The internet has made online booking easy and simple. But it is not necessarily always a secure way. Whenever you make a booking online, remember to be cautious, as the number of phony booking websites is growing. These websites are so successful at scamming customers and trick them into thinking they’re booking directly with the company. Cybercriminals pocketing more than $1.3 billion in fake hotel reservations, consumers need to beware when booking hotel rooms, gym payment, and other travel reservations online — such as for airline flights and rental cars, too.
Why Secure Online Booking is Important
We all are aware that public Wi-Fi is unsecured, and yet and yet the majority of us still use it anyway. Free public Wi-Fi has gone from something that few of us connect to, to an essential part of our everyday lives. We use it in coffee shops, on transport, in hotels, and just about anywhere in public, we can connect, even though almost all of us don’t believe it’s secure. Most of us still put our bank card details in whilst on public Wi-Fi. All of this means that today, millions of us are booking things over unsecured networks.
So, when things go wrong, who do people blame? Themselves, the Wi-Fi provider, and where they booked from. It is an unfortunate fact, but often customers just do not understand how payment security works. They need to give our card details to secure payment gateways like CloudBanking, having a feature of a virtual terminal.
By offering secure bookings, your business gains instant credibility and trustworthiness, as well as safeguarding your reputation. It can take years to build up a reputation, only to potentially see it destroyed by a booking platform that was not secure. A payment gateway not only helps your clients book online but keeps them secure in the process. Clients and customers need to be confident that their details including, passwords, bank details, and self-details are completely confidential! Our secure booking system never keeps any of your customers’ bank details and we will always guide our customers towards a secure and trustworthy payment gateway when setting up their secure booking system.
How to make your Online Booking Safe?
As mentioned earlier, people use public Wi-Fi everywhere – despite not knowing if it’s secure or not. Indeed, many people automatically connect to Wi-Fi wherever it’s available.
However, connecting those open Wi-Fi spots can be exceptionally dangerous, and open the door to serious crimes like fraud or identity theft. So, how can you protect yourself when on insecure networks?
Update your anti-virus software:
There are ways that customers can mitigate their chances of falling into cybercrime; one of the most common ways for people to stay secure online is to keep their computer’s antivirus protection up-to-date. Antivirus software is a program that makes your system secure from worms, harmful viruses, and attacks through the scanning process. It helps identify websites and files that could contain harmful programs before they can enter the computer and block them from being downloaded to your computer.
Use a secure online booking system:
On an insecure network, the security of your transactions is often quite debatable. However, with the CloudBanking payment processor, that’s not the case. CloudBanking offers a great length about security benefits to customers, but with HTTPS compliance on every booking page, partnerships with secure payment gateways and so much more, by using secure booking your customers can avoid fraud.
Update your device’s firmware:
Not updating your computer’s software beyond Windows XP, which had long since stopped being supported and patched with fixes for security issues. To avoid this, update your software on all your devices. The newest versions are built to mitigate any security risks, and they’re almost always free to upgrade to, so there’s no reason not to update.
Use strong passwords, and a password manager:
Strong passwords are something that many websites, and programs, are making customers employ as standard by ensuring your password includes an upper-case letter, a number, and a minimum of six characters. However, that’s often not enough, with many of us reusing the same passwords over and over again. But how would you remember all the passwords for all the logins you have? The answer is by using a password manager will enable you to put all of your passwords in one database, meaning that you only have to remember one password! A reliable password safe is KeePass. KeePass is free and encrypted with secure encryption algorithms. This will prevent you from having the same password for every login.
Those are just some of how your customers can avoid getting caught out whilst online. They range from the slightly technical (VPNs) to the simple and free (updating your firmware), but as a business, there’s simply no excuse for offering an unsecured booking platform.
It’s the one aspect of security on this list that isn’t in the hands of the customer, and, as we discovered earlier, customers are quick to apportion blame when something goes wrong whilst they’re on unsecured internet.
At CloudBanking, we take the security and integrity of your data as well the data of your customers very seriously. As part of our ongoing efforts to ensure the safety of your customer and credit card data, CloudBanking undergoes routine PCI Compliance scans to ensure we are PCI-DSS compliant. These scans check for known vulnerabilities and common security holes in server configurations. To meet PCI-DSS compliance, for those CLoudBanking members who utilise a compatible payment gateway, we abide by PCI card security criteria.
The ability to make travel reservations online saves a lot of time compared to more traditional methods, so be sure to use some of those minutes saved to take a few moments to make your online travel booking transactions more secure.
To learn more about how to implement a secure booking platform online for your business contact us today.
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