Avoid Guest Reservation Web Site

Here it is unlocked.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/travel/travel-scams-airlines-hotels.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hVA.Obgi.NUYKW-LR8XPt&smid=url-share

Th link worked for me. Thans!

It is paywalled (but my parttner has access). It is also a couple weeks old, I remember seeing this already.

Thanks for posting! I'm a Seth Kugel fan, but somehow missed this article.

IMHO, I would never trust a website called "Guest Reservations" - that sounds pretty fishy ex facie.

I posted a link to that same article when it first came out, and there's some really interesting information in it.

I highly recommend reading the article and checking it out. It almost fooled me when I was trying to book something, and I found myself on the Guest Reservation website. They're tricky. https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/transportation/the-click-that-cost-11-000-and-other-travel-pitfalls

Good article. We all really, really have to stay on our toes these days.

All the time

Everywhere

Trust no one

Well, maybe that last one goes a little too far

Not sure how much they pay but their site is always the first to pop up when I'm doing a hotel search. I almost got fooled once, and now pay extra attention to website address when booking a hotel.

Thanks for posting this. I know to pay attention to domain names, but the fact that the NYT found damning information that makes it appear that Priceline is running this company tells me what I need to know about ever using Priceline again. Just when you think that the scammers are all foreign companies, it turns out that legit companies are willing to scam people, too.

It got me when we were searching for Texas hotels for the eclipse. I was looking at several hotels on their official sites, and then decided on one, quickly googled it again, and clicked on submit just as I was realizing it wasn't the official hotel site. I had to pay $20 to cancel with Guest Reservations.

More and more i find myself starting my hotel search on Google Maps. It seems to cut through all the noise of a Google search and I can vet the physical reality. I can purge from consideration hotels that are booked only through the likes of booking.com or third party sites, it gives me the direct website, user photos and user reviews. Those that make a shortlist I certainly make sure to bookmark the site.

Maybe I'm old fashioned (well, old anyway), but I've never had a problem booking directly with any hotel or motel. Never. Just food for thought.

I'm looking for reservations for this weekend by MSP and the first option that comes up is Guest Reservation. I wish I could just block them like I do people on Facebook;)

Mnannie: You can block specific websites on Google Chrome, for example.

You can also report the website. Right next to the link are three vertical dots. Right-click on those, and there will be an option to report it. Hopefully, if enough people do, Google will do something about it.

My thanks to the previous two posts regarding search engines.

Very interesting, thanks for posting that. I just used DuckDuckGo (I never use G##gle), and searched for "hotel reservations". The results did not include "Guest Reservation". But each listing had the dot-dot-dot as Mardee said. I clicked that, and got the option to "Block this site from all results". There was no option to Report the site, but there was an option to "Share feedback about this site".

So now I will do that in the future for questionable sites I might encounter. Thanks!