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As the number of online hotel bookings continues to increase, so does the rate of booking scams. 

A study released in 2015 by the American Hotel & Lodging Association found that around 15 million hotel bookings are affected by deceptive rogue affiliates each year. That translates to roughly $1.3 billion going to fake bookings annually. 

The study, which was conducted by GfK Custom Research, included 1,1017 interviews conducted among adults age 18 and over.

Fraudulent websites and call centers will often mimic an affiliation with a certain hotel, when they in fact have no relation. 

These scams often result in wholly lost reservations, undisclosed credit card charges, incorrect accommodations, lost rewards points, or false reservations. 

Here is a full breakdown of the study's results: 

• 32% of people got a room that was different than what was expected 
• 17% of people were charged unexpected or hidden fees 
• 15% of people did not get their rewards points 
• 14% of people were charged an extra booking fee 
• 14% of people could not get a refund for a cancellation 
• 9% of people had reservations lost or canceled 
• 3% of people had their identity or private information stolen 

Thankfully, there are some steps you can take to avoid getting caught in a scam.

The safest way is to book directly through the hotel's website. Third-party sites can show you a good variety of options, which you can use as a guideline to find the hotel that works best for you, then book it on that hotel's own site. 

The American Hotel & Lodging Association also recommends watching out for sites that say there's an immediate urgency on the number of rooms left, mostly in order to rush the booking process. This could be a red flag. 

You should also be wary of websites that don't allow you to click in to see a breakdown of your fees, or that make this information difficult to locate. 

Typically, when you book directly through the hotel, you'll have the option to click in and see a clear breakdown of any additional fees you'll be expected to pay.

The American Hotel & Lodging Association also recommends only using trusted sites. Sites that have a hotel's name as part of the URL could still be a third-party vendor stealing a hotel's identity. 

When you see a viable option, call the hotel directly and ask them the following: 

• What is the cancellation/trip change policy? 
• Is the site, in any way, affiliated with the hotel? 
• Is it a secure payment site? 

The Federal Trade Commission recommends using either the toll-free number or URL provided on your rewards card, or the one that is featured in the company's ads.

Anytime you do book through a third-party site, be sure to read the details carefully, since fees and surcharges can sometimes be hidden in the fine print or behind vaguely labeled hyperlinks. 

Finally, keep in mind that when you type a hotel name into a search engine, the first result that pops up might not always be the official one, since some third-party reservations pay to be the top spot on the results page.

In response to growing concerns on the issue, the Stop Online Booking Scam Act was introduced this February. If passed, the bill will require all third-party hotel booking websites to clearly disclose that they are not affiliated with the hotel. It will also allow a state attorney general to go after perpetrators in federal court.

Finally, the bill would require the FTC to produce a report on the impact of these fraudulent websites on consumers, as well as encourage them to simplify the process for reporting a claim on their website. 

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Being more productive is about working smarter, not harder, and making the most of each day.

While this is no easy feat, getting more done in less time is a much more attainable goal if you're not sabotaging yourself with bad habits.

Following are 16 things you should stop doing right now to become more productive.

Aaron Taube contributed to an earlier version of this article.

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1. Hitting the snooze button

It might feel like pressing the snooze button in the morning gives you a little bit of extra rest to start your day, but the truth is that it does more harm than good.

That's because when you first wake up, your endocrine system begins to release alertness hormones to get you ready for the day. By going back to sleep, you're slowing down this process. Plus, nine minutes doesn't give your body time to get the restorative, deep sleep it needs.

2. Prioritizing work over sleep

This isn't to say you should cut back on sleep.

As Arianna Huffington discusses in her sleep manifesto, "The Sleep Revolution," a good night's sleep has the power to increase productivity, happiness, smarter decision-making, and unlock bigger ideas.

As she explains to Business Insider, a recent McKinsey study shows the direct correlation between getting less sleep and workplace inefficiency. The prefrontal cortex, where the problem-solving functions of the brain are housed, is degraded if we don't get enough sleep. Working 24/7 "we now know is the cognitive equivalent of coming to work drunk," she says.

The trick for getting enough sleep is planning ahead and powering down at a reasonable time.

3. Keeping your phone next to your bed

Another key to getting better sleep is not letting outside influencers impair your sleep.

