The airline industry is under constant attack from malicious bots. Bad actors use automation to scrape fares, hoard inventory, commit fraud, and compromise customer accounts. While every airline faces its own unique challenges, the business impacts are remarkably consistent—lost revenue, inflated infrastructure costs, degraded customer experience, and weakened competitive positioning.
Why Airlines Need to Protect Their Look-to-Book Ratio
A look-to-book ratio measures how many users search for flights (“looks”) versus how many actually purchase tickets (“books”). It’s a key metric for forecasting demand, managing pricing, and optimizing inventory.
When scraping bots flood an airline’s website with automated flight searches—without any intention to purchase—they distort this ratio. Airlines are left with:
- Inflated demand signals
- Faulty pricing triggers
- Over-provisioned infrastructure
- Misaligned marketing and route strategies
Increased bot traffic artificially inflates the look-to-book ratio, making airlines think there is demand where there isn’t. This misleads revenue management systems, raises prices unintentionally, and degrades the experience for real users.
Bots Are Draining Airline Revenue in the Background
Many airlines are unaware of the full scope of bot activity on their websites. Scraping and seat manipulation aren’t easily classified as cybersecurity issues, so they often go unmonitored.
Bots designed to mimic human browsing behavior—using headless browsers, anonymized proxies, and randomized user agents—can bypass basic defenses. They automate flight search queries, parse HTML responses to extract fare data, and scale these actions across thousands of sessions.
The impact?
- Inflated infrastructure costs from synthetic traffic
- Competitors gaining access to live pricing data
- Erosion of direct sales and upsells
When customers book through third-party aggregators powered by scraped data, the airline loses control over pricing, presentation, and upsell opportunities. This is why bot scraping is not just a technical issue—it’s a strategic business risk.
Three Major Bot Challenges Airlines Face
1. Unauthorized Scraping
Third-party aggregators and competitive entities use bots to extract real-time fare data, seat availability, and discounts.
This allows them to:
- Undercut pricing
- Redirect bookings
- Resell marked-up fares once inventory disappears from airline sites
It also cuts airlines off from their primary upsell funnel—baggage, seat selection, meals, and other ancillaries—resulting in significant revenue leakage.
2. Seat Spinning
Bots simulate the “add to cart” process without completing the purchase. The seat is held temporarily, blocking real customers from booking.
This creates false scarcity, misleads pricing algorithms, and drives frustrated users toward third-party sites, where attackers or partners may resell the inventory at a markup.
Seat spinning is a key contributor to distorted look-to-book ratios and unpredictable revenue performance.
3. Loyalty Account Takeover
Criminal bots use credential stuffing to take over frequent flyer accounts. Once inside, they steal miles, transfer rewards, and commit fraud.
Airline loyalty programs are especially attractive to attackers due to their high dollar value and limited monitoring. Points and rewards can be sold on dark web forums or used for unauthorized travel.
Why Attackers Target Airlines: High ROI, Low Effort
According to the 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report, the travel industry is the #1 most targeted sector by bad bots—and with good reason:
- High-value inventory: Airline tickets are expensive, time-sensitive, and dynamically priced.
- Fast monetization: Inventory hoarded through bots can be resold at a markup or leveraged by affiliate schemes.
- Lucrative data: Fare data powers pricing tools and competitive benchmarks.
- Soft targets: Many airlines lack advanced bot protection, making them easy prey.
- Frequent flyer fraud: Loyalty points have real-world resale value with minimal fraud detection in place.
- User redirection: Once bots manipulate search and booking behavior, users may develop a preference for third-party sites, permanently diverting revenue from the airline.
And because bots are cheap to deploy—thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud infrastructure, proxy services, and off-the-shelf tools—Bots-as-a-Service (BaaS) – the ROI for attackers is consistently high.
The Business Impact: Why Bot Mitigation Must Be a Priority
Bot attacks are often deprioritized because they don’t trigger traditional security alerts. But their impact is real—and measurable.
- Revenue loss from distorted booking patterns
- Competitive disadvantage as rivals scrape and undercut prices
- Operational inefficiencies due to false demand signals
- Higher IT costs from handling bot-driven traffic
- Customer trust issues due to loyalty fraud
- Loss of upsell revenue from bookings routed away from airline-controlled flows
More importantly, each of these attacks creates direct financial opportunity for attackers—whether through resale, fraud, or affiliate kickbacks.
Ignoring the problem allows competitors, aggregators, and fraudsters to quietly erode your margins and customer base.
Conclusion: Bots Are a Business Risk Airlines Can’t Ignore
Bad bots are no longer just a nuisance—they’re a sophisticated, well-incentivized ecosystem that siphons revenue, data, and strategic value from the airline industry.
To protect pricing integrity, customer loyalty, and long-term revenue performance, it’s worth considering an advanced bot mitigation solution, that goes beyond IP blocking or rate-limiting to understand behavior, fingerprint devices, and adapt to evasion tactics in real time.
Because if you don’t control your traffic, someone else will.
To learn how Imperva helps mitigate bots visit Imperva Advanced Bot Protection
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