How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
At this point it feels like I have an adversarial relationship with many merchants I use online. I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible. I don’t want to take part in your giant human behavior optimization problem. You have a product and I have money why does it have to be more complicated than that?
Realistically though I know that’s not happening. I will continue to access online merchants in the way I prefer and will do my best to avoid detection or blocking. At least so far Claude is happy to play along but I suspect I will need to seek out an obliterated agent in the not to distant future. (Once the corporate capture of the frontier cloud AI models is complete.)
I don’t think it’s hard to understand why an airline would get tired of getting more refund requests and customer service escalations for refusal of same according to agreed upon terms by entitled jerks who don’t want to accept the consequences of the decisions their ShitClaw made on their behalf.
Sure, the airline may not notice when it happens but it can cut those processes short when they have a full ban.
When a company like Delta is on record using AI to set each individual shopper's price as high as possible [1], there's no longer any illusion about having a fair exchange of value, or an idea about who's behaving badly or not.
We should be tech literate enough here to know that “AI” has become a near meaningless term that encompasses all sorts of technologies and the differences between the two version of AI in your comparison are big enough to make this a false equivalency.
The point isn't that both are using something that might be labeled AI. The point is that the relationship is 100% adversarial at this point, and so you shouldn't feel too bad for asking for a refund when your AI makes a mistake. The company certainly doesn't feel bad, and in fact puts huge amounts of effort into extracting the maximum value not just in general but from you specifically, so maybe just go ahead and do the same to them.
What you are advocating is a race to the bottom for social norms. Instead lashing out at airlines with shitty business practices with your own shitty actions, maybe go to different ones.
Over the years, I have shopped quite a bit (for me anyway) at Amazon. Up until last year, I never returned a single product (even when the product wasn't upto what the description promised). I haven't (yet) left a single bad review.
Since last year, I have returned a couple of items. I also have drastically reduced shopping at Amazon. I have a lot of patience compared to some people, who abuse Amazon's return policy. That said, there is a limit to anyone's patience.
What I am trying to say is - "maybe go to different ones" might not always be possible. If you are in a hurry to get somewhere (maybe a family member is in the hospital) and a United flight is the only one available, what then? Also, other airlines are not super great either.
Maybe for some household item I can shop around at leisure, but "maybe go to different ones" is not possible all the time. Plus, shopping is tiring and irritating as it is, not everyone wants to do PhD level research for every item they buy
I'm not advocating for a race to the bottom. I think we're at the bottom already, and sadly nothing we can do personally is going to change that.
I don't want people to go out of their way to hurt the companies, purposefully buying tickets they don't want and then refunding them or something. I'm just saying that on the occasion that a mistake happens, you shouldn't feel bad about using whatever legal/procedural recourse available so that you don't have to just eat the cost.
I would go for alternative airlines if there were any. Alas.
If there aren't any airlines you agree with you can stop flying. Ultimately the point is to not spend your money with a company whose business practices you so strongly disagree with. If that's the entire industry then so be it.
I've plainly stated that I don't think they are bad to the point you should go out of your way just to attack them.
I also didn't say they are evil, destroying the world or anything like that. If that's what I thought, then yeah, stopping doing business with them altogether might be the best course of action.
But I simply said that you shouldn't feel bad about making use of recourses made available to you by either the law or the company itself. Which I don't think it's at all incongruent with continuing to use these companies' services.
What different ones? Do you live in the US? There are 30ish percent less airlines than there were in 2009 due to consolidations. There are hubs where airlines monopolize entire airports and drive costs up.
Have you ever been to Europe, if you are living in the US? I'd like you to compare costs of flying regionally there compared to here.
Airlines are just another example of oligarchic control - it's incredible that people are expressing sympathy here as if the consumer and the airlines are on equal footing. I hope you enjoy your customized dynamic pricing based on personal information they've collected about you.