The LED screens of our smartphones, tablets, and laptops, for example, give off what is called blue light, which studies have shown can damage vision and suppress production of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate the sleep cycle.

Research also suggests that people with lower melatonin levels are more prone to depression.

When it comes to making the perfect sandwich, we all have our favorites.

But how healthy for you is that turkey club or Italian sub?

We decided to do some number crunching to determine which deli meat was high enough in nutrients and low enough in sodium and fat to be crowned the ultimate healthiest lunch meat.

For the purposes of a constant comparison, we looked specifically at Boar's Head meats bought at our local grocery store. Still, the nutrition for each meat shouldn't vary too much based on the brand.

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No. 8: Salami

Unfortunately, salami is the worst meat on the list as far as nutrition goes. At 110 calories for just a 1-ounce — about three slices — serving, it has some of the highest fat, cholesterol, and sodium of the lunch meats.

Plus, like many of the meats on this list, it's cured. Several recentstudies have suggested a link between high daily consumption of cured meats and certain types of cancer.

No. 7: Bologna

Beef bologna doesn't fare a whole lot better than salami, though it is cholesterol-free. It's still high in fat and sodium, and has 150 calories per 2-ounce serving — about two slices.

No. 6: Pastrami

A New York deli staple, pastrami doesn't fare much better than its processed-meat counterparts, though it is lower in calories at 80 per serving. One 2-ounce serving — about two slices — has a quarter of your daily sodium intake and 11% of your daily cholesterol, though it also has a quarter of your recommended daily protein intake.

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Some 40 million tons of reusable plastic cutlery get thrown away every year, most of them after a single use. This plastic can take up to 1,000 years to break down in the environment. Meanwhile, they collect in our oceans, adding to an already long list of environmental concerns we face today.

Bakeys, an edible cutlery manufacturer based in India, might have a promising solution. The company launching the world's first edible cutlery line. Yes — that's a spoon that you can eat. Earlier this month, 9,293 backers on the popular crowdfunding website Kickstarter pledged $278,847, to the startup — 14 times more than its initial $20,000 goal.

Bakeys' products, which include a line of spoons, forks, and chopsticks, are completely biodegradable and edible. The spoons come in savory, sweet, and plain. 

We tried them for a week, and learned quite a bit:

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On a typical day at work, whether I bring my lunch or buy it, I usually pick up disposable plastic cutlery.

But this week, I had a set of Bakey's spoons, which I carried throughout the week in my backpack. My first impression of the spoons: they look sturdier than expected given how light they are, and they smell really good!

I get lunch — some sweet potato stew — from one of my usual spots, and skip the disposable cutlery section, feeling pretty good about myself.

Larry Ellison, Oracle's billionaire cofounder and current CTO, is famous for his brash personality.

He's shown time and time again that he's willing to go to great lengths to win, both in business and in his extracurricular activities. 

In honor of The America's Cup — one of Ellison's favorite hobbies, which begins Saturday in New York City — we've rounded up the stories that best show how competitive Ellison really is. 

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Ellison wants to be dominant in everything he does. On Oracle's competing with Microsoft to be the No. 1 software company, Ellison told 60 Minutes in 2004, "We're in second place. We're trying to catch them. They're not making it easy ... They have a monopoly. We don't. Darn it."

Source: 60 Minutes

Ellison obsessed over beating Microsoft's Bill Gates for years. Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold told Vanity Fair in 1997: "I mean, the guy’s got six billion bucks. You'd think he wouldn’t be so dramatically obsessed that one guy in the Northwest is more successful. [With Larry] it’s just a mania."

Source: Vanity Fair

He led huge changes in the America's Cup sailing competition, moving away from standard catamarans to expensive, futuristic AC72s. The boats are 13 stories tall and reach speeds of up to 50 mph.

Source: Business Insider

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When Under Armor released a new, free fitness app, Record, last January, which uses IBM Watson to send you personalized fitness tips, I was pretty excited about it.

Under Armor owns some of my favorite fitness-tracking apps, especially MyFitnessPal.

I use MyFitnessPal to track my diet. That means I use it to verify that half of the time I'm eating fewer calories than I'm burning.

MyFitnessPal syncs with all the wearable fitness devices on the market and passes the data to the Record service. Record takes all the info from millions of users and compares how you are doing to other people like you.

