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11/07/2026 8:21 pm
TL;DR: Chargeback management is still weighed down by manual work, fragmented workflows, and revenue leakage, based on insights from more than 300 merchants worldwide, according to Riskified and Paladin Fraud. The operational issue is not just dispute volume but the governance gap between fraud, payments, and recovery teams.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Riskified: Chargeback challenges for travel merchants and what to do about them
By the numbers:
- Riskified and Paladin Fraud interviewed more than 300 merchants worldwide for this travel chargeback research.
- 2024 research into chargeback management in the travel, ack management in the travel industry.
Questions worth separating out
Q: Why does travel chargeback management become inefficient so quickly?
A: Travel chargebacks are operationally expensive because bookings often change after purchase, involve multiple stakeholders, and require detailed evidence to justify a dispute.
Q: How should merchants connect fraud signals to chargeback handling?
A: Merchants should route authentication evidence, account history, booking context, and dispute notes into the same case workflow so reviewers can see whether a chargeback is tied to abuse, customer confusion, or policy failure.
Q: What do teams get wrong about chargeback management in travel?
A: Teams often treat chargebacks as a back-office expense instead of a revenue recovery process.
Practitioner guidance
- Standardise dispute intake and evidence routing Create one queue for chargeback cases with explicit ownership, mandatory evidence fields, and SLA-based routing so analysts do not rebuild the same case logic in multiple tools.
- Link fraud telemetry to chargeback cases Connect account history, booking context, device signals, and authentication evidence to each dispute so reviewers can separate policy disputes from abuse patterns.
- Measure recovery performance as an operational control Track recovery rate, time to assemble evidence, and manual touches per case to see whether the process is improving or just shifting work between teams.
What's in the full report
Riskified's full report covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Survey breakdown of how travel merchants currently manage chargebacks and where the biggest friction points appear.
- Operational observations on the scale of manual effort involved in dispute handling across merchant teams.
- Practical recommendations for making chargeback management more efficient and more revenue focused.
- Industry advisor input from Paladin Fraud that adds context to the merchant interview findings.
👉 Read Riskified's report on chargeback challenges in travel →
Travel chargeback management: where are merchants losing efficiency?
Explore further
11/07/2026 8:51 pm
Chargeback management is a governance problem, not just an operations problem. The report shows that travel merchants are still treating disputes as a processing burden when they should be treating them as a cross-functional control process. Payments, fraud, customer service, and evidence collection all affect the same outcome, so fragmented ownership creates avoidable leakage. Practitioners should align dispute handling to a defined governance model, not an ad hoc inbox.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How can organisations improve dispute recovery without adding more manual review?
A: Organisations should standardise case intake, automate evidence collection where possible, and use prioritisation rules so analysts focus on disputes with the best recovery potential. The aim is not to review everything manually, but to spend human effort where it changes the financial outcome.
👉 Read our full editorial: Chargeback management in travel is becoming a revenue recovery problem