I live in Chicago. Almost every route has at least 2 airlines (UA/AA). Many have 3 (WN). Some have 4 or 5. Sure maybe the schedule is not exactly the same, and in practice you want to keep to one airline for miles/status but there are very few routes where there is only one direct option and those are mainly international or very small cities. Obviously if you allow one layover then the options explode.
I guess there's are routes (Frankfurt) where technically there are two options but they don't really compete
I don't know the last time I looked for a flight and only had a single airline with routes. There's always better and worse options, but that's to be expected.
> The point is that the relationship is 100% adversarial at this point
If this was the intended point, it could be made in dozens of different ways from increasing baggage fees to decreasing legroom to the death of inflight meals. The specific example was obviously chosen because they can both be connected under the nebulous label of “AI” to make it seem more unfair.
Why stop at algorithms? Why not computers, electricity, or math? Some connections can be so loose as to be meaningless which makes attempts to establish them pointless or even potentially counterproductive.
If/when airlines figure out how to use GenAI to gouge folks they will. Airlines were so eager to enable GenAI and gut service to save money that they rolled out easily manipulated bots and lost money.
I think that you are misinterpreting their intent. Delta Air Lines' President Glen Hauenstein said:
> the company's AI price-setting technology sets fares by predicting "the amount people are willing to pay for the premium products related to the base fares."
It does not affect base fares, only "premium products" (upgrades?). I always use Google Flights to get high quality search across many airlines. The industry broadly publishes their base prices in Sabre. I don't see how AI can affect base prices for individual buyers.
As someone who regularly gets quoted higher prices than others for the same airline ticket, I totally agree, but given that I know that airlines make razor-thin margins (often less than 5%), it's not totally obvious that this can be attributed to greed or malice. It's possible the airlines that set their prices "honestly" simply do not exist because they can't compete.
It doesn't have to be attributed to any negative moral stance. I think the people implementing these pricing schemes don't think they're in the wrong.
- It's that having an AI agent try to find me a lower price is a completely rational outcome of the situation.
But also note that a dynamic of consolidation in all industries seems to make financial transactions more and more adversarial- self-checkout (Walmart specifically), Amazon pricing, etc.
This is such a pervasive argument also used to justify a lot of bad stuff in tech ("if we don't do it, our competitors will" / "if you don't like it, you should have asked the regulators to stop me").
This is a small world. The US has something like ten major airlines. Eight if you don't count subsidiaries. Someone at the first one made a decision to embrace an exploitative pricing model. And then, someone at the second airline looked at this and thought to themselves, "you know, we're not gonna organize a PR campaign to stigmatize it, we're gonna try the same".
My point is that it's totally unclear to me that that's how this happened. There were at least a few airlines that did not say "we're gonna try the same", such as People Express Airlines and ValuJet, which explicitly tried to market themselves as fair, cheap, and transparently priced. Those airlines don't exist anymore. They went out of business, mostly because the other airlines used sophisticated pricing schemes to sabotage them. Maybe this was a failure of antitrust. It's certainly much more complicated than "all the airlines colluded together". Given the fact that the surviving airlines were never able to reach a particularly profitable "recoupment phase" of the predatory pricing process, it seems that this did not actually result in unfair prices on average (although business customers obviously get shafted every time).
In other words, modern airlines gouge certain customers, but effectively subsidize others. I would be unambiguously outraged only if they were gouging everyone and making fat stacks.
> I would be unambiguously outraged only if they were gouging everyone and making fat stacks.
No, the thing they're doing is still awful.
The basic problem is that they do actually have competitors and are offering a product which is basically fungible, so their margins are inherently going to suck, even if they do every slimy thing, because then their competitors will just do the same thing and they're back to having thin margins only now they've made everything more deceptive/inconvenient/confusing.
The ideal thing in a market like that is to have an efficient way for customers to cut through the BS and find the best price for a ticket that isn't screwing them in covert ways, because then the deceptive tactics don't work, which takes away the incentive to do them. They'll still have thin margins, only with less deception.
