Don’t Be Fooled by a Copycat Hotel Website
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, April 1st. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. Dairy farmers are putting a little extra flair on their cows to help track their movements and possibly detect bird flu and other illnesses. Plus, copycat hotel sites that charge hefty fees have been popping up online. Our travel columnist will tell you how to avoid dubious resellers.

Up first, dairy farmers are putting smart devices like internet-connected collars, ear and leg tags on their livestock to better track the health of their cows.

The devices could help detect diseases like bird flu, which has spread to cattle after wiping out millions of America's chickens over the past few years. Farmers say they hope the devices will help manage individual animals with less manual labor. WSJ Enterprise tech reporter Belle Lin has been following the story, and she spoke with our colleague Victoria Craig. Here's their conversation.

A wearable device that helps farmers spot possible bird flu. Just explain how this device works. The device is typically a collar or an ear tag. It can also be a tag that goes on the legs or the tail of the cow. And it's sort of akin to a wearable that you and I would wear, maybe like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch. But for cows and for cattle, they are...

are less designed to help you track your steps and figure out if your heart rate is where it's supposed to be on a workout, but more for farmers to figure out if their animals are in optimal health when they're ready for breeding and if anything unusual is going on. It's been trained on a vast amount of information from a number of cows looking at their positions and movements and

Looking to see if there's been a deviation in whether or not the cows are acting the way that they normally are. Any deviation from that behavior indicates that something might be wrong. And then what's important to note is that the collars or the ear tags are not meant to actually identify diseases. It's meant to kind of say, hey, farmer, you might want to take a look at your cow. And it can be used not just for cows, but other animals, too.

They can be used for other animals, but in terms of the overall livestock monitoring market, it's really cows that are in need of this technology because there's so many aspects of a cow's health that need to be tracked. What I most often hear is that cows are sort of like professional athletes. And so they're performing their best. They're giving us their best milk when they are at their optimal health, and that's why they need to be checked regularly.

And this is not a small market. This is a really big booming business monitoring livestock. How big of a market are we talking? Yeah, it's not quite a $2 billion market, but it's growing at a nearly compound annual growth rate of 7 point something percent. And so it's a growing market, but it's limited by things like farmer adoption. Farmers do need to be aware that technologies exist and have to be able to make the justification that the technology is worth it.

The big question, I think, is will this eventually replace a need for humans to do whatever this technology is doing? And you did talk to a farmer who said that that has actually been the case on his farm. Trackers have replaced a few humans. That's right. Yeah, it is one of the big headline goals of these smart devices is that when you don't need as many eyes and ears on every single animal in your herd, then you can save a lot in terms of the manual labor required.

But humans can't be replaced altogether by these wearables because there's something called cow sense. And cow sense is basically this intuition that farmers have to say something's going on with my cow. I need to get a veterinarian in here to take a look. And so that at this point can't be replaced, but it's certainly scaling back the number of manual hours and labor that this particular farmer requires.

And another farmer also talked to you about issues with connectivity with some of the devices. Like what happens if they fall offline or a portion of that tracker population isn't working? How do the farmers adjust to that or how do they work through it? It's a barrier to adoption as well, where if you don't have internet connectivity in this very rural part of your farm, then you can't get the data synced back up to the cloud in either direction. So essentially the callers are worthless and the data is worthless.

And so that's one of the challenges that dairy farmers across the country have faced, because they are in actually more spread out locations than their fellow crop farmers, who are also using precision technologies, but do tend to be in a little less far-flung areas. And so they really have to wait until the internet's back online in order for the data to connect both in and off of the cloud. That was WSJ's Victoria Craig speaking with reporter Belle Lin.

Coming up, thinking of booking a hotel for an upcoming trip? Be aware of copycat hotel websites posing as real hotel sites. We'll tell you how these dupes have been ripping off consumers after the break. With leading networking and connectivity, advanced cybersecurity and expert partnership, Comcast Business helps turn today's enterprises into engines of modern business. Powering the engine of modern business. Powering possibilities. Restrictions apply.

Summer's just a few months away, and folks may have already started booking hotels for their travels. If you're searching online, you've likely come across sponsored ads that make you think you're booking directly with a hotel. Well, check those links twice, because there's a chance you're not. WSJ travel columnist Dawn Gilbertson spoke with Victoria Craig about the rise of copycat hotel sites and their enormous fees.

