargains.
Q: In one of your recent “On Travel” columns, you warned that travelers can expect a minefield of travel scams this year as criminals use AI to create fake websites, fake listings, and fake social-media profiles. What should we watch for?
CE: AI is a blessing and a curse. It can help people plan better trips, but it can also help scammers. Clever scammers use AI to create websites that make them appear to be legitimate hotels or airlines and then entrap people. The most common one is an SEO trick, where scammers create a website that lists a phone number for an airline, so [the search] ranks highly for a term like, “how do I get a hold of a live person at British Airways?” People will type that search term in and call the phone number. It’ll take them directly to a scammer who will then charge their credit card or steal some personal information.
Q: Don’t scammers also send phishing emails and text messages that appear to be from legitimate travel companies, but are designed to steal personal information?
CE: Scammers can use AI to create very realistic-looking emails with a signature and a phone number. They then pretend to be the airline when they’re not.
Q: There’s always been a problem with listings for vacation rentals. They can manipulate the pictures, and I think AI is going to make that even easier for people to do that sort of thing, whether they’re con artists or just someone with a rental property trying to goose up sales.
CE: It’s so easy now to put a photo of your vacation rental in and edit things out. We have always had Photoshop, but now it’s so much easier to make something look deceptively much better than it actually is. We’ve seen people falling for that as well. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Q: You’ve also written that the most dangerous travel scams start with offering something free. What does that mean?
CE: I talked to psychologists about this. If you offer something free, people will do crazy things. The example I give is loyalty programs and frequent-flyer miles. You have this tradition at the end of the year where a lot of people will try to get status and they do “a mileage run,” where they fly across the country just to get enough miles so that they can get status.
They’re looking for free stuff. What they don’t realize is that they’re giving the airline either their valuable time or their valuable money. In the end, it’s like Las Vegas: the house always wins. The airline is going to do better than you will.
Q: According to a survey by Adobe, about 53 percent of Americans have used artificial intelligence to plan a trip—to comparison shop for hotels, to find restaurants, and even to plan itineraries. What’s your view of AI in travel right now?
CE: It’s still not quite ready for prime time. I use AI all the time for planning. I recently asked it for recommendations in the Caribbean, including security and which islands it would recommend. (The State Department has issued a couple of warnings about security in the Caribbean.) AI allowed me to determine which islands were safe or not, and where the good stories were.
AI gave me useful information, but in each response, there was always at least one “hallucination.” A hallucination means bad information, something that AI is making up. If you don’t check to make sure that an attraction exists or is still open, you may end up going to a place that either doesn’t exist or has been closed for years. So, my recommendation is to trust but verify. AI is definitely not a human travel agent.
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Checkbook.org is a nonprofit organization with a mission to help consumers get good service and low prices. It does this by providing unbiased ratings, advice, and price information. Checkbook is supported by consumers and takes no money from the service providers it evaluates. You can reach Herb at his website, Consumerman.com.
