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A Long Island travel agent has been arrested and charged with scamming would-be cruise ship passengers out of $35,000. That shocked family only found out at the pier that their Royal Caribbean reservation on Symphony of the Seas was fake.
And that’s not all that Tavia Thomas of Hempstead, New York, is being accused of doing. Other clients say Thomas collected almost $8,000 for a destination wedding that she booked — and then canceled — behind their backs. Another disgruntled family paid over $10,000 for a nonexistent Caribbean luxury vacation to celebrate a special birthday.
In all, Nassau County prosecutors say the self-proclaimed “award-winning” travel agent pocketed over $53,000 from unsuspecting customers. Some paid Thomas through monthly plans up to a year in advance of the trips she claimed to have booked. But for each of them, the story ended the same: no cruise, hotel or airfare and no refund from Thomas.
Unfortunately, she is just the latest in a number of high-profile cases of travel agents gone bad. The good news is that these schemes are easy to avoid — if you know what to look for.
Here’s how to make certain you don’t hand over your vacation dollars to the wrong person.
Booking a Royal Caribbean cruise to celebrate a graduation
In August 2023, Rosiland Gross-Hall decided to take her daughters on a Royal Caribbean cruise as a graduation present. After making that decision, Gross-Hall contacted Thomas, the owner of Destiny Travel NY, a local agency she’d used before.
Gross-Hall’s family selected a seven-night cruise to The Bahamas aboard Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of the Seas. It was especially appealing that they wouldn’t need to fly to the cruise port to start their tropical celebration. The ship would sail from Cape Liberty in New Jersey, about a two-hour drive from their home on Long Island.
After booking the cruise, 34 other friends and extended family members decided to join the trip. In all, the group paid Thomas $35,753 for the cruise, set to embark on July 5, 2024. She soon sent the cruisers confirmation of their reservation and even included a specialized itinerary entitled “Hall graduation.”
For the next ten months, Gross-Hall’s two daughters worked hard and completed their final year of high school. The entire time, they were looking forward to the prize at the end — that celebratory Royal Caribbean cruise.
Asking Tavia Thomas: “How do we board the cruise?”
On the day the family believed they were cruising to The Bahamas, they arrived early at Cape Liberty. Just beyond the terminal, Symphony of Seas sat waiting for its passengers, who were eager to board and begin celebrating.
Things began going wrong immediately for Gross-Hall’s group.
Thomas had told her she would meet them personally at the port to deliver the necessary boarding documents. However, the travel agent was nowhere to be found. When they tried to check in for the cruise using the documents Thomas had provided, RCCL staff delivered awful news.
They confirmed that what Thomas gave to the family was little more than a print-out of the cruise ship’s itinerary. Destiny Travel NY had not booked or paid for anyone to actually board the ship and take the trip.
In a panic, Gross-Hall repeatedly called and texted Thomas from the pier, hoping for a reasonable explanation. She says they waited and waited for Thomas to answer, but she refused to pick up the phone.
Royal Caribbean: “The confirmation number is someone else’s.”
Justin Carter of The Shade Room (TSR) was the first to share the story of Gross-Hall’s shocking experience with Thomas. In his original report, from late 2024, he interviewed multiple disgruntled customers of Destiny Travel NY.
“Royal Caribbean told us that the confirmation number she [Thomas] gave us was tied to someone else,” Gross-Hall told Carter.
As the clock ticked closer to the last call for boarding, a terrible realization began to sink in. Thomas wasn’t coming to save the day, and there would be no magic fix that would allow the family to board the cruise.
Soon time ran out, and the massive ship weighed anchor and left the stunned group behind.
“The doors closed and the [The Symphony of the Seas sailed away],” Gross-Hall told Carter. “My daughters and everyone else there were just broken.”
The group gathered their belongings and headed back to Long Island — definitely not the island they expected to be traveling to that afternoon. It was a stunning turn of events.
And when they arrived home, Gross-Hall made a beeline to the police station to make a criminal complaint against Tavia Thomas.
