CAMBRIDGE, MA—The robots will rise up! It’s a storyline out of any number of Sci-Fi movies, and yet, in an age where it seems everything is digital, mobile and wireless—it has never been more true that technology is a dominant force.
Most technological advances are aimed at making life easier and systems more intelligent, but innovation can also bring its own set of challenges for consumers and businesses alike.
If you’ve ever tried to buy tickets to see your favorite artist in concert or book travel for a popular cruise destination only to discover it has sold out shortly after going on sale, you may have encountered “artificial scarcity” caused by a “BOT,” according to Renny Shen, senior product marketing manager, Akamai Technologies, based here. For businesses such as cruise lines or music venues, this can be a real problem resulting in dissatisfied customers and, in some cases, damaged credibility.
“BOTs are all or none. At the end of the day, it is a piece of software that somebody wrote to automate a task that the person wants to do. When we talk about BOTs and our BOT Manager, we talk about the BOT operator—the person or business behind the software. It all depends on who you are and who the operator is,” Shen said. “We can detect them based on a variety of methods. We can see traffic coming in an automated instance retrieving content from a website. Your website has something that is valuable and most likely that is what the BOT is trying to do.”
How do BOTs work and what is their impact? For starters, a BOT’s activity and motives can vary. It can be friend or foe depending on the user’s intent or purpose.
“Approved hotel partners such as Travelocity or Expedia may mirror the same booking information a hotel is showing on its website, and then there are the upstarts such as competitive intelligence services or direct competitors. You, as a vendor, want to decide how to price a room and want to know how the competition is doing, so you have software to help you do that,” Shen said.
In the case of the cruise line—one of Akamai’s customers—real damage can occur when BOTs are working against your business.
“The ships are on schedules and they had a problem on some boats where all of a sudden, all the rooms seemed booked. Some third-party operator came in trying to create artificial scarcity by booking the rooms and when they didn’t sell them, they were releasing the rooms close to the sail date,” he said. “You have upset customers going to competitors and now you have to scramble to fill the rooms. It impacts the bottom line because you may have to offer discounts and do more marketing programs to promote the last-minute deals.”
There is a whole ecosystem out there comprised of BOTs. The operators are scooping it all up and selling it on third-party websites, which defeats the goal of businesses’ trying to gain new customers or the additional pull, according to Shen. The spread of BOTs and their activity is something hotel brands should watch carefully.
“From an IT perspective, the hotel’s website is its brand and its asset to which they reach out to the outside world. It’s their job to understand who is coming to the website and exercise greater control over it. BOT traffic can make up 30% to 70% of the hotel’s web traffic,” he said. “Customers visiting the site make up 30% to 50% of web traffic. The difference is a big deal. You’ve built the website to reach customers. Even though a third-party operator may sell a room to a customer, it’s not a relationship.”
The problem is not new. Hotel companies have all had problems with BOTs for a long time. What is at issue here is how to best deal with them efficiently so their actions don’t harm your business.
“Some companies see it as a security problem for IT teams, falling to a security team to do something about it. They might block it, if they don’t know who it is. There are solutions out there that block it for you, but blocking isn’t the right solution. Instead, we recommend to manage not mitigate it,” he said. “We talk about BOTs with our customers and the focus should be on the BOT operators as they have a financial incentive to get the data that they wrote the BOT to get. With blocking, operators will try to figure out how to update their software and then it becomes a cat-and-mouse game to make it look like a human. Blocking is not a magic-wand solution.”
Akamai’s BOT Manager is a product that empowers business owners with the ability to slow down BOT activity and provide alternate information, among other tasks, according to Shen.
“For hoteliers worried about competitors, they can serve back a request to the BOT with all the prices slightly different. What we do for customers and what solutions they have available depends on how they’re using their website backend infrastructure and what do the BOTs look like when they come in before figuring out the right strategy for them,” he said. “The BOT Manager is a foundation. We can tell you when there is a BOT coming in, doing things such as scraping content. We can’t tell you why they’re doing it. It’s a tool to identify and we can easily analyze the traffic at request level from different BOTs to figure out who they are such as a competitor and then categorize it into various and take different actions on them. We have to build in a flexible platform that enables companies to do what is best for them.”
—Corris Little