When customer-friendly policies become commercial risk

TL;DR

• Airlines and OTAs face rising commercial risk not from traditional fraud but from policy abuse, refund manipulation, and first-party misuse that exploit flexible, customer-friendly booking and cancellation experiences.
• Signifyd’s travel network data (Jan–May 2026 vs. the same period in 2025) shows consumer abuse/friendly fraud GMV up 10%, abuse-related chargeback volume up 8%, services not received up to 20%, and Significantly Not As Described claims up 37%.
• This abuse is hard to catch with traditional fraud tools because it involves genuine accounts, payment methods, and identities; the risk only becomes visible as a pattern across repeated bookings, refunds, and customer service interactions over time, not in any single transaction.
• The recommended approach isn’t rolling back flexibility or adding friction for all customers, but rather connecting signals across bookings, refunds, loyalty activity, and service interactions to precisely identify the small number of abusive customers while preserving a seamless experience for everyone else.

Risk vs. reward of leveraging flexibility as a competitive differentiator

The travel industry has spent years making the customer journey easier, recognising that flexibility has become an important competitive differentiator and that giving travellers greater control over bookings, cancellations and refunds plays a significant role in driving conversion, customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty, but as those experiences have evolved so too has the way some customers interact with them, creating a category of commercial risk that sits beyond the traditional definition of fraud and is becoming increasingly difficult for airlines and online travel agents to ignore.

The scale of that shift is becoming increasingly difficult to overlook, with Signifyd’s travel and ticketing network showing consumer abuse and friendly fraud continuing to rise, but perhaps the more interesting story sits beneath the headline figures, because while overall consumer abuse GMV increased by 10% and abuse-related chargeback volumes increased by 8% between January and May 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, claims linked to services not received increased by 20% and significantly-not-as-described claims increased by 37%, reinforcing that the commercial challenge extends well beyond payment fraud and increasingly sits within the grey area where genuine customer issues, service recovery and opportunistic abuse intersect, making it far more difficult for travel businesses to distinguish legitimate claims from behaviour that consistently exploits customer-friendly policies.

Those figures tell an important story, because they suggest that while fraud remains an important challenge, a growing proportion of revenue leakage is being driven by behaviours that are much harder to identify through traditional fraud controls alone, particularly when viewed at the level of an individual booking or refund request rather than across the wider customer relationship.

What the figures mean for airlines and online travel agencies

For many airlines and online travel agents, this represents a fundamental change in where revenue is being lost, because the challenge is increasingly not unauthorised transactions but authorised customer behaviour that exploits the flexibility businesses have worked hard to introduce. A traveller cancelling a booking because of a genuine change in circumstances is exactly what a flexible fare is designed to support, but the commercial picture changes when the same customer repeatedly books flexible fares with little intention of travelling if prices fall, consistently requests refunds following disruption, repeatedly seeks goodwill gestures through customer service channels or exploits loyalty benefits in ways they were never intended to be used, creating patterns of behaviour that appear reasonable when viewed individually but become far more costly when repeated across thousands of bookings.

What makes these behaviours particularly difficult to identify is that they rarely resemble traditional fraud, because customers are typically using their own accounts, their own payment methods and their genuine identities, meaning individual bookings or refund requests rarely appear suspicious in isolation, while the real indicator of risk sits within the broader pattern of behaviour that develops over time and only becomes visible when bookings, refunds, loyalty activity and customer interactions are considered collectively rather than as separate events.

This is prompting many travel businesses to rethink how they approach revenue protection, moving beyond decisions made solely at the point of payment and instead developing a broader understanding of customer behaviour across the entire travel journey, recognising that abuse, account takeover and payment fraud are becoming increasingly interconnected and that the strongest indicators of future loss often emerge only when those signals are brought together.

Protecting revenue without removing the option of flexibility

The answer, however, is not to remove flexibility or make legitimate customers work harder, because restrictive policies, unnecessary verification and additional friction ultimately undermine the very experiences that airlines and online travel agents have invested so heavily in creating. The opportunity instead lies in becoming much more precise, preserving the convenience and flexibility that genuine travellers increasingly expect while identifying the relatively small number of customers whose behaviour consistently falls outside what would reasonably be considered normal.

For airlines and online travel agents, the conversation is therefore shifting from fraud prevention to revenue protection, because understanding where flexibility stops creating value and starts creating avoidable loss is becoming just as important as identifying stolen payment credentials or compromised accounts. Businesses that are able to connect signals across bookings, refunds, loyalty activity, customer service interactions and broader network intelligence will be better positioned to identify abuse earlier, protect profitability more effectively and maintain the seamless customer experiences that have become essential to competing in today’s travel market.