Summer is the most profitable—and most volatile—season in the travel calendar. Alongside soaring demand come missed flights, overbooked hotels, delayed luggage, and a spike in customer disputes. Increasingly, those frustrations translate into chargebacks: payment reversals initiated by consumers, often after the trip is already completed.
For travel and e-commerce platforms alike, chargebacks are a growing business risk. While some are legitimate, others—driven by unclear refund policies or customer confusion—can erode margins and strain operations. The result is a hidden cost that peaks precisely when resources are most stretched.
A Summer Surge in Travel—and Frustration
This summer is shaping up to be one of the busiest in recent history. According to Deloitte’s 2025 Summer Travel Survey, over half of Americans plan to take leisure vacations, with the average traveler anticipating 3.1 trips—up from 2.3 last year. But while volume is up, travel budgets remain volatile and consumer expectations are shifting rapidly. Shorter trips, tighter budgets, and last-minute decisions are becoming the norm.
This surge isn’t limited to U.S. travelers. According to Mastercard’s global travel analysis, nine of the ten busiest days ever recorded for cruise and airline spending occurred in 2024. As more consumers return to travel—and spend more while doing so—the risk of disputes climbs in tandem, especially when delays or service breakdowns occur.
Disputes Are a Systemic, Not Situational, Problem
Chargebacks often occur weeks after a trip ends, making them harder to track and resolve. The industry’s traditional approach—manually responding to disputes on a case-by-case basis—is no longer sufficient. Teams are stretched thin, and fragmented systems across booking, payment, and fulfillment can make it difficult to validate what actually happened during a customer’s journey.
Many of these disputes aren’t rooted in malice, but in complexity. In a recent Accenture study, 66% of global travelers said they’re dissatisfied with current planning tools, and 74% said they’ve abandoned purchases due to overwhelming or confusing options.³ When service recovery fails, many customers turn to their credit card company for resolution—whether or not a refund is technically justified.
Proactive Strategies Are the New Baseline
To address this risk, travel companies need to move upstream. Proactive strategies to prevent chargebacks begin with the basics: ensuring your checkout flow is compliant, your terms and conditions are clearly communicated, and your support team is equipped to handle complaints effectively. From there, integrating with the right data sources—like booking records or check-in confirmations—makes it easier to build strong, defensible cases when disputes do occur. Chargebacks can’t be handled manually anymore; scalable solutions are needed to stay ahead.
This shift is already underway. Accenture found that 73% of travel executives are prioritizing generative AI adoption for improved operational efficiency and customer insight. Paired with automation, AI can dramatically improve dispute win rates while reducing the manual burden on internal teams.
Build for Resilience, Not Just Refunds
Research shows a marked increase in road trips and short stays, meaning more fragmented itineraries and less standardized service delivery. With more customers stitching together their own travel experiences, companies must be ready to back each interaction with verifiable data—or risk revenue losses due to incomplete documentation.
Technology alone isn’t the solution. What’s needed is a structural rethink of how disputes are handled, with cross-functional collaboration between finance, ops, customer service, and product teams. With travelers using more than 10 different sources to plan trips—and relying increasingly on flexible, self-directed experiences—the ability to maintain consistency across touchpoints is key.
Chargebacks will never fully disappear. But with the right data, tools, and workflows, they can be controlled. As volumes rise, travel companies can’t rely on manual processes alone—disputes now require scalable, tech-enabled systems to be resolved effectively. Proactive infrastructure that ties transactions to fulfillment data isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s now the baseline.
Roenen Ben-Ami is an internationally recognized payments and chargeback industry expert, serving as Co-Founder and Chief Risk Officer at Justt.ai.
He is the architect behind Justt’s AI-powered product vision and platform innovation, driving the company’s mission to automate and optimize chargeback management for merchants worldwide.
By Ronen Ben-Ami, Co-founder and Chief Risk Officer at Justt
