The long term answer to this is easy: the airlines (really just Air Canada, and that will set a precedent) will lose this battle.
They will devalue points, change award charts, play the stupid cat and mouse game of trying to prevent scraping, but they will lose.
Even Southwest is giving up; they’re switching to assigned seats after many decades, because no amount of trying to prevent bots from checking you in has worked, long term, and checking in exactly at the minute and getting a C group number is infuriating. This isn’t a Taylor Swift concert; it’s a goddamn flight to JFK, lol.
The airlines make up the fake currency, control its value, distribution, and ultimately, the entire consumer market for the currency. I don't know how you can conclude that they'll lose, when they run the entire game.
Totally fair. I only meant they’d lose the battle against third-party searches, not that they’d lose money on the programs overall.