Beware of scam ads on Ownersdirect and Holidaylettings

[MartynE]

Ladies and gents, I want to bring your attention to a rather disturbing situation regarding some online holiday rental booking operations.
The Kalkan accommodation rental company that I run (I will not advertise the name here) has agreements with several villa owners to offer their properties exclusively on our website; we hold the calendars for these properties, and if the owner receives any enquiries from other sources, they check with us to make sure the calendar is clear before accepting any bookings that we are not involved with. This ensures no double bookings.
As part of the service, in most cases we also place a listing for the property on Holidaylettings/Tripadvisor and on Ownersdirect/HomeAway under our agency agreement (unless the owner wishes to place their own listing on these sites).
Increasingly, however, we have seen cases where duplicate listings have appeared on both Ownersdirect and on Holidaylettings that were neither put there by ourselves, nor the owners! The calendars for these listings are not up to date and, in some cases, have completely different prices from those agreed with the owner. It seems that these companies have simply copied photos and text from our existing listings, and have created duplicate listings using their own contact details. We can only assume that the purpose of this is fraudulent and is intended to scam people out of money. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any mechanism in place for either Ownersdirect or Holidaylettings to check for duplicate listings in this way. Although we report them, it can take a long time to resolve - assuming we can actually get through to Ownersdirect or Holidaylettings in the first place.
The particular companies that we have had trouble with are Flat4Day and TravelOpo. In some cases the manager is listed as "Russell or David"
Please be vigilant and be very careful before booking any property through either of these companies on Ownersdirect or Holidaylettings; you may well lose your money and turn up in Kalkan only to find your property has already been booked to someone else, with the owner having absolutely no knowledge of your booking.

Linkback: https://www.enjoykalkan.com/forum/index.php?topic=13629.0

[onelove]

Thanks Martyn, really helpful info

[EmeryC]

Thanks for the warning.