In effect they aren't blocking "countries", they are blocking people. In 2019 we are floating all over and corporate virtual WANs that make you appear to be somewhere totally else isn't uncommon. One should believe that actively travelling people would be important target customers for an airline or what? I have never heard about any other US company intentionally blocking international customers by IP. Yes, you have Netflix and such that are bound by region rights in contracts, and you have some services requiring a US social security number, and providers not shipping goods internationally. Thats different, and also they dont block your IP, they just state that they cannot serve you based on their terms. I really dont understand how it would be any higher cost of making the website available to everyone. If they dont serve other than US citizens it would be easy to just state that they cannot serve you based on their terms (like not having a US sosial security number etc.). They could do that without blocking US citizens abroad. With that said, I also dont understand what would be the cost driver of booking ie. a Europen citizen over a US citizen. Rules and regulations is the same given that the flight is US domestic, and they accept international travellers booked through 3rd party travel agencies. Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Paypal, ApplePay... is all global standards for payment. That leaves only the booking process itself - so what would be the big obstacle here? Wrong format for address and phone fields? I honostly dont believe in the cost/profit explanation. Realistically they are probably rather loosing a lot of customers and saving next to nothing. I believe that what they need to do is to have someone take a very good look at their cyber security strategy. I wonder if top management is aware what's going on at all? Probably not.
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