We don't often see fake bookings made, and actually in a whole it's not a problem the industry is massively facing at the moment, however we did recently have a customer who was targetted by someone who was unhappy at their suppliers. This customer was receiving every weekend fake bookings that by every other defination looked real. The obviously solution would be to enable booking deposits, but they were concerned about the negative impact on their actual real customers, after all deposits are great and near enough 100% garanteed to stop fake bookings, but they do have a small but noticable impact on booking completion rates.

So what solution did we find? Well to launch a new feature of course! Now you can optionally enable a verification email during the booking phase. As your customer gets to the stage where they place in their contact information it can now ask them to verify their email address. It does this by sending a short 4-5 digit code which they then type into the booking form to confirm they actually have access to that email address.

The more technically minded amoung you may now say "yeah, but what about disposable email addresses"? Well, we've got an ever updating list of these domains which are blocked when you have the email verficiation feature enabled. This customer has had the feature enabled for a few days now, and we're not seeing any change in the amount of completed bookings, and the fake bookings seem to have completely been stopped in their tracks. If you want to enable the verification setting then you'll find it in the "Custom Fields" section of your settings.