Has anyone used paypal when booking accomodation and is it secure and reliable !

I use Paypal all the time when buying in e-bay and have had no problems whatsoever. I have not used it for securing travel accomodation but am about to use it for a deposit on a Paris apartment. I have no qualms about it. I even asked the apt owners if they would allow me to pay my rent using Pay Pal as I am only staying in France for two months and do not plan to open a bank account.

Another satified Paypal user here.

I've used it for several years , paying and reciving monies, and have never had a problem.

Hi

I have used paypal for ebay purchases since it became available and have had no problems.

I have used PayPal to send and receive Ebay payments.

I just read some of their "fine print" and do not see any real protection for the payment of a deposit. It will come down to the integrity of the service provider.

If the apartment owner is honest you will have no problem. If they are not honest, you may have difficulty getting your money back. What happens if the apretment isn't available when you get there. Will you get your mopney back?

I would try and check references, if possible.

All I know about PayPal is that it is one of the few spams that sneaks through my spam blocker. About every week or two I'll get what appears to be a personal email "Robert needs to update your Pay Pal account" or something like that. I've never had a PayPal account and resent that kind of solicitation. I don't know what it is, but I'd be hard pressed to find a reason why I'd want to deal with a service who does that kind of tactics.

I've had Paypal for several years and have used it without problem....and I never get spam about it interestingly enough...

Patrick, The spam is NOT from Paypal. It is a fraud to try to get you to open a link in the letter and then the spammers ..I think they have traced it to Russia..can get personal info. I have had the same thing coming thru with my Earthlink account. Both Paypal and earthlink have warnings on their websites.

The best thing to do is NEVER open a link in an email that asks for information changes or account updates, go directly to your account site and check there!

Patrick you might want to forward the emails, along with their headers to

[email protected]

Or if you get the Earthlink ones those should be forwarded to

[email protected]

I have successfully used PayPal for sending and receiving money for several years now. It's very useful for small businesses that want to get paid quickly but that don't want to pay the premiums associated with getting paid by credit card.

The PayPal spam, as someone says, has nothing to do with the PayPal service. It's been widely discussed on the internet as some sort of fraud perpetrated by people trying to get PayPal users to divulge information that might enable the spammers to get access to PayPal accounts,

Interesting comments about those spams. Yes, I know better than to open any of them. I particularly get annoyed when sometimes I'll get a spam that says something like "we haven't had dinner in a while". I delete them immediately, then found friends who had just changed their email had sent me one and wanted to know why I wouldn't respond. It's really bad when you truly can't tell the difference between spam and friend's emails!! Mostly my spam blockers work, but somehow some of these places have cleverly found ways to override them.

I recently had trouble with a vendor whom I purchased with via Paypal. They immediately froze that person's account and applied firm pressure that I thought aided in my obtaining a refund. I was very pleased.

PAtrick:

As others indicated above, PayPal (or more correctly its reputation) was the victim of this scheme, not its perpetrator.

See http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3109201

I learned well after the fact that I let a computer get infected with this Mimail virus by exactly this method - - I was the perfect sucker for this, because, by cincidence, I actually HAD let a PayPal account lapse. I wondered what credit card info they might still have from me, and that's how I got suckered into opening their "secure reply" (attachment) "form".

Fortunately, I could tell as soon as I opened it that it did not seem authentic (the window would not close nor even minimize normally), so I did not enter any info into it.

The virus infestation had already succeeded though.

Live and learn...

Best wishes,

Rex

I had cause to read a law report about them recently.

I happen to be a very satisfied user of the service and was interested when I noticed the report (esoteric point of law, so I won't bore you with it)but it would appear that they DID have fairly major problems when they went from a 10s of thousands of users service to millions of users service very quickly- 6 months, from memory. They had some major glitches, and I know there are people very pissed off with them about it.

But they seem to have fixed it, and as I say, I couldn't fault them.

I've been using Paypal for several years without any problem. They have very good customer service, although Paypal is now owned by Ebay and that may change.

Here's a tip if you plan to pay with Paypal, use your credit card to send payment. That way if there is a problem, you can contact both your credit card co. and Paypal and get the money back.

Btw, I'm also an Ebayer

A good free program to eliminate spyware that infects most computers and causes many of the popups you get is Spybot Search & Destroy available at www.safer-networking.org.

This is different from software that suppresses popups--Spybot finds nasty spyware popup generating programs that are on your hard drive and eliminates them. It is free, though you can give a donation to keep the site running after you use the software if you want to.

I've used it with great success--spyware not only causes popups but slows down your entire computer system.

Here's another recommendation for Spybot.

I've used PayPal for several years with no problems (and no spam).

Since no one has mentioned it, though, if you're planning to pay a European vendor with PayPal, note that PayPal has their own "today's exchange rate". You'll want to know the interbank rate before accepting the PayPal rate, though the difference is probably not worth the fees involved with alternate methods of sending payment to Europe if the vendor does not accept credit card payment.

If you use PayPal you need to be aware that you have no consumer protections that are available to you when using credit cards. When you use a credit card you have rights to challenge charges based on services not provided, unsatisfactory, etc. With PayPal the service that they are selling is the transference of money, which, once done, cannot be challenged.

Also, you are limited as to the amount you can spend on PayPal unless you become 'verified'. Before becoming verified you would do well to visit
paypalsucks.com and read some of the comments.

Ok, now you've got me worried about using PayPal to pay for my Paris apt rental. Thanks for pointing that out. It never crossed my mind. I will have to do some checking about refunding if I were to arrive to problems with the apt.

I've used Paypal for ebay a little and, as others, had no problem with the transaction. They do have this sneaky, confusing thing about the "being verified" by which they ended up charging me an extra $2 which wasn't necessary. I think it's because the information form to fill in was a little confusing and somehow I put in a wrong field somewhere (the address, I put in my shipping instead of one on my CC) -- then it came back and instead of saying I had filled it in wrong, it told me I needed to be charged $2 for this verification. I thought maybe every new person had to pay that with no choice, so said okay. Later I found out it's a scam and it was because I misunderstood the form, and could have started over again and avoided that charge. And then you can't use Paypal for weeks until you get your bill with that charge on it and a secret code. I complained to them about it and they said the form did state the address on the card (basically saying it was my fault) but then they admitted that "a lot of people do that". Also, the notice about needed the $2 extra fee did not explain why.

IN any case, it's just a money transaction service, it isn't going to guarantee against any problems with your apartment or the owner or that you get what you pay for.