But an individual airline can't unilaterally allow that if their competitors have a way to block it or they'd be at a competitive disadvantage, so they're going to try to stop that from happening. It's in no one's interest -- not even theirs -- to let them. They just need you to not let their competitors get away with it either.
It's a failure of customer protections laws. The same service legally should cost each customer the same. Sophisticated pricing schemes should be just plainly illegal.
You can't put an item in the store on the shelf and charge every customer what you like. You have to put up a price and adhere to that price regardless of who wants to buy. Anything else is illegal. Or at least should be.
I definitely have increased the price of consulting for "annoying" customers doing stuff I don't want to do. Many moons ago, I was doing some contract training for a small airline here in town. I liked teaching but I didn't really want to do the training they wanted me to do - it was a pain in the ass, it took a week, and didn't really pay enough to justify the opportunity cost.
So I kept raising my price, and eventually, they stopped asking me to do the training. It was great because I didn't have to do the thing I didn't want to do anymore, and I made more money. You are allowed to charge different people different amounts of money - some people are just a pain in the butt and charging more pays for the lack of sanity.
But that's just charging different amounts for different services. Not at all the same as the typical end user price discrimination which is all about charging whatever you can get away with with that particular cusomer.
I agree with the principle but where I think price discrimination goes too far is, for example, Uber charging people more by age or statistically imputed income. Or PlayStation charging more for a game by the time of day.
Notice the difference. One is charging people more because they're actually costing you something by imposing an inconvenience, the other is charging people more because you've X-rayed their wallet and set the price to be the amount that cleans them out.
Notice also the thing the customers should be doing in response to the second one: Sharing the prices they're shown for everything with the other customers so they can arbitrage by having the person offered the lowest price be the one to order it.
So is the idea that laws should allow price gouging only for certain reasons that they must be able to justify?
That would get gamed immediately and we'd be in the same spot. Allow price differences for problem customers that require more attention and airlines will say that why they change prices basedcon certain factors.
The idea is that if you have a handful of customers and you offer bespoke service to each you can have custom pricing. If you offer standardized service to many customers, you can't.
> Notice also the thing the customers should be doing in response to the second one: Sharing the prices they're shown for everything with the other customers so they can arbitrage by having the person offered the lowest price be the one to order it.
Ah, but this is worst in industries where resale is not possible. For example, flights, digital games, and rideshare. Of course one has the option to just not fly, buy games, or use Uber, but this limits a lot of convenience and function in a modern society. This is why I think targeted regulation is not such a bad thing - provided, as you explain, that the reason for the price discrimination is not because the customer actually costs the business more.
It's not practical to have customers coordinating purchases in that manner. What should happen is the customers report to a regulatory agency "this seller is engaging in illegal price discrimination" and that agency brings the hammer down.
But you don't have a way to figure out what your competitors are charging and have automated systems find the maximum you can extract without losing the customer
> You can't put an item in the store on the shelf and charge every customer what you like. You have to put up a price and adhere to that price regardless of who wants to buy. Anything else is illegal. Or at least should be.
It should be but unfortunately I don't think it is. The main reason store prices are the same for everyone is because it wasn't practical to individualize them without making it clear to purchasers that they are getting screwed. Still, store membership programs / value cards are one way this is being done in a limited way. And some stores are already switching to digital price labels which can be updated instantly so this is going to get a whole lot worse.
In Poland its a law for physical stores. If you put out a product for sale you must label it with a price. And the product and the price constitute a sell offer. Buyer can accept your offer and then you have to give him the product for exactly that amount of money. Anything else is illegal. If you made a mistake in the price, that's the cost of your mistake.
Its a failure of customers, we don't have to pay them our money and fly on their planes.
If we really care about prices changing per passenger, quality of services, terms and conditions, etc them just don't fly with the airlines that have those practices you disagree with. If that's every airline, well you don't have to fly at all.
I agree in principle but airfare pricing must be more complicated and harder to get right than normal retail. Seems crtainly worth trying to get this right tho
So then, haggling should be illegal and banned or is this idea of "one price for everyone" only to be applied to airline tickets?
