Concept:
The travel industry has always had it fair share of promoters and naysayers whenever a new concept in travel or hospitality management has come up; the news of air tickets being available for purchase was greeted with much fanfare a decade ago while the consequences of it are being fast realized after many big players have burnt their fingers and reputation, in trying to uphold their market image after the sudden impact of credit card fraud on the LCC has been brought to light.

Consequences:
A lot of fraud and malpractices has been marauding the framework of professionalism in the management of LCCs and that of smaller travel agencies that the booking was outsourced to as affiliate partners; the latest credit card fraud in the travel industry has resulted in costing the airline industry about $1.5 billion annually!

Impact:
This costly impact of credit card fraud on the LCC has been primarily due to the bigger airline and GDS players, also the payment systems, not working in tandem to bring about professional and secure management practice by cooperating in the exchanging 0f information about day-to-day operations, relating it to fraud.

Terms like 'Bust-out scam' are not uncommon parlance anymore when the greater impact of the credit card fraud on the LCC and the larger picture of the travel industry is considered: this relates to a situation wherein agencies sell tickets and collect payments before abruptly closing up shop.

A top-leading executive of British Airways has gone on record to say that his carrier got slammed by a travel agency writing about $4.5 million worth of tickets in 18 hours! While there are sensitive systems that can detect this kind of 'bust-out scams' or bogus ticketing activity by comparing what is the average rate and number of tickets with judging it alongside of what is actually taking place, it will be a long and arduous while before it can function without being tampered with or show definite foolproof results.
At times, the smaller transactions via simple credit card frauds can also lead to cases of identity theft with thousands of credit card numbers being hacked into company-wise, apart from that of randomly selected vulnerable individuals, and these are the ones that are harder to detect. Many of these are being used to purchase airline tickets across the width of the skies, opened out largely due to the wide range of options in LCCs today that are competitively pricing tickets to woo passengers but the result is a strong impact of credit card frauds instead of the initial, basic idea of offering convenience of non-cash shopping for flights for customer ease.