I think it might make sense assuming that the ticket to "increase price for automation bots" ticket was taken by someone who did not think through the implications, and maybe there wasn't an adequate sprint planning (or maybe place is sort of old fashioned no actual sprint planning) and so nobody else discussed potential downsides.

So instead of getting a bot detection script they rolled their own solution.

Why am I giving them the benefit of a doubt here, because it doesn't really make sense for an airline to want to punish ad blockers.

> Ad blockers blocks ads, it does not block bot detection scripts

While not wrong explicitly, I think that most ad blockers I’ve used are very generous in what they block, incl trackers and other monitoring scripts. In this case, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the statement is true, that blocking or otherwise interfering is messing up bot detection. That said, they could be intentionally misleading in that they are trying to bill ad blockers not bots but don’t want to say it for PR. Especially considering others have said they run a captcha already.