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14/07/2026 4:25 pm
TL;DR: A global survey of 4,060 consumers found that 81% now use digital platforms for travel planning, 26% already rely on AI tools, and 53% say identity verification steps sometimes or often cause booking abandonment, according to Riskified. The trust gap between discovery and purchase now shapes fraud controls, checkout design, and identity verification choices.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Riskified: New 2026 Summer Travel Survey findings on AI-driven travel planning and checkout trust
By the numbers:
- 81% of consumers use digital platforms for travel planning, with 26% already relying on AI like ChatGPT or Gemini.
- 53% of consumers say identity verification steps sometimes or often lead them to abandon a booking.
- 47% cite payment security and 39% cite fake or invalid tickets as top concerns when buying tickets online.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should retailers reduce fraud without making checkout too slow?
A: Use progressive verification.
Q: Why do identity verification steps cause customers to abandon bookings?
A: Customers abandon when verification is poorly timed, repetitive, or unexplained.
Q: How can security teams decide where AI is allowed to act in a customer journey?
A: Define AI as advisory unless the transaction has been explicitly governed for automation.
Practitioner guidance
- Rebalance verification timing Move identity checks later in the booking path when risk is low, and reserve stronger verification for high-value or anomalous transactions.
- Separate AI-assisted planning from transaction authority Allow AI tools to help customers search, compare, and plan, but require explicit human confirmation before any payment, passport, or booking commitment is finalised.
- Instrument abandonment around verification steps Track where customers drop out after payment security prompts, identity verification, or ticket-authentication checks, then compare abandonment by channel, device, and transaction risk score.
What's in the full report
Riskified's full article covers the survey detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Country-by-country survey breakdown across the United States, United Kingdom, China, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia.
- Consumer behaviour splits between travel planning, booking friction, and trust in AI-assisted trip purchase flows.
- The exact wording of the questions behind payment security, fake ticket concerns, and booking abandonment.
- Riskified's interpretation of how merchants should balance fraud prevention with checkout completion.
👉 Read Riskified's survey findings on AI, trust, and travel checkout friction →
AI travel planning and checkout trust: where merchants lose conversions?
Explore further
14/07/2026 4:32 pm
Checkout trust is now an identity problem, not just a UX problem. The survey shows that verification friction can directly suppress completion, which means identity controls are shaping revenue outcomes as well as fraud outcomes. In practice, IAM-adjacent decisions in consumer commerce now sit inside conversion engineering, not beside it. Teams need to treat step-up logic as a controlled business policy, not a static security default.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should organisations measure if they want to know fraud controls are working?
A: Organisations should measure whether controls are increasing attacker cost, reducing campaign success rates, and forcing repeated abuse to become uneconomic. A control can reduce one attempt and still fail strategically if attackers can immediately retry at low cost. The right metric is not only detection, but deterrence.
👉 Read our full editorial: AI travel planning is outrunning trust at checkout
