Because their site is valuable data and if you automate access to it, you can re-sell their services without having to use their site with all its tracking/ads/metrics etc.

They want people to hit their site and get cross-sold, not order through some aggregator.

Because they can't distinguish that from a robot ran by a malicious hacker trying to access other people's accounts using stolen credentials.

Particularly for Airbnb, who deals with travelers (visits from international locations; shared IP ranges like airport wifi and cgNAT, etc).

Your last sentence is interesting. I never considered that AirBnB needs to battle more of this hard-to-distinguish traffic. In another thread on this page, someone else mentioned that -- when logged in with your Google account -- various Google sites/assets never show CAPTCHAS, because it has so much information about your account that they can reliably predict if you are human or robot. I'm surprised they don't offer this as a feature to 3rd party commercial websites. "Add Google login and we can remove 99% of your CAPTCHAS (but you have to be X cents per login)."

I assume they’re trying to fight against bots buying up “hot” Airbnbs that sell out quickly. It’s a weird captcha for sure, but understandable why they wouldn’t want bots accessing the site.

They probably want to reduce scraping and definitely unauthorized account access. In addition, Airbnb has thousands of A/B tests running at all times. Scrapers may try to decode pricing algorithms, price fluctuations, etc. The traffic and interest to an offering also has an impact on its search ranking.

There are also anon account crews that will make many fake accounts using sourced credentials from their social group or bought on darknets. Generally, those only result in things like pop-up events from which entry fees are collected. I assume some could use the same method to commit robbery. Another method is to use a botnet of fake accounts and use the bots to build up fake reputation, eg offer a fake listing, book the fake listing, leave good reviews, etc.

There are also some weird currency arbitrage opportunities that might be found if someone was really inclined. From what I saw of that aspect, you'd have to be really looking for pennies in the couch seams.

Source: Did major customer support work for Airbnb pre-ipo

Wait, what does a robot do once it rents a house?

It sets up a workshop inside to build more robots.

Perhaps it takes 'pre-orderes'.

You want a place to stay, inform the bot "give me anything good in this area when available", pay the bot extra money, and then the bot goes out and hits the good rooms in the area the moment they become available.

Depends if its a member of the Church of Appliantology, let alone those miniature rubberized homo replicas.

Dream of electric sheep?

Sublet it to a human.

It's a market, so it's potentially susceptible to HFT and arbitrage bots like anything else.

Sublet it? I mean it's possible that someone really dedicated writes a bot to reserve a room for themselves, but more likely it'd be done by someone who will list it somewhere else for an even higher fee.

Airbnb could just raise their prices by 10% if they detect a bot; that would be a way to take a cut of someone doing that. It would be really subtle too, so they wouldn't know that they'd been detected.

This sound like a great idea for Futurama (TV show) episode with Bender (the robot).

Does this actually happen??

It is a way to bankrupt competing Airbnb properties. Book them all up with hundreds of fake accounts with stolen credit cards.

Nobody ends up staying in them, but it can bankrupt the Airbnb host pretty quickly if they have many properties on highly leveraged mortgages.

And why would they care if it did, if the robots are "buying" the properties, implying payment?

That makes the impression that Airbnb is always out of service, and the other platform selling Airbnb rent is more available. It creates a competitor and worsen the service of Airbnb at the same time.

implying payment, until the last second when the robot's operators decide they can only have one unit to live in. Or any other such scams

If you have bots buying your merchandise as fast as possible you don't have a bot problem, you have a pricing problem.

There can be good reasons to keep prices "below market value".

There’s nothing immoral about taking advantage of someone else’s marketing budget. If they feel like pricing below market that’s great. If you can resell their stuff for more great. If they don’t like it they can try to stop you. You can’t fix the real price of things far from market demand without the full force of the state behind you and that usually doesn’t work either.

here we go

No can do.

