How do embassies verify hotel/flight bookings?

Hi all,

I am just curious, and maybe someone has a reply. How are embassies/consulates which process visas able to verify hotel and flight bookings?

I know one person who edited old Ryanair and EasyJet e-tickets to be used as flight bookings when he was going to apply for a visa at the Italian consulate in Edinburgh. Other people might be doing the same for their flight and hotel bookings. Is it common practice? Do you know of people who do the same?

Is there any way visa officers can actually verify that flight e-tickets for low-cost airlines are even real?? How about for hotels?

Cheers,
Greg.

PS: I would never dream of doing this and getting blacklisted ever! Just curious though how people can get away with doing this.

How do you know they even verfiy? Both are not mandatory requirements to qualify or secure Tier1, then why should they bother to verify either?

I think the original poster was talking about visitor visas, for which flights and hotel bookings are sometimes a requirement — in particular, I guess, Schengen visas.

My suspicion is that they either don't routinely check (though in that case they might well check randomly) or that they only routinely check certain sorts of applications, perhaps applications from certain nationalities or applications in which some feature raises a suspicion for whatever reason. But of course I don't know that. I also don't know if airlines and hotels would necessarily divulge who they have bookings for, and I doubt that an embassy or consulate would have any way of forcing them to do so.