Infographic by Netacea - How Scraping and Look-To-Book Ratios Threaten the Travel Industry

1. How Scraping and Look-To-Book Ratios Threaten the Travel Industry Recent research has found that the travel industry is the third most likely business sector to be scraped. Content or price scrapers are automated bots that steal content from websites and mobile apps for use without permission, usually for malicious purposes. This is often your competitors, scraping your pricing information to leverage competitive prices of their own. Serving requests to these bots uses up server resources, which can slow down or even crash a website, as well as pushing up infrastructure costs significantly for no commercial benefit. Some scraper bots are good – like Google search agents – however over 60% are bad bots, looking to steal competitive information. Did you know? Scrapers can push flight prices up by 10 – 15% 30% of the average travel site’s traffic comes from bots The travel industry has seen scraping more than double over the last few years, up to 33% from 15% in 2013 Scraper bot requests peaked by 554% on travel sites in April 2020 The excess web requests made by scrapers drive up the look-to-book ratio, and significantly increase travel websites costs. This not only includes financial costs associated with unnecessary and increased costs to infrastructure – but also costs associated with reputational damage, since loss of control on the sales channel can have a negative impact on the relationship with the customer. Many airlines often see their look-to-book ratios climbing to 20 times their normal rate due to malicious bot activity. Travel websites need the ability to detect and manage bots that scrape content and prices to avoid falling victim to decreased revenue, loss of loyal customers, and increased marketing and advertising costs.