When you have got to the paying page on a website and your spider sense starts tingling and you abandon cart and leave the site because the thought of being hacked and having your personal life turned upside down by the dark side of the web is just too much to handle!

You are not alone!

From ordering food, requesting a taxi and checking our bank accounts, to meeting new people and selling our unwanted items, more of our lives are spent online. And whilst these digital services have given us more convenience and a better customer experience, we are giving our personal data to an unlimited number of people and companies.

A terrifying thought when news of data breaches hit the headlines almost every day. In fact, in 2016 alone a record 421 billion data records were stolen. If that’s not scary enough, 35 data records are lost or stolen every second and over 3 million data records are lost or stolen every day.

Many of us will not even trust internet banking and the most automation we expose ourselves is using a debit card to use only when shopping. Well for most of us we laugh and say to themselves; ‘I would like to see the thief get far on what I have in my account!’

There is an old joke that goes:

A credit card company calls a chap over the phone and says;

“We believe your credit card has been compromised and is being used by somebody to steal from you”

“Uh huh” replied the chap not seeming too bothered. The lady from the Credit Card Company adds:

“We also believe the card was stolen over 2 years ago, why have you not reported this to us sooner?”

The chap sighs deeply and says “Well the thief was spending less than the wife!”

But with the economy moving further and further down the line of online shopping, Crypto currency block chains and QR codes, are we being left behind with cash and simple debit cards?

The latest ecommerce growth forecast from eMarketer is that ecommerce sales will increase 23.2% in 2017. It will account for one-tenth of total retail sales.

Total retail sales will reach $22.737 trillion by the end of this year, up 5.8% from 2016. This projection shows the growth in digital buyers. The declining percentage change shows that growth rates for ecommerce are declining, although they are still positive.

A change that will affect all of us in time, and cash will become less and less apparent.

I remember a time when we were planning our annual holidays and that meant a rite of passage which was the trip to the travel agent, wherein your holiday fervor started, and just by booking your holiday you could start to feel excited and the countdown began.

Back in the 80’s and early 1990’s the only people who had access to flight information and could book a Hotel for you was a travel agent. They were always well dressed and in the main were quite proud of their jobs. The travel industry brochures was a massive industry and the only images you had of your holiday before you got there was the information from the brochure.

Fast forward to today and you can book anything you want online and you can become your own travel agent.However you begin to realise when it is time to book a flight why the internet is 95%; a seller’s market, just Googling a flight will expose you to thousands of websites and if you choose one site they will open hundreds of other sites and soon you become lost in the entirety of the World Wide Web. It feels like someone has just dumped thousands of flight brochures over your head.

Whenever I am sat next to someone on a flight I do not want to ask them what they paid for fear of ruining the rest of my flight as they may have paid so much less, I am paranoid to the extent that my overtly smiling neighbor in the seat next to me is just waiting for someone to ask them because they had the patience to sit online for 18 hours solid and got the flight so cheap they paid him to fly!!

If you are like me and you really don’t have the time to sit on the internet and wait for the best possible deal to appear for like 15 seconds so you can book it with a massive high five with yourself at 4 am. Then you should go and see your local Pattaya travel agent, two good reasons why:

He is sat all day waiting to get those great deals and if you give him your cash he will expose his company credit card and not yours to the perils of hackers and online identity theft and you get the flight risk free. Let’s face it he probably pays a fortune for online security.

Second; he can get you a great deal on a flight too.

If you are traveling in Pattaya Thailand and you want to fly anywhere else in Southeast Asia or back to Europe, China, or the Americas and your Debit/Credit card is not working abroad, (did you tell your credit card company you are going abroad? you are supposed to now) pop in with the cash or an old fashioned Traveler’s cheque and Sunny online travel can get you a great deal at a great price and you can pay in old fashioned Lincolns and Washingtons. He will even print out the ticket on a Printer, you know, a printing machine? that types onto paper that you keep. Oh forget it