Those Indian call centers pretending to be travel agents, and which often show up at the top in internet search results when looking for the direct websites or phone numbers for an airline, are almost always 100% scammers that spoof as being part of the airline. In reality, they are not licensed travel agents and have zero affiliation with any airlines. If they do book a ticket for you, they will just go onto the airline website using your own credit card and book the ticket for you, the same thing you could have done yourself. Then, on top of that, they will add a bunch of additional charges to your credit card using their own merchant account, so that money goes directly to them. It happened to a friend of mine. They booked the ticket for him on the airline website and then made around half a dozen additional charges to his credit card totaling close to $10,000. I won’t get into all the details about how he tried to stop those payments, but he caught it immediately, and then the Indians made up all kinds of lies to try to prevent him from canceling the charges. Eventually, he filed disputes with his credit card company, and after about 60 days, all the charges were removed from his credit card and canceled. Anyway, the point is, yes, the best thing is to book directly with the airlines because if you have a problem at some point and need to make a change to the booking, sometimes the airlines will be more difficult about it if you booked through an agent. But that’s not always the case if you’re booked with a major booking site. So, if you book tickets through Booking.com, Agoda, or Trip.com, not a problem. I do that all the time, and it does save a bit of money on certain flights. They are reliable providers, and you can safely book the flights right through their mobile apps.