Other customers of Destiny Travel NY report similar experiences
During Carter’s breaking news report of Thomas’s alleged larceny, he also interviewed two other disgruntled former customers. They reported that similar high-value vacations did not materialize despite their full payments to Destiny Travel NY.
These alleged victims said Thomas pointed fingers at hotels and other vendors as the source of the problem. According to the other guests on Carter’s show, Thomas recommended her clients file travel insurance claims to speed up their refunds.
At the same time, she was launching a brand new, flashy website for Destiny Travel NY. There, she described herself and her team as “award-winning” specialists with an amazing number of affiliations and certifications.
When Carter reached out to Thomas at the time, she denied all accusations. She told him the same thing she’d been telling her clients: Their missing trips and cash weren’t her fault. She said that the hotels had overbooked her clients.
Then Thomas got her attorney involved.
Thomas’s attorney told Carter that these former clients who were speaking out would soon receive a cease-and-desist order.
For former customers reeling from her alleged betrayal, that threat was like pouring salt on an open wound. However, Carter’s report and his guests’ willingness to speak about their experiences began to slowly turn the wheels of justice. Nassau County Prosecutors started taking a closer look at Tavia Thomas and Destiny Travel NY.
18 months later: Tavia Thomas is arrested and charged with Grand Larceny
January 6, 2026 was the day Gross-Hall and the other alleged victims of Destiny Travel NY had been waiting for. Tavia Thomas was arrested and charged with, among other things, grand larceny, a felony. She was accused of defrauding her former customers to the tune of $53,488.
At her first court appearance in Nassau County District Court, her attorney oddly described her as a social worker rather than a travel agent. During that hearing, where she pleaded not guilty, her lawyer painted a picture of a caregiver and mother, as opposed to a predator of unsuspecting vacation-seekers.
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Her case is ongoing.
Prosecutors suspect that there may be other potential victims of Tavia Thomas and her Destiny Travel NY. Anyone who paid Thomas for a trip she never delivered should reach out to the Nassau County Crime Stoppers at 1-800-244-TIPS.
How to spot a travel agent to avoid (so you don’t lose your vacation dollars)
If you’re a regular reader of my columns, you know that I am a strong proponent of professional travel advisors. Many of the fiascos that I mediate and write about could have been avoided had the traveler used an experienced agent.
But unfortunately, everyone who hangs a shingle calling themselves a travel agent isn’t necessarily professional or experienced. (Who can forget the “Worst travel agent ever” who didn’t know the difference between Cancun and Los Cabos?)
Remember the term “travel agent” is not a protected title. Anyone can call themselves a travel agent. That leaves it up to you to vet your travel professional. Here’s how to do that and some simple precautions to protect yourself from becoming a victim.
Ask for and verify professional affiliations
The best way to confirm that your potential travel agent is legitimate is by checking whether they belong to organizations that are dedicated to training and improving the profession. For travel agents those organizations include, among others, ASTA (American Society of Travel Advisors) and CLIA (Cruise Lines International Association).
Don’t be fooled just because you see a logo on a travel agent’s website, as those icons can easily be copied and pasted. And, keep in mind that some organizations have membership levels which only involve paying a fee — and nothing to do with professional abilities. Be more curious about certifications than memberships. And verify those claims directly with the organization.
For reference, Thomas claims on her website to be endorsed and certified by ASTA, Sandals and the Association of Black Travel Professionals (ABTP) among many others. But spokespeople at each of these organizations were unable to find any records that she had earned any certifications on their platforms. In each case, she was a “general dues paying member.”
Don’t let a fancy website trick you
Today, it is super easy to make professional looking websites without any IT knowledge or assistance. Artificial intelligence programs have made it possible for any layperson to create beautiful, fully functioning websites in minutes. And many scammers and other people with bad intentions do just that every day.
When deciding whether to entrust someone with large sums of your money, don’t let a flashy website sway your opinion. Instead, look for those professional affiliations and testimonials from satisfied customers, and ask if you can contact any for a reference. If the agent claims to be award-winning, look up their name plus the word “award.”
