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A small counterpoint to this -- in the airline industry, it's relatively commonplace for seat reservations to be made for a user _before_ payment has occurred.
by hchasestevens 10y ago
A small counterpoint to this -- in the airline industry, it's relatively commonplace for seat reservations to be made for a user _before_ payment has occurred. In this case, if you're mirroring normal browser activity, you can (temporarily) reduce availability on a flight, potentially even bumping up the price for other, legitimate users, and almost certainly causing the airline to incur costs beyond normal bandwidth and server costs. I'm sure there are many other domains for which this is also the case, however rare.
- gnud 10y agoIf they don't do the seat reservation behind a POST, or at least blacklist the reservation page in robots.txt, I have no sympathy.
- Steeeve 10y agoI've had this happen regularly enough that I developed the habit of finding a fare in the morning and then returning at 11pm ready to buy.
- Chris2048 10y agoCinemas and some online shops do the same. I've always wondered if it's possible to block any tickets sales for entire flights/screenings/products this way. And if airline tickets are based on supply v demand, it might even be possible to drive down ticket prices by suddenly dropping a load of blocks near to the flight date.
- angry_octet 10y agoIf you have ever tried to buy hot tickets online and not been able to get any, this is due to bots. Bots are the scalpers friend. This can easily be prevented by requiring ID matching the ticket on entry, but the ticket sellers often don't seem to care.