Topic starter
11/07/2026 8:40 pm
TL;DR: Recovered travel demand is exposing gaps in rules-based fraud management, manual review, and 3DS as airlines try to balance approval rates, loyalty, and margin protection, according to Riskified’s November 2024 airline fraud report. The governance challenge is no longer just stopping fraud, but controlling the trade-off between friction and resilience.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Riskified: “Air travel is back: With growth headwinds (but less turbulence)”.
Key questions
Q: Why do rules-based fraud controls struggle in airline payments?
A: Airline bookings are highly variable, with different routes, channels, fare types, and customer behaviours creating noisy signals for static rules.
Q: What should airlines do when manual review starts slowing down approvals?
A: They should treat manual review as a targeted exception process, not a blanket backstop.
Q: When does 3DS create more friction than fraud value?
A: 3DS becomes counterproductive when it is applied too broadly, too late in the journey, or without a clear segment-based policy.
Practitioner guidance
- Reassess rule thresholds against current booking behaviour Compare existing fraud rules with present-day airline booking patterns across routes, devices, channels, and customer segments, then retire thresholds that mainly create false positives.
- Segment manual review by business risk Reserve manual review for transactions where the revenue, chargeback, or account-risk impact justifies delay, rather than routing every uncertain booking into the queue.
- Measure 3DS against abandonment and approval rates Track whether step-up authentication improves fraud outcomes without materially increasing checkout abandonment or suppressing legitimate bookings.
Bottom line: Rules-based fraud controls are struggling because airline booking behaviour changes too quickly for static thresholds to stay reliable.
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11/07/2026 9:08 pm
Rules-based fraud management is reaching its governance limit in travel. The issue is not simply that fraudsters adapt, but that airline booking behaviour is too fluid for static policies to stay accurate for long. When controls are tuned around yesterday’s fraud pattern, they start suppressing legitimate demand and invite manual exceptions, which weakens the policy layer itself. Practitioners should treat this as a control-design problem, not only a fraud-volume problem.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How should fraud teams balance loss prevention with airline growth?
A: They should use a shared governance model that weighs fraud loss, customer friction, approval rate, and margin protection together. In airline commerce, a control that reduces fraud but damages loyalty or expansion can still be the wrong control. Resilience depends on both loss reduction and revenue continuity.
👉 Read our full editorial: Airline fraud management is straining rules-based controls