Supported document type
Detect tampered and deepfake Accommodation Booking
A hotel booking confirmation proves where an applicant sleeps on every night of a Schengen trip, and it is trivially easy to produce, because most reservations can be made without payment and cancelled without penalty once the appointment is done. The forgeries that reach a forensic check are the other kind: stay dates widened, a guest name replaced, or a property invented outright at an address no hotel occupies. TamperCheck finds the edited field and shows where it sits on the page.
API slug: accommodation_booking
What a genuine accommodation booking contains
A reservation confirmation names the guest as the booking was made, the property with its full street address, city and country, and the reservation number in the platform's or the hotel's own format. It states check-in and check-out dates with the number of nights, the room type and occupancy, the rate with taxes and city levies, the cancellation policy and its deadline, whether the stay is prepaid or payable on arrival, and the hotel's telephone number and email. Confirmations from a booking platform carry the platform's reference alongside the hotel's own.
For a Schengen application the calendar is what matters. Every night between the arrival flight and the departure flight has to be accounted for, including nights in a second or third member state, and check-in has to be the arrival date rather than the day after it. The guest has to be the applicant, not a friend who booked on their behalf. A confirmation covering nine nights of a twelve-night itinerary leaves three nights unexplained, and that gap is visible before anyone examines the file forensically.
How accommodation booking forgeries are made
Stay dates widened
Check-in and check-out are edited so a short booking appears to cover the whole trip. The nights count printed beside the dates is usually left as it was, and the total stops equalling the nightly rate multiplied by the stay, which puts two contradictory statements inside one box.
Guest name replacement
A colleague's or relative's confirmation is reused with the guest name overwritten. The name appears more than once on a platform confirmation, in the reservation summary and again in the guest details, and the edit is often applied only to the first of them.
Template confirmations for properties nobody booked
A confirmation is built from a template with a hotel name, a plausible address and a platform logo. Real platform emails follow a rigid layout with fixed blocks for the cancellation deadline and property policies; fabricated ones drop the blocks that are hardest to imitate and keep the ones that look reassuring.
Reference numbers in the wrong format
The reservation number is typed rather than issued. Each platform and chain uses a fixed length and character set for its references, so an invented number looks right and retrieves nothing, and it often repeats across several applications submitted through the same agent.
Screenshot re-dating
A screenshot of a genuine confirmation is opened in an image editor and the date line painted over. The replacement text is rendered at the screenshot's resolution but without its compression history, so the edited numerals carry a different noise floor from the digits beside them.
Book, show, cancel
The reservation is real, free to cancel, and released as soon as the visa is granted. There is no forensic finding because there is no forgery. The only control is the property or platform confirming that the booking is still live at the moment it is asked.
What TamperCheck checks on an accommodation booking
TamperCheck runs 200+ forensic checks across three layers and returns a risk score from 0 to 100 with plain-English findings tied to specific regions of the document. These three carry the most weight on this document class.
Date and validity consistency
Issue, expiry, and period dates are checked against one another and against the file's own creation metadata, which catches backdating and validity extension.
Reference and document number checks
Document, account, and reference numbers are checked for issuer format conformance and against every other place the same value appears on the page.
Field-level forensics
Every text region is analysed in its own right rather than as part of one whole-page image. This catches the smoothed and feathered edits that whole-image Error Level Analysis misses entirely.
And many more checks
The three above are the layers that carry the most weight on an accommodation booking. Every upload runs the full suite of 200+ checks regardless of document class, spanning file structure and metadata, pixel-level forensics, font and text rendering, optical and print characteristics, provenance signals, AI-generation signatures, and many more checks.
Who verifies an accommodation booking, and why
Consulates and visa processing centres checking Schengen accommodation proof. In each case the document is being used to unlock money, access, or a legal status, which is exactly what makes it worth forging.
How to verify an accommodation booking in 4 steps
Check the fields against each other
Read stay dates, guest name, and booking reference together rather than one at a time. Forgers typically change one value and leave the rest of the document describing the original.
Inspect the file metadata
Open the document properties and look at the producer, creation date, and modification date. A document produced by a consumer PDF editor, or created long after the date printed on its face, is worth a closer look.
Ask for a second document
Request a corroborating document from the same issuer or an adjacent period. Forgery effort concentrates on one file, so inconsistencies surface as soon as there are two to compare.
Run a forensic check
Manual review catches obvious edits but not field-level pixel manipulation or synthetic generation. TamperCheck runs 200+ forensic checks on an accommodation booking and returns a risk score from 0 to 100 in about a minute, at $0.50 per document.
Frequently asked questions
How do consulates check hotel bookings for visa applications?
They ask the property or the platform whether the reservation is still live, and they count nights. The name on the booking has to be the applicant, the address has to be a real property in the country claimed, and the dates have to cover every night of the itinerary, including nights in other member states. A cancelled booking is the common finding; an edited one is the serious finding.
Can you tell if a booking confirmation is fake?
Yes, in most cases. Edited confirmations contradict themselves: a stay length that no longer matches the dates, a total that is not the nightly rate times the nights, a reference in a format the platform does not issue. Fabricated ones drop the blocks a real confirmation always carries, such as the cancellation deadline and the property's own policies.
Do I need a hotel booking for every night of a Schengen trip?
Yes. Schengen applications are assessed on a complete accommodation plan, so every night between entry and departure needs to be covered, whether by hotel reservations, a host accommodation form, or a mixture of the two across several countries. Gaps in the calendar are among the most common reasons an otherwise sound file gets questioned.
What software detects fake hotel reservations?
TamperCheck analyses booking confirmations through one REST endpoint and returns a JSON verdict: a risk score from 0 to 100, findings mapped to regions of the page, and the name of the field that was edited. Documents are processed ephemerally and not stored, at $0.50 per document with no subscription or minimum.
TamperCheck analyses accommodation booking uploads with a hybrid forensic and AI pipeline tuned for this document class. Upload endpoints accept PDF and common image formats; class is inferred automatically. See the API documentation for authentication, async jobs, and webhooks.