Before I started using Record, for few months, I carefully logged all of my food and workouts in MyFitnessPal to give Record plenty of data about me. You don't have to do that. I just wanted to.

For the past month I've been using Record daily to log stuff.

And now, I get a daily "insight" about myself from IBM Watson. Some of them are hilarious. Some of them are baffling. And a few of them are useful.

Take a look ...

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This was the the very first insight I got from Watson. I was mostly baffled by it. I didn't see a correlation between my workout duration and other women's workouts. And it felt like Watson was implying that maybe I was working out because I was depressed?

When I clicked on the "learn more" it just took me to two random studies about exercise and depression. It is true that exercise boosts my mood. Endorphins are great. That's why they call it "runners high."

This "tip" seemed a bit like a marketing pitch, but then again, I actually haven't used the app to meet other fitness people.

When life gets unbearably stressful, most of us opt for a vacation that relieves us of the worries of day-to-day life.

Thomas Thwaites, a UK-based designer, decided to take that a step further and take a break from being a human entirely. He became a goat.

Seriously. With the help of a team of researchers and the financial support of London-based biomedical research group Wellcome Trust, Thwaites built himself a suit to achieve goat status and cross the Alps, all of which he chronicles in his upcoming book.

For Thwaites, the project wasn't just a physical adventure. It was a psychological one, too.

"I started thinking of the project as kind of this investigation into what present-day science and technology could do to help me achieve what I think is this ancient human desire of becoming more like an animal," Thwaites told Business Insider.

Here's what the experiment was like:

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This is Thomas Thwaites. He's a designer. You might know him from his TED Talk about building a toaster from scratch. Last year, he decided that he wanted to take a break from being a human.

Watch that TED talk here.

At first, Thwaites wanted to try being an elephant. Its size, he thought, would make it easier to transition from a two-legged person to a four-legged animal. But he changed his plan after speaking with a shaman who said that he'd connect better to his environment if he chose to become a goat.

Next, Thwaites went about discovering how to be a goat. He spoke to goat behavioral experts to find out how and what goats think. After finding out that activity in several parts of his brain distinguish him from a goat, he met with a neuroscientist at University College London to try and hack a system for temporarily shutting those parts off, particularly the Broca's area, which is related to speech. To Thwaites' dismay, the technology to turn off a person's ability to understand language isn't there yet. So, Thwaites decided to focus on the physical aspects of becoming a goat.

In August 2015, Netflix made a huge announcement — the company's new moms and dads can take off as much time as they want during the first year after their child's birth or adoption.

By announcing this policy, Netflix not only joined the ranks of several major companies, but it also led the way for many more that have instituted radical parental leave policies at odds with the country's lack of mandatory paid parental leave.

While US policymakers have been slow to acknowledge the benefits of guaranteeing paid time spent with a new child, companies like Netflix say they want their employees to be able to balance the needs of their growing families without worrying about work or finances.

"Experience shows people perform better at work when they're not worrying about home," Tawni Cranz, Netflix's chief talent officer, wrote on Netflix's blog. "This new policy, combined with our unlimited time off, allows employees to be supported during the changes in their lives and return to work more focused and dedicated." 

Here are some companies that are making life for new parents that much better with generous parental leave policies:

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Netflix

New parents at Netflix take as much paid parental leave as needed for up to one year after the birth or adoption of a new child, and they can choose to return full-time, part-time, and take additional time off as needed.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Employees at the largest private foundation in the world can enjoy up to one year of paid time with their newborns during the child's first year after birth or adoption.

"This will enable parents to participate more fully in their children’s lives, while also allowing them the flexibility and financial certainty to meet the needs of their growing families," Steven Rice, the foundation's chief human resources officer, writes in a statement posted on LinkedIn.

Etsy

Regardless of gender, birthing means, or country of residence, all employees are eligible for 26 weeks of fully paid leave that can be taken over the two years following the birth or adoption of a child.

"Many traditional parental leave policies don't treat people equally, including single parents, adoptive parents, and parents who use surrogates," the company's director of culture and engagement, Juliet Gorman, says. "While we recognize the unique toll of giving birth, we believe that all members of a family benefit from generous, inclusive leave."