So, Dawn, I like to think that I'm a fairly savvy hotel booker myself, but even I've been duped by this kind of thing. How do you identify the travel agency sites and the actual hotel booking sites? Click on it. There's not going to be any problem if you just click on it initially. And if things don't look right, but the thing that you should really look at first is the total price and then shop around and see if there's a big variance between prices. And if you see a big variance, that's a big red flag.

Describe what the most meaningful difference is. Why should you prefer to book on a hotel site versus another third-party site? I'm a big direct booker myself. I recommend it to travelers all the time because you really generally do not want a middleman when things go wrong in travel. We've all been on an airline. We've all booked a hotel. And then we're like, oh, I need to change something or something changes. And they're going to tell you, you have to go back to where you booked it.

So the issue there is if you book directly with the hotel or the airline, you have only one place to call, and they have a little more control over what they can do for you. A lot of these sites will sort of force you into a nonrefundable rate. So once you realize that you didn't book where you wanted to book, it's too late. You can't do anything. Well, yes. If you get your confirmation, you're happy with this price. You maybe didn't read the fine print. You're happy with this price. And then all of a sudden, you're like, whoa.

I booked a prepaid room that's not changeable, not refundable. Now, I must know, and a couple of readers pointed this out to me, you can also run into some of these issues with the Expedias and booking and price lines because you can save money. There's nothing wrong with prepaying for a hotel room unless you think there's a giant chance that you're going to change your plans because those are the lowest rates these days are the prepaid. But where these lookalike hotel websites where you get into trouble is they charge extra fees.

That's what you're not going to find on an Expedia or a Priceline or a booking. And this has become so ubiquitous, I suppose. It has become very difficult for consumers to really spot the difference. If you put in, say, the hotel chain that you want to book in Google, this is likely to be one of the first ones that come up. It's become such a problem that the Federal Trade Commission and the hotels have teamed up looking into this.

as a problem. They've been looking at this for years. The FTC cracked down on them in 2017, but yet they still are around. Google a hotel and chances are the first thing in your search list is going to be a hotel that is not the direct booking site. Plenty of times it is. Hilton, the big chains have money to pay up and then get first on the sponsored ads. But then there's these other players and people really, really, really need to be aware of this because the price difference is

can be huge. And once you book, if it's not refundable, you're out.

And that was what I was going to ask is how has this become such a pervasive problem? Is it that these third-party companies just have the money to pay to have their websites go up higher in the search rankings? What does it come down to? I think that's reason number one. This one site that I kept coming upon over and over again, guestreservations.com. And not every single hotel, but when you search a lot of hotels, it's the first one that comes there. And the way they trick you is they're

they put like a keyword like guest or reservation in the URL. So you're looking at and you're thinking, here's the name of my hotel. So they use the name of the hotel and then they use something like guest. And then you're like, oh, okay, well, what's wrong with this? And sometimes there's absolutely nothing wrong with it, right? If the price difference is teeny tiny and you get there and your room is fine. But some of the examples that I found, the price difference was so egregious. There was absolutely no reason to book on the lookalike website.

If the FTC is already looking into this but hasn't been able to do anything, how do you stop it? That's a million-dollar question, right? I mean, the Hotel Association says it's all about education. That's why I wrote the story. These ads are going to be out there until there's a further crackdown. But really, the most important really thing, I think, for consumers to know, travelers to know, is just take your time when booking. Unless this is something you've got to jet out of town for a funeral or something,

all bets are off, right? But really take some time. And you can also call the hotel. I know it sounds so old-fashioned in 2025. Call the hotel. Ask what is your website. I'd seriously highly recommend that. If you're going to plunk down money for a week's stay, even a weekend's stay, before you click buy on an online site,

Take five minutes and say, is this your website? Because let me tell you, the hoteliers aren't happy with these sites whatsoever. First of all, they don't get any of that extra money. They don't get the money they're charging us. All they get at the front desk, if people do realize this, is some angry guests.

That was WSJ's Victoria Craig speaking with our travel columnist, Dawn Gilbertson. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Jess Jupiter with our supervising producer, Emily Martosi. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

With leading networking and connectivity, advanced cybersecurity and expert partnership, Comcast Business helps turn today's enterprises into engines of modern business. Powering the engine of modern business. Powering possibilities. Restrictions apply.