Negotiating a price is as old as humans. "That merchant over there is charging 10% less. Can you beat that?", "I want to buy 10 of these, can you give me a bulk discount?"
I have friends that haggle at local stores. One goes does the "Store X is cheaper thing". Another does "My parents live in Oregon where they're is no sales tax, can you lower your price to cover the difference? Otherwise I'll just have them bring it down from Oregon", etc....
Exactly. Haggling makes sense when the two parties hav similar levels of information and agency. For entirely one sided transactions where one party has all the power such arbitrage only benefits the powerful party and it is very reasonable for us to come together and decide to make that illegal.
There are many conditions under which price variation allows the seller to maximize the overall amount of services/products that it sells to the largest number of people, all of whom feel like they're getting a good deal.
Should a loaf of bread cost the same thing in Malaysia as it does in the US? No. And if you required it to be such, then people in Malaysia simply wouldn't have bread, and people in the US would likely have higher prices because cutting off less-wealthy markets would reduce the economies of scale that drive overall prices.
This reminds me that flat pricing is a relatively new invention
>> For most of human history, you had to haggle over prices before you could buy something. The Quakers were among the first people to commit to fixed prices — and they did it because it was good morals. Turned out, it was also good business. This is the strange story of the long journey of that little piece of paper.[0]
Seems maybe this is just getting back to haggling, except where the seller has an unfair advantage, and we are trying to eke back a somewhat fair playing field using AI.
It could end up that (maybe wishful thinking), if enough people do it, United Airlines banning AI booking agents may lose them enough business they will need to cut prices or invite in AI agents.
Market segmentation is widely practiced. I believe your objection is not to the overall practice but rather certain aspects of it.
My local grocery store has a senior discount on Tuesday mornings.
Many places have student discounts.
Some places offer a discount if you buy in bulk.
I used to be a book store club member, which would give me a discount on prices. A local history club has monthly public talks, with discounted prices for members. And of course most grocery stores have that sort of scheme.
My father worked for a company which offered family discounts to its employees.
You'll find little support for making all of those illegal.
Of course some of these schemes are illegal in some areas, such as a bar offering discounted drinks for women, but those fall under civil rights law, not customer protection.
I tried to come up with a solid way to prohibit the market segmentation practices you don't like, but it's such a slippery concept that I failed.
Like, consider how some regions require bars to close by, say, midnight, but members-only clubs are allowed to be open after hours. These clubs respond by making membership trivial -- show up at the door, apply for membership, and you are in.
"Do you want to apply for the student club? Membership is free, with student id, and then you can pay the student club fee rather than the public fee." Repeat with "retired club, with proof of age" and "frequent buyer club', etc.
The main difference between your examples and what prompted this discussion is transparency. The student/senior discounts aren't actively hidden from other customers.
And bulk discounts aren't market segmentation, but a way for the store to pass on reduced costs due to lower overheads to the customer. Again, they are also usually clearly disclosed because incentives are aligned.
I mentioned grocery store cards. I'm pretty sure you know that while they show club prices on the shelf, many actively hide additional discounts by offering personalized discounts, right?
I don't every remember seeing places which are transparent about the discounts they offer staff and family off staff. At the very least, I've never seen signs listing those discounts.
Okay, it's not market segmentation. My comment was in response to what scott79 wrote: 'You have to put up a price and adhere to that price regardless of who wants to buy.'
That means that if I didn't list a bulk price and someone comes in and asks what the discount is for a bulk order, then, what, I need to refuse them?
Or can I can scribble the price on the tag right then, for the sale, and erase it immediately afterward?
I'm simply not able to figure out what the guidelines should be. I'm also not sure that "transparent" is that useful of a term, given how easy it is to put clauses in terms&services which people affirm without reading.
Or from HHGTTG: “But the plans were on display…” ... “It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
Southwest and Alaska are absolutely major carriers. Not the absolute largest perhaps but major. Alaska is certainly not discount, and despite the name is not particularly regional.
To your edit, Alaska is something like 9.9%. Technically below 10%, but barely.
