Case Study: Leading Online Hotel Booking Site stops app denial-of-service and blocks competitor price scraping with Imperva Bot Management

Leading Online Hotel Booking Site Stops App Denial of Service Issues

A leading online hotel booking site was losing pricing data to increasingly sophisticated web scrapers that mimicked human browsers. The bots consumed wholesaler query allocations, caused application‑level denial of service, and rendered simple IP‑based rate limiting ineffective—forcing the company to dedicate 2.5 full‑time staff (≈$250k/year) to mitigation.

The company deployed Imperva Bot Management in front of its Akamai CDN, load balancer and origin (integrated with HAProxy and Cisco IPS), adding just 3–7 ms of latency. The solution immediately stopped competitor price scraping, freed the 2.5 FTEs for strategic work, and delivered roughly 20% savings in infrastructure and wholesaler API bandwidth, steady site availability, a large drop in bot traffic, and high detection accuracy (283,000 CAPTCHAs served with only 166 human responses).