This is not only for flight bookings, but also for indie games/apps. I also have issues with merchants that change their name slightly but because the name is changed I have to re-approve.
I understand the security part but not the usability part. I have to again go through the payment flow of the merchant.
Why not let a real-time approval (push notification) be possible that the creditcard step has to wait on your approval. With a timeout of 10s (nice architectural challenge).
Or that you can set a limit for a first time transaction at an unknown merchant for a month? So that they can only do this once during a month?
I understand that if I get 10 faulty approvals a day this can get costly but your systems can be triggered by these kind of patterns, right?
Hope you find a better way than the current (duplicate) way.