Protect fares, seat inventory, and loyalty accounts from travel bots
Airlines, hotels, and online travel agencies publish live prices and availability, and pay to answer each search. Centinel evaluates how each search, hold, and login request was made, so travelers and approved partners keep access and scrapers get a different response.
Request a site auditEvery search costs money, and scraped searches never book
A fare or availability search often calls a pricing engine or a distribution system that charges for the query. Scrapers repeat those searches for many routes and dates all day, so the cost of each real booking goes up. Blocking automation outright is not an option either: metasearch sites and approved agencies need the same data.
Read the researchWhat the traffic looks like
Fares and availability, scraped
Competitors, resellers, and unapproved aggregators rerun fare and room searches across routes and dates, raising the number of searches for each booking.
Seats and rooms held without payment
Scripts start bookings to hold inventory and then let the holds expire. OWASP lists flight seats as a target of OAT-021 Denial of Inventory.
Points and miles as a target
Loyalty balances can be spent like money, so loyalty logins attract credential stuffing, and taken-over accounts are drained through redemptions.
What runs against this traffic
Evidence on search and availability routes
In supported browser deployments, Centinel evaluates request and browser evidence on fare, availability, and room searches instead of relying on one address or header.
A scraping session can be rate-limited or challenged before its searches reach the pricing engine, without adding friction for travelers.
Read moreA separate policy for holds and bookings
Booking-start and hold routes can carry their own response, separate from the policy for searching.
Repeated scripted holds can be rate-limited or challenged. Hold times and fare rules stay in your reservation system.
Read moreA login policy for loyalty accounts
Where the integration supports it, loyalty and account logins can be observed, rate-limited, challenged, or blocked by how they were made.
Credential stuffing against point balances meets friction. Centinel does not decide whether a login or a redemption is fraudulent.
Read moreKeep metasearch and approved partners
Centinel can compare a declared crawler identity with the verification data its operator publishes, and known partners can keep an explicit policy.
Metasearch partners, agencies, and search crawlers keep their access. A scraper that copies a partner's name gets no trust from the name alone.
Read more
Want to see what reaches your site?
Start with a free scraping audit: tested tools, exposed pages, and fixes to consider, reviewed by hand and emailed to you. This checks scraping exposure, not every abuse pattern or all production traffic. Discuss broader workflow coverage in a demo.
Travel & airlines: common questions
What platform and security teams ask before they deploy.
What is fare scraping?
Fare scraping is the automated collection of prices and availability from an airline, hotel, or travel agency's search results. Competitors, resellers, and unapproved aggregators run it across many routes and dates, usually through rotating proxies.
What is the look-to-book ratio?
The look-to-book ratio is the number of searches a travel seller answers for each booking it makes. Scraping raises it, because automated searches almost never book. Where each search has a cost, a higher ratio means a higher cost per booking.
What is seat spinning in airline booking?
Seat spinning is holding seats with automation, by starting bookings and letting them expire, so other travelers cannot buy them. OWASP files it under OAT-021 Denial of Inventory. It can make a flight look sold out when it is not.
Can an airline block scrapers and keep metasearch partners?
Yes. Partners and search crawlers can keep an explicit policy, confirmed against their published verification data or the credentials your API already checks. Everything else on search routes is judged by how the request was made.
How do bots steal loyalty points?
Mostly through credential stuffing: scripts replay leaked username and password pairs against the loyalty login, then redeem or transfer the points in the accounts that open. The defense starts at the login, where the automation is visible.