I don't see why if I got my credentials right, I have to prove I am not a robot. What if I wanted a robot to access my account on my behalf?
They want people to hit their site and get cross-sold, not order through some aggregator.
Particularly for Airbnb, who deals with travelers (visits from international locations; shared IP ranges like airport wifi and cgNAT, etc).
Nobody ends up staying in them, but it can bankrupt the Airbnb host pretty quickly if they have many properties on highly leveraged mortgages.
It's a market, so it's potentially susceptible to HFT and arbitrage bots like anything else.
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.
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
You would be in breach of the AirBNB terms of service: "Do not use bots, crawlers, scrapers or other automated means to access or collect data or other content from or otherwise interact with the Airbnb Platform. "
It's not physically possible to use any website except by directing a tool to do it for you.
You decided you wanted to kick off a rather large process by clicking a link, and the browser performed countless individual and dynamic actions as a result.
Just to take one macroscopic crude simple example since we apparently don't have much imagination to work with here, did you evaluate every one of the individual http fetches in that page to decide if you wanted to fetch or render tgem, or did your ublock origin plugin do that for you?
You may not like the inconvenience implied by the fact that a statement like "no automation" is invalid and therefor unusable, but that doesn't change the fact. It's inconvenient not incorrect.
Oh, I'm much more likely to engage in a great conversation after an ad hominem. Sigh.
I am well aware of how browsers work and what they automate for you. But you called them bots. You lumped them with several other types of software, which doesn't make sense. I never said you were incorrect — I said you were going for the technically correct and the gotcha.
Do browsers include automation? Yes. Do things get automated when you use them? Yes. Is software development automation at heart? Yes. The fact that you are correct about these things doesn't make the deception any less obvious: you are using these technicalities to misrepresent what a browser is — which doesn't make sense in the context of the thread -, and that's all I pointed out.
You also can't really pass Captcha's this way, as far as I know.