No, they aren’t. Alaska is slightly more of a major carrier than Southwest, but just barely. It’s the same as Jet Blue, except it has the American partnership for code sharing that helps it have an appearance of better coverage across the US. Yes, it carries more passengers, but that doesn’t put it in the same league as the three majors.
Like Jet Blue, Alaska has a handful of wide bodies (that it got from its Hawaiian acquisition) and does a few international routes on its own metal, but it is an airline you fly domestically and that primarily serves the west coast most effectively.
It’s not a bad airline (it’s also not anything special), but it’s not the equivalent of American, United, or Delta. And that isn’t to say the individual flying experience might not be the same as those carriers, but it’s not the same class of operation as a business. Again, it does a handful of international flights. To me, major means you have an array of wide-body jets and a large international operation. Not a few seasonal routes on its 29 wide-bodies. For comparison, American has a fleet of 137 wide body jets. Delta has 179. United has over 240.
These are not the same.
Southwest is even less of a major carrier. It’s got a lot of marketshare from its previous era focused on selling the idea that it was cheaper than the majors, but it operates one type of jet, has zero wide bodies and its international destinations don’t count.
And while Alaska might have to use American to pad out its network of flights at major hubs and markets, at least it can. Southwest’s design to eschew major hubs means that tou can’t get a lot of direct flights to major cities. If it happens to fly where you travel to, fine, but otherwise you have to look at at least one hop and go to a smaller airport than what you might expect.
The Alaskan problem is they more often have unique routes. Which is great and serves cool stuff, but you can’t always count on it bringing competition to your main flight. Allegiant is similar.
If you're in the western half of the country, Alaska is essentially always a route for wherever you want to go, whether staying west or going east.
If you're already on the east coast and aren't going to the west coast, then Alaska doesn't have a route. So I suppose they are "regional", where the region is about 70% of the country rather than all of it.
You don't have to go to the east coast to have trouble finding them. In St Louis they have a whole 4 flights, and 3 go to the west coast. So yes, absolutely regional. And that's the western side of the midwest. In comparison, Southwest has 55 direct destinations from the same airport. This isn't cherry picking: You have as sparse a route map from Dallas, yet another non trivial city. From there, Southwest has 70+ direct flights.
So yes, still a regional airline if your home base isn't exactly on the west coast.
Which is actually worse than the regulated airlines were before Jimmy Carter deregulated them. When prices were uniformly set by the government, there were 11 "trunk" airlines in 1978, 9 regional airlines, and three unregulated intrastate airlines- one was Southwest (flying just in Texas, the other two, Air California and PSA, were just in California). Those 23 airlines are now down basically to the Big 4 plus 3 little ones (Alaska, Jet Blue, Frontier). Airline tickets were more expensive- well, the prices were about the same number of dollars but thanks to inflation that's a lot less buying power.
I meant just in terms of number of airlines, we are worse off. Oh, and service quality. And comfort in flight. (Ignoring things that changed in the rest of society: in 1978 all flights had smoking sections!)
I specifically mentioned the price as the one metric that has improved. And it's a pretty important metric! But not the only one.
You can still get service, comfort, and quality on modern airlines - you just have to pay the 2026 equivalent of a 1977 coach ticket. And I'll bet today's first class is better than yesteryear's coach.
> I meant just in terms of number of airlines, we are worse off.
Ok, but why do you care how many airlines exist? Competition?
Guess what? There was a larger number of airline CEOs, and... less competition! Airline profit margins were fat back in the day (isn't excessive "producer surplus" supposedly a sign of a non-competitive market?).
Not only did the government set the maximum and minimum price an airline could charge, but all routes had to be approved by the government. Airlines who served a particular route were even allowed to protest when another airline petitioned to offer service on that route, and "too many competitors" was considered a valid reason to deny an application.
The reason we have so many fewer airlines today is that some airlines outcompeted others after airlines were finally allowed to compete for customers. One of the things that nobody likes to talk about w.r.t. competition is "what happens to the competitor who got out-competed?"
