How Logitravel serves international travelers while keeping fraud low
Streamlined and data-driven decisions
Rules-based solution couldn't scale
OVERVIEW
A front-row seat in ticket sales
Logitravel is an online travel agency (OTA), selling various travel-related tickets and product bundles, including cruises, flights, hotels, cars, trains, ferries, and shows. The business has a robust foundation in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Mexico, and the popularity of their dynamic packaging options has meant that iteration is key as they grow into Argentina, Russia, and other countries.
Logitravel was started by technically-minded individuals and thus much more focused on the systems than the product. However, as they sought to expand into new markets, they needed a tool to help them understand the trustworthy and legitimate users as well as efficiently identify the scammers, particularly with the recent launch of their Android and iOS applications. Currently, 95% of customers come via website.
CHALLENGE
Rules couldn't keep up
With a small and agile team, Logitravel was more focused on spending their time growing the business rather than building a fraud solution. However, as a business that operates over borders and across continents, Logitravel was vulnerable to fraud from several different directions. Whether organized crime fraud rings, people capitalizing on a lack of business rules in a certain geography, friendly fraud in contested ticket sales, or phishing and account takeover, bad users were persistent and clever. In addition to the price of chargebacks, the pain felt by the Logitravel team and their legitimate customers was damaging to the brand and their resources.
After a particularly destructive barrage of fraud, the Logitravel team knew that their third party rules-based fraud solution wasn’t able to keep up with their growing business and evolving markets. Gaspar Salva, a four-year veteran of Logitravel, was tasked with managing the fraud issue. Thanks to a preliminary integration with Sift, he was able to start leveraging the tool’s fraud capabilities.
SOLUTION
Workflows that fuel automation
Once Gaspar took the helm on fraud management, he and his team trained the algorithm with historical data and sent labels to teach the machine what good and bad customer behavior looked like. Since then, the system has been running quietly and efficiently in the background. Using Sift Scores to automate allows for a smooth fraud management process. Suspicious orders are automatically held for review, with the Sift Console providing a data-rich pop-up of investigation tools for the team. The APIs allow Logitravel to easily take advantage of the machine learning findings, thus making every reviewed transaction more effective.
RESULTS
Scoring high with fraud managers
For Logitravel, the best part about using Sift is its intuitive interface and actionable insights. It’s easy for Gaspar and his team to find and investigate transactions and activity. The network visualizations offer a powerful lens into how suspicious users are connected, allowing Logitravel to preemptively flag potentially linked users, saving time when those accounts surface. Using the Lists function enables Gaspar to customize a workflow to track various attributes in real-time and ultimately gives him the ability to explore fraudulent trends.