In today’s online world, everything is discoverable. If the only mention of winning an award can be found on their website, you can safely assume they’re fudging the truth. People who fib about winning awards are attempting to mislead you and should not be trusted with your vacation dollars.
Check for reviews
The Internet is your friend when you’re searching for information about a company or individual. Searching for the name plus “complaints”, “scam” or “arrest” may reveal startling information about your potential travel agent.
Related: Our cruise missed Greenland. Why won’t this agent refund our excursion?
Always pay with a credit card
The Fair Credit Billing Act protects consumers from fraud who use credit cards to pay for their travel. Unfortunately, many sellers of travel (tour operators, cruise lines and independent travel agents) entice travelers to pay with cash or bank transfers by offering discounts to do so. These discounts are often minimal and the danger to the consumer is high.
Never was that risk more clearly illustrated in my case files than in the Vantage Deluxe World Travel bankruptcy. Passengers who had paid in full via bank transfers lost upwards of $66,000 in that consumer disaster.
The good news for some of the victims listed in the complaint against Thomas and Destiny Travel NY is that they paid with credit cards. Others, however, used Zelle and there is no way to claw back that type of bank to bank transfer.
To make certain you have your bank’s protection behind you when you make a large payment to a merchant, always use a credit card. You should take it as a warning signal if an agent insists on cash, check, wire transfer or a cash app, which are all preferred payment methods of con artists.
Ask for proof of errors and omissions insurance
Anyone can make a mistake. But a consumer should not be expected to pay for the mistake of a travel professional. We should make it clear that in the case of Tavia Thomas, she has not been convicted of grand larceny. That will be decided by a jury. She claims that all of these missed vacations and missing money are the result of some undefined mistake. If that were true and she is a professional travel agent, she should be holding errors and omissions insurance. That product would protect her from the financial impact of her own mistake. (However, it would not protect her if she did, in fact, commit fraud and larceny.)
It should come as no surprise that scammers do not waste money on errors and omissions insurance. But professionals always carry it. So, yet one more way to vet your travel advisor is by asking if they carry E&O.
Verify your reservations
After you’ve selected your travel professional and they’ve made your reservations, it’s crucial to verify your booking. Had Gross-Hall checked directly with Royal Caribbean at any time before her family showed up at Cape Liberty on that fateful July day, she would have learned the truth. Thomas betrayed her trust and her alleged scheme’s success depended on her clients not reconfirming with the cruise lines and hotels.
It doesn’t cost you anything to verify your agent’s work. If your travel professional doesn’t give you an official reservation number that you can use to confirm your trip, you may not have one.
The bottom line
This particular case is ongoing and I will provide an update when I learn more. But as I mentioned previously, this isn’t an isolated case. I’ve written quite a bit about unscrupulous people posing as friendly travel agents. The terrible tales flooding the media suggest that the field likely needs some oversight and tightening of the controls determining who can legally call themselves a travel agent.
But until that happens, be on guard. Fake and unprofessional travel agents are flooding Facebook groups and other online communities.
The last piece of advice I have for you is to make sure that you get to know your agent in real life. I’m always amazed when travelers tell me that they sent thousands of dollars to a travel agent whom they’ve never spoken to or seen in person. That is a mistake.
Related: This Carnival Cruises passenger lost $3556 to a Zelle scam (and got banned, too)
Scammers want you to be a faceless entity they don’t really know. That’s what makes it easy to victimize you.
Personalize yourself with your agent. The psychology behind this tactic is undeniable. Remember this: Unscrupulous people don’t want to know you personally because that would make it more difficult to victimize you. Don’t trust someone who resists direct contact, but who expects you to trust them with large sums of your money.
By the way, none of the victims in the Tavia Thomas case knew her in real life.
In fact, the office “suite” listed in the footer of the Destiny Travel NY fancy website? It’s a PO Box in a UPS store in a strip mall along a highway in Long Island. A very difficult place to meet with, and impress, potential clients, indeed.