You would be in breach of the AirBNB terms of service: "Do not use bots, crawlers, scrapers or other automated means to access or collect data or other content from or otherwise interact with the Airbnb Platform. "

A browser is a bot that interacts with the platform.

It's not physically possible to use any website except by directing a tool to do it for you.

That’s pedantic and not even that right. The browser is an agent, not a bot. A bot takes semi-autonomous actions after being instructed by a human, for an undetermined amount of time; A browser just does something it’s told for a few seconds (or as long as the website’s open)

By your definition would a screen reader turn the browser into a bot? If not, if a I program my own “bot” isn’t it just working as my own agent?

Maybe depends on whether you are "driving" the agent personally?

If it’s my bot, it’s literally doing what I told it to do (how I bought a PS5 in my sleep, actually).

I'll just use Selenium to direct the browser then.

I suspect this how a large part of web UI spam occurs. Selenium combined with the latest browsers provide almost perfect control over a real web browser. It makes me wonder if this is how Google tests its "I am not a bot" test. Basically, generate billions of actions -- surfing a web UI -- with slightly different mouse movements (Selenium). Then, use machine learning to generate a network to differentiate between robots and humans. (The humans training data would come from a highly quality population... like all Googlers using internal Google assets/websites.)

Using a headless browser would muddy the waters then.

Yes, it seems everybody has forgotten the meaning of User Agent.

Probably the nuance that is not spelled out (and certainly should be) is that AirBNB expects only interactive user agents, and not automated/batch user agents.

All those lines of code in a browser are automation.

Not to mention screen readers.

Do you always go for the technicality and the gotcha? Isn't that best applied elsewhere rather than here? Because sure, lines of code in a browser are technically automation, but they don't automate your actions so your whole point is moot. And you know this, I'm sure, so you're wasting your (and everybody else's) time.

They do exactly in fact automate your actions.

You decided you wanted to kick off a rather large process by clicking a link, and the browser performed countless individual and dynamic actions as a result.

Just to take one macroscopic crude simple example since we apparently don't have much imagination to work with here, did you evaluate every one of the individual http fetches in that page to decide if you wanted to fetch or render tgem, or did your ublock origin plugin do that for you?

You may not like the inconvenience implied by the fact that a statement like "no automation" is invalid and therefor unusable, but that doesn't change the fact. It's inconvenient not incorrect.

> since we apparently don't have much imagination to work with here

Oh, I'm much more likely to engage in a great conversation after an ad hominem. Sigh.

I am well aware of how browsers work and what they automate for you. But you called them bots. You lumped them with several other types of software, which doesn't make sense. I never said you were incorrect — I said you were going for the technically correct and the gotcha.

Do browsers include automation? Yes. Do things get automated when you use them? Yes. Is software development automation at heart? Yes. The fact that you are correct about these things doesn't make the deception any less obvious: you are using these technicalities to misrepresent what a browser is — which doesn't make sense in the context of the thread -, and that's all I pointed out.

Pedantic was not an insult, but unimaginative was, got it.

Eh, arguably you can do it without bots by opening a telnet (or openssl s_client) connection and typing the commands yourself. Though ironically some websites will block your attempts because it doesn't look enough like a browser.

You also can't really pass Captcha's this way, as far as I know.

Hey... Real Question: How about JAWS (screen reader) software [1] users that are blind / visually disabled? Do those assistant tools count? Can someone do something like control JAWS programatically and navigate website UIs using a robot? It seems possible. I am sure JAWS has a crazy web browser footprint. (I have seen videos at my office where a junior trader was blind and using JAWS on Bloomberg and a trading app. The sound was so fast that it sounded like jibberish... but she could move around super fast.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAWS_(screen_reader)

If I recall correctly, GitLab has a concept of "keys" (akin to SSH keys) that you can grant for your account. On of the categories is API -- which is specifically for this use case. If I ran my own commercial website, I would probably also disallow robot logins for the UI. It seems like too much trouble with no commecial upside. However, I could imagine allowing robot accounts to access tiny sliver of the API.