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By the time a traveller clicks “book now”, half a dozen things can already have gone wrong behind the scenes. The payment fails. The card is flagged. A suspicious routing throws up a warning. Or worse someone who never planned to fly anywhere walks off with the fare.

That mix of high velocity and high risk has made online travel an irresistible playground for fraudsters and an ongoing migraine for airlines, agents and anyone else selling tickets. This week, two heavyweights in the sector announced they’ve had enough.

Etraveli Group the global flight-booking giant known mostly for powering other brands’ booking engines is rolling out a new partnership between PRECISION, its in-house fraud arm, and Yuno, a fast-expanding payments orchestration platform with a footprint stretching across 200 markets.

It’s being billed, somewhat modestly, as a way to “expand access to travel-specialised fraud prevention”. In plainer terms: travel merchants are sick of losing money, and the industry needs a grown-up solution.

A problem the industry should have solved earlier

PRECISION is not a new toy. Etraveli has been fighting fraud in one form or another for more than two decades. Over that time, fraud has evolved from amateur-hour chargeback schemes to full-blown industrial operations driven by stolen identities, bot attacks and endlessly inventive digital contortions.

The company describes PRECISION as “purpose-built for the travel industry”, though the phrase undersells the scale of the problem. Travel booking data is unusually messy transactions come from everywhere, at all hours, in dozens of currencies, with complex legs and inconsistent customer histories. Generic fraud tools have always struggled to make sense of it.

PRECISION’s system, trained on millions of travel-specific patterns, uses machine learning and adaptive algorithms to sift the legitimate late-night booking from the suspicious one. It processes billions in annual transactions and, crucially, learns from its mistakes.

A blunt assessment of the cost

Peny Rizou, Etraveli Group’s Chief Fintech Officer, is unusually direct about the financial damage the industry absorbs.

“For every dollar lost, two more go unrealised through blocked sales and missed opportunities.”

It’s the sort of figure that makes CFOs tense up. Fraud isn’t just about plugging leaks; it’s lost revenue from genuine customers who get wrongly flagged and abandoned at checkout.

Rizou says the travel sector needed a solution that understood its quirks.

“PRECISION was born out of a clear need for a purpose-built solution that could address travel fraud in all its complexity.”

Her argument is simple: if the system is too defensive, merchants scare off customers. If it’s too relaxed, they bleed cash. The sweet spot is rarely easy to land.

Enter Yuno – young, global and growing fast

Yuno, founded in 2021, is one of those fintech firms that seems to have expanded while everyone else was still reading the press release. Already working with McDonald’s, Avianca, Rappi, Viva Aerobus and Indrive, the company has become an infrastructure layer for businesses wanting to accept payments almost anywhere.

Through a single API, merchants can tap into more than 1,000 payment methods, dozens of anti-fraud suppliers, and an extensive compliance and settlement system across 180 currencies.

For the travel sector — which routinely deals with cross-border payments, foreign cards and tight booking windows — that breadth is valuable.

Yuno’s Chief Revenue Officer, Justo Benetti, is keen to frame the partnership in broad terms.

“At Yuno, our mission is to make financial infrastructure effortless… unlocking new revenues and making companies much more efficient.”

Of course, nothing in global payments is ever truly effortless. But plugging PRECISION into Yuno’s orchestration layer means merchants can now switch on travel-specialised fraud controls without building their own labyrinth of integrations.

Sharper tools for merchants who can’t afford mistakes

For online travel agents, airlines and consolidators, the appeal is straightforward: real-time risk scoring at checkout, better accuracy, fewer false positives and fewer fraudulent approvals sliding through the cracks.

It also means that protection can be calibrated for each market. A last-minute domestic fare behaves differently to a multi-leg international itinerary, and the system can adjust accordingly.

The upside, in theory, is a booking flow that moves quickly but not carelessly an increasingly difficult balance.

Travel fraud isn’t slowing down.

The travel sector remains one of the most attractive categories for fraudsters. High-value bookings, cross-border movement, and the speed of online ticketing provide the perfect cover. And while airlines have improved internal risk controls, the weakest links remain the broader payment ecosystem and patchy fraud tools that treat travel like any other retail purchase.

PRECISION and Yuno insist this is where their combined expertise makes a difference: not a generic fraud filter, but one that understands why a rushed one-way ticket to Frankfurt at 2 am from a borrowed IP address might raise eyebrows while a legitimate late-booking business traveller shouldn’t be punished for tight timing.

A cautious step forward for a vulnerable industry

The partnership will not solve the industry’s fraud problem overnight. Nothing will. But it does give travel merchants something they haven’t had in years: a specialised tool designed to keep pace with an increasingly sophisticated threat.

From booking a flight to checking into a hotel, the companies say the goal is straightforward: safer transactions, fewer blocked customers and a payment system that finally behaves like it belongs in 2025.

That, at least, is a start.