Case Study: Leading Hotel Booking Site achieves full site availability, 20% infrastructure savings and $250,000/year in manual bot-blocking cost savings with Distil Networks

Leading Online Hotel Booking website Deploys a Distil Appliance to Stop Application Denial of Service Issues

A leading online hotel booking website was being targeted by increasingly sophisticated web scrapers and bots that stole pricing data, flooded wholesaler APIs, skewed look-to-book ratios and caused application-level slowdowns and outages. Manual IP-based rate limiting proved ineffective, forcing the company to assign 2.5 full‑time staff to mitigation efforts — an estimated $250,000 annually — while competitors used scraped data to undercut their prices.

The company deployed a Distil Appliance in front of its load balancer (integrated with Akamai, HAProxy and Cisco IPS) to inspect and block malicious bot traffic with only about 3–7 ms latency. The solution restored consistent site availability, stopped competitive data mining, reduced infrastructure and wholesaler API bandwidth costs by roughly 20%, and allowed the 2.5 FTEs to be redeployed, saving about $250,000 per year.