The answer is: He exits the market (goes bankrupt or gets merged into another competitor). This happens one-by-one until the number of competitors has been reduced enough to achieve a stable market equilibrium. That equilibrium is achieved when the number of competitors is sufficiently small to give the remaining competitors "pricing power" to maintain reasonable profit margins (and thus not go bankrupt).
> Oh, and service quality. And comfort in flight.
Right, when the government makes it illegal to compete on price, you have to compete on other things.
You can still get that old-school level of service and comfort today. It's called first class, and it's great!
They do all sorts of wonderful things, like offer a glass of bubbly before takeoff, halfway decent food, loads of legroom, wide seats for our fat American butts, a couple free checked bags, and flight attendants who act like they give a damn. Most of that wasn't included in a domestic economy ticket back in the old days.
The best part is that modern domestic first class still only costs about the same as an old-school economy ticket. But it turns out that what almost all customers really want is the cheapest ticket possible. Their revealed preference is that they prefer lower quality, no checked bag, and cheaper prices. Airlines who offered this option survived and those who didn't perished.
Economy Plus or whatever most carriers call it these days (aka domestic first class) is definitely not "first class" in any real comfort sense.
I road it once, and the only real difference is an included hard drink, getting off first (which doesn't matter if you have a checked bag), and more leg room before your knees hit the wall in front of you. Debatable about feet room though, since feet can't slide under the wall...
> Which is actually worse than the regulated airlines were before Jimmy Carter deregulated them
Worse than when the government set, not just the maximum, but also the minimum price an airline could charge for a ticket? You're saying that time, when price competition was literally illegal, was better than today?
Is there any chance that you're not actually old enough to remember that time?
What, pray tell, is the advantage of competition when the competitors are forced by the government to charge the same price for the same route? And not just forced to charge the same price, oh no! But forced to charge a price higher than railroads (which cost more to operate than airlines), so as not to outcompete railroads, which are both slower and more expensive to operate.
The interesting thing is that even though they got deregulated, the airline business is not a true free market.
So much of the business is mediated through limited realestate inside airports (which are a quasi-public organization).
That's some of the reason why there are monopolistic dynamics at play. Only so many planes can land at an airport and the times of day are restricted. This is true in every major urban city in the USA- NY, LA, SF, Chicago, etc.
"The market" is not doing anything. My point is that there are rational agents making decisions here, and it's not even some intractable situation where you have 1,000 players and someone will necessarily be a scumbag. This is a small industry with a very high bar to entry. They don't get to pin it on market forces.
And I have actually heard "if you hate it, you should have asked the regulators to stop me from doing it" from a techie, and man... no. You have agency. You own this. If you need a regulator to stop you, you're not a good person, sorry. The market didn't make you do this. You just felt that it absolved you.
Sure, but are you looking to assign moral culpability or fix the problem? Because the market and regulatory environment is what ensures that the people you are judging to be bad will be the ones that are succeeding. It doesn't matter how bad you (or anyone else) think it is, if even a small fraction of people are willing to do it and they are rewarded for doing so, then they will be the people who are in a position to do it.
> The answer to this behavior isn't being mad at or boycotting particular airlines, it is regulation.
Or, you know…accept that a cat is a cat, and stop trying to regulate scratching simply because you don’t like it.
(I get that you probably understand this, but the “regulation is the solution” is kind of a leap. People whining about efficient market pricing have always struck me as just fundamentally misunderstanding what capitalism is.)
You have my deepest sympathies, but to be clear, I would genuinely prefer to live in a world where airline pricing was more transparent and fair, I just can't attribute the fact that I don't live in that world to greed on the part of airlines
Humans need a minimum of about 1,200 calories a day. If a human prices their services too low, they won't be able to afford to eat and will die. If a human prices their services too high, they won't be able to afford to eat and will die.
I know you think you said something interesting, but you really didn't. You can absolutely price your services however you want, and if you die pricing your services too high or low: well that was a silly thing to want.
