Some fascinating figures on human visitors to online travel sites, versus the machines trawling and scraping sites, emerged at a recent conference.
It's little surprise that the likes of Ryanair spend so much time, effort and money pushing back the scrapers when in 2014 only 44% of traffic came from humans compared to 66% from robots.
It's not all bad news, almost a third of the non-human traffic is from good bots such as search giants Google and Baidu.
However, there's 22% of traffic which is said to come from bad robots - those taking content and/or pricing to do something with it.
The figures were reported during the Amadeus Digital Merchandising conference by the company's commercial director, ecommerce and mobile, APAC, Airline IT, Chiang-Sin Tang.
The three most common threats, he says, are:
- Content scraping
- Data aggregation, bots which capture a site's information for comparison purposes and then display it
- Those that pick up pricing and availability information and compare it against another airline and resell the information
Tang describes it as "unfriendly traffic that is causing unproductive transactions and violating your site policies without making any bookings."
Strong stuff but the point is that all this impacts sales, affects user experience and has related technology costs.
Online travel sites, it seems, are in the top five worst affected only beaten by sites dedicated to listings or classifieds.
Help is at hand in the form of technology to identify who is coming to the site, whether it's a valid browser or an impersonator and parameters that can be put in place to help identify and authorise different visitors.
NB: Reporter's travel and accommodation at the Airline Digital Merchandising conference was supported by Amadeus.
NB2: Cyborg image via Shutterstock.