Haha yea why'd that guy on vacation write with any sort of style... Everything should read like an RFC and look like notepad and we are robots that only consume information.
Wondering why you didn't also automate the process of actually signing up for the seat? Getting notified that a seat is open is helpful but automatically taking the open seat sounds a lot more helpful.
Though at that point you'd have a lot more luck with selenium or some other web driver.