To be truly addicted to a drug, the conventional wisdom goes, you have to be psychologically and physically hooked.

In other words, you have to both crave the drug mentally and feel physically sick — for example, shaky or nauseated — when you can't get it.

But this isn't necessarily true, at least according to neuroscience writer Maia Szalavitz and the author of the new book, "Unbroken Brain." 

In reality, it's incredibly tough to put the signs of addiction into two distinct mind or body categories, because that isn't how addiction works. 

At the end of the day, "both kinds of symptoms [are] ultimately expressed ... in the brain." So focusing on where we see these symptoms is a waste of time, Szalavitz says. It can also obscure how dangerous a drug really is, since certain drugs might produce very visible symptoms and not do as much harm, while others might result in symptoms that are almost impossible to detect even while they're doing a lot of damage.

The case of cocaine

Take cocaine, for example. In the 1970s and '80s, numerous scientists regarded coke as fairly harmless because people who stopped using didn't suddenly get the shakes or start vomit ting.

In a 1982 article in Scientific American, renowned University of California at San Francisco psychiatrist Craig Van Dyke and infamous Yale psychopharmacologist Robert Byck compared the behavior of people who'd used cocaine to that of people who'd recently indulged in a delicious snack. The behavioral pattern of users, they wrote, was "comparable to that experienced by many people with peanuts or potato chips. It may interfere with other activities ... but it may be a source of enjoyment as well."

This sort of thinking had drastic consequences. 

The number of people who admitted using cocaine on a routine basis jumped from 4.2 million in 1985 to 5.8 million in 1989, according to data from the Drug Enforcement Administration. During that same four-year period, cocaine-related hospital emergency room visits increased 28-fold.

But most people didn't see this coming; they thought they could judge how harmful a drug was based on how bad its visible symptoms were. 

"While withdrawal from marijuana, cocaine ... and numerous other drugs does not result in the stereotypical 'opiate-withdrawal-flu-like-syndrome,' there is no doubt that real withdrawal from these substances exists for long term users," writes University of California at Los Angeles psychiatrist Adi Jaffe in a blog post for Psychology Today.

Jaffe adds: "Fatigue, depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, and trouble eating are only some of the symptoms that tend to show up."

What's really key to pinpointing and treating addiction then, is seeing how drug use might be affecting behavior — how it might be getting in the way of normal life.

"... if you have a behavior that is making your life miserable and which you can't seem to stop, it doesn't matter if you're throwing up during withdrawal or not," writes Jaffe. "It's an issue and you need help."

Depressants vs. stimulants

The other problem is that our bodies and brains react very differently to depressants (alcohol, heroin) than they do to stimulants (cocaine, meth). 

When we regularly use a depressant like alcohol, for example, we tend to develop a physical tolerance for it, meaning that each time we drink, we need more to achieve the same warm, pleasant feelings.

Most users also experience physicalwithdrawal when they suddenly stop drinking: They feel nauseated, shaky, or physically ill. And some of us  experience psychological withdrawal, too, meaning we crave or strongly desire to drink again.

Conversely, when we regularly use a stimulant like cocaine, very different things can happen to us physically and psychologically. First, you may develop partial tolerance or sensitization, two virtually opposite reactions to the drug. In partial tolerance, users need slightly more of the drug each time to experience the same high. In sensitization, smaller amounts of the drug actually cause more intense effects. Plus, most users tend to go through psychological — but not physical — withdrawal when they suddenly stop using, meaning they might crave or strongly desire to use the drugs again.

"Stimulant withdrawal doesn't make you physically ill like heroin or alcohol withdrawal does; nearly all of its signs can be dismissed as 'psychological' rather than 'physical' and include things like irritability, craving, depression, and sleep disturbances," Szalavitz writes.

Using these differences as a gauge for how dangerous a drug is doesn't work very well, says Szalavitz. And it's about time for a new system.

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Last month, I downsized my closet by about 75% and built a capsule wardrobe composed of 30 items.

The experience was liberating, economical, and a major space-saver — so much so that I'm selling my gratuitous clothing and sticking with the minimal wardrobe.

Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of the project was how much time and energy it saved each morning.

Choosing what to wear to work became infinitely easier, simply because I had so few clothes to choose from. It was also nice knowing that I couldn't really go wrong with my decision — after all, I filled my capsule with my favorite, highest-quality items.

