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