Airlines are planning to reduce the exposure with the great diversity of the detection of fraud along with a proper system of risk management. Bookings done through Tor may simply represent the high profile of risk. Airlines also do not wish any kind of anonymous customers; they always want the customers offering much information and details about themselves as possible.
However, the fraud of Credit card is considered for the problem exclusively for the airlines. You will also think fraud risk will be quite low—after all, even the passengers generally have to appear in the person with the help of the photo ID to make proper use of these services—but since there are various number related to the fraud, “airlines will lose about $2.4 billion to the fraud happening from credit card yearly.” In specific, fraudsters may even buy the airline tickets with the help of the stolen credit cards and after that, they may even set up some of the fake travel agencies which could either be done online or even offline to resell them for the real travelers. There is also some time when the fraud happens within the agencies of real travel, with an insider with the pocketing of some of the real funds as well as the booking ticket with the help of the stolen card details. Much Frequent flyer accounts may also get compromised and also miles used for booking of the flights which are resold. There are some other that may also fly using the stolen cards being a part of the criminal activity (when the travelers are also caught when it happens, they may also claim to be the legitimate traveler that also has fallen victim to such kind of the fraud), with the tickets that were sold on the black markets that were accessible over Tor.
On the other hand, even the Airlines look to reduce the exposure with the great variety of fraud detection as well as systems of risk management. Bookings done to book the airline ticket through Tor may also represent some of the great risks. Airlines do not wish to have anonymous customers as they wish the customers who offer you much detailed information regarding them as it is possible. The IP address of the Customer may also be used as a crucial part of the system for fraud detection as it can simply help to identify the high-risk transactions (that is much more difficult for the airlines as compared to some of the other industries, as the legitimate clients are possibly to need for buying the tickets at the time of traveling). Airline policy might even need some more amount of the scrutiny in such specific cases, like requiring original credit card that should get presented at the time of the check-in (it at times also differ depending on country of the purchase, that were well accordance with the fraud risk) or also declining transaction as well as requiring customer purchase for the tickets in the person at the sales office in some of the countries.
Even Airlines even use the rate-limiting on the websites to prevent bulk access for automated. They wish to also block some of the repeated attempts for login to compromise some frequent accounts of the flyer and do not want people to try to simply scrape the fares from booking engine. These will also block anonymity networks which can also be used to assist in defeating such kind of measures.
It is suspected that the airlines do not see any real upside that allows the bookings to be done through Tor; legitimate or the reliable customers should need to identify themselves at any point of time, and some of the travelers will even refuse to buy if the mode of Tor gets blocked. But it is important to understand that there is a cost, it also makes things simple for those that were committing fraud. However, the decision to block access that is simple for them.
It doesn’t happen every time with all airlines, in some of the cases when ding booking for airline tickets some error says Access denied or something like which says you don’t have access to the server.
This kind of error comes from Akamai CDN that usually blocks various Tor exit nodes. The web site which uses Akamai for serving their content will even, as a side effect, block the access of Tor. It is not mandatory a decision about the fact that the airlines have taken the level of explicitly, but Akamai offer their customers with an option to blocking Tor exits, and hence they might even need to choose it, either it could be done explicitly or it could be done through default. The airline can even turn it off, but the great thing is that getting through to a person who may actually do it or even order it to be done. At the same time, the decision for blocking Tor at the time while using Akamai is certainly configurable by the customer. Hence in such kind of the effect, Airline also has made some decision (either it could be implicitly or even explicitly) for blocking the Tor traffic
To test it, you may also visit some of the airline websites in the Private Mode and also in the Normal Mode from your browser. This is certainly not unusual to check some of the differences in the rates for the same flights that are available between the two. Moreover, airline companies also are highly bestowed in tech which tries detecting when you are insensitive for the rates offered for flights (such as the regular trips that are back home for visiting the families) and it will also raise the rates accordingly.
Conclusion
Tor gets blocked by the airlines quite probably not because of the “security” concerns, but also because the airline websites are notorious to use a manner of the browser traffic as well as the browser history sniffing to alter some price for diverse customers that could simply maximize the price of the ticket.