What's more, by simplifying the "What do I wear today?" conundrum, I wasn't wasting energy on mundane decisions, which meant more mental energy (and greater productivity) for the rest of my day.

I'm not proposing anything revolutionary — if anything, I'm behind the curve.

There's a scientific reason some of the most successful people wear the same outfit day in and day out.

Think: Mark Zuckerberg and his signature gray tee-shirt, Barack Obama and his blue or gray suit, and John Paul DeJoria and his all-black ensemble. Wearing the same thing day in and day out helps them avoid what psychologists call decision fatigue.

"Making decisions uses the very same willpower that you use to say no to doughnuts, drugs, or illicit sex," Roy F. Baumeister, a psychologist who studies decision fatigue and a co-author of "Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength" told the New York Times.

"It's the same willpower that you use to be polite or to wait your turn or to drag yourself out of bed or to hold off going to the bathroom," Baumeister said. "Your ability to make the right investment or hiring decision may be reduced simply because you expended some of your willpower earlier when you held your tongue in response to someone's offensive remark or when you exerted yourself to get to the meeting on time."

As Obama told Vanity Fair in 2012, "You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make."

Zuckerberg said something similar during a public Q&A session, when asked about wearing the same tee every day: "I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community ... I feel like I'm not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life."

I'm not quite ready to make the leap from 30 items to a mere handful or single uniform — but the option is always there, with Obama, Zuckerberg, and science in its corner.

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Every year since 1999, hundreds of supercar owners have gathered together to drive around the world in convoy for the Gumball 3000 rally — a 3,000-mile cross-country rally that takes place on public roads. 

In between long drives, participants stay at luxury hotels and pop champagne at decadent nightclubs. Entry to the week-long rally costs around $50,000. And you need to provide your own supercar, obviously.

Business Insider was invited to take part in one leg of this year's 3000-mile rally from Dublin to Bucharest by Car Throttle — an app-based online car community dubbed "Buzzfeed for Cars"— which had entered Gumball 3000 with a Nissan GTR that was inexplicably wrapped in emojis.

We were only with the team for one day — from London to Kent on day three — but it gave us a flavor of the event. Inside the "EmojiTR," Car Throttle CEO Adnan Ebrahim filled us in on what we had missed.

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We joined the Gumball 3000 on Tuesday morning (day three) at Golden Square in Soho, London.

It looked like one of the most expensive gridlocks the city has ever seen.

The plan for the day was to drive to Folkestone and then onto mainland Europe by Eurostar. Initial progress was slow, as not everyone had yet woken up from the party the night before.

If you know someone who shares a little too much about their relationship on Facebook, the reality is that there may be a deeper meaning besides wanting to show off how "happy" they are. Psychotherapist M. Gary Neuman shows why you should hold back on posting about your significant other. 

Produced by Justin Gmoser and Graham Flanagan. 

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Popular diet Whole30 has taken Instagram by storm.

Like most diets, it requires you to give up sweets and alcohol.

But the 30-day diet also bans weigh-ins and calorie-counting, which are the cornerstones of most weight-loss regimens.

Photos that people have been posting on Instagram showing their bodies before the diet and afterward tell enticing stories.

Find out more:

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Whole30 requires that you eat only whole, natural foods for 30 straight days.

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Except for a list of foods that are off limits, like legumes, grains, sweeteners (even stevia!), dairy, and additives like carrageenan. You also can't "recreate" baked goods with healthy ingredients, as you can do on the Paleo diet — though there's a burgeoning industry of companies selling Whole30 products, like RxBars and avocado-oil mayonnaise.

The diet, which has been around since 2009, swears that by eating "real" permitted foods, you'll "change your life." It's a lofty promise, but judging by the many photos on Instagram, it's clear that many people are inspired by this concept.

Another thing you can't do? Step on the scale.

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"You are not allowed to step on the scale or take any body measurements for the duration of the program," the website reads.

You can, however, weigh yourself before and after. The purpose of this is so you don't get side-tracked.

"This is about so much more than just weight loss," the website says.

Like the Paleo diet, there's no emphasis on counting calories, either.

The weight loss is billed as a byproduct of eating well as opposed to an end goal.

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