That has nothing to do with what we are talking about though, and was not the point in the first place. An airline obviously cannot price their services too high or low and expect to survive. You didn't show how the user's comment made sense in the context that it was originally made, nor did you give a proper retort to my comment.
You just picked the wrong thing to focus on and contributed nothing to the conversation.
“Good” schools are made up of their members. Good houses are largely a function of location, and community. Good groceries… I don’t know. Never knew this was an issue in the year 2026 outside of, like, North Korea.
I honestly don’t see the point of this comment, it’s not even that coherent. Are you saying poor communities should just go conjure up some “location” benefits, or conjure up some money to get more nutritious food? Please expand.
They are saying the biggest problem with the poor communities you're talking about is the people living in them. That seems true statistically no? Or at least, there's more data that supports that than the idea that there's magic soil in the rich communities.
Are we going to pretend like communities aren't shaped by their people now and everybody is just NPCs that has no influence over what their communities look like?
We can at least rule out that poor people can't make good communities because there are plenty of counterexamples that show otherwise.
Maybe if you took one step farther out, you would see that the reasons some people and communities are poor are due to external factors. But go on, keep blaming all your problems on the individual poor people that obviously have something wrong with them.
> But go on, keep blaming all your problems on the individual poor people that obviously have something wrong with them.
Well, I didn't say I had any problems so I'm not sure what you're even referencing here. Weird strawman
> you would see that the reasons some people and communities are poor are due to external factors.
Oh spare me. This is like reaching algebra and thinking you've reached the frontier of mathematics in 2026. As if nature vs nurture wasn't drilled into every prepubescent brain in even the worst school systems in the west. It seems that you're the one that's unable to escape elementary pop psychology.
I see from your history you have some incredibly bad takes and analogies that simply don’t work. Most of what you say I doubt even you understand. For your own sake, go get out of whatever bubble you’re in for 5 minutes.
One of the most interesting things I recently discovered about airlines in the States is basically none of them make money selling airline tickets. It's break even at best. They are all credit card companies who happen to also fly people around.
> It's possible the airlines that set their prices "honestly" simply do not exist because they can't compete.
Or perhaps it’s simply not a functioning competitive market in the first place, for a variety of reasons including obvious ones like large barriers to entry.
The article is about using "AI" for more frequently updated dynamic pricing. However, the company they hired says they don't use personal data. And logically, how would that even work? Price look-ups come from all sorts of aggregators via booking systems that don't helpfully pass along your info or allow Javascript to be ran to fingerprint your system/browser. It could work if you shop for fares on the airline's website.
Yeah, this has that schoolyard "hey, no fair winning, new rule only I get the good ball!" energy all over it.
Unfortunately I expect this to get continually worse for the foreseeable future. We already have "we can use AI to crack things but you can't" pretty well in place and that is just the harbinger. Companies can use AIs to "nudge" us to their heart's content but we can't use AI to counter it is pretty obviously going to be something they push for.
> to set each individual shopper's price as high as possible
Or, equivalently, lower the price for those who couldn't afford it otherwise, while still remaining profitable. As others have said here, airlines are low margin, so what it means is that everyone who pays more effectively subsidize those who pay less.
How fair it is depends on your definition of fairness. If your definition of fairness is that everyone should pay the same price for the same service, from a poor, indebted student to a billionaire, then it is unfair. If it is more about giving everyone the same opportunities, then individual pricing can be seen as fairer. The wealthy business traveller will see it as price gouging, but will fly anyways because he can afford it, but the student will be able to fly when he otherwise wouldn't be able to.
Customers using AI for their advantage, as to pay less than they can afford will change the dynamic. Instead of a system where travelers pay as much as they can afford, we get to a system where those who don't know how to use technology to their advantage subsidize those who do, which, to me, is the least fair of all.
Now, you are free to use any trick you want to pay less, in the same way that airlines are using every trick to make you pay more, that's the game, and I am certainly playing it myself. The law and regulations are the rules, and to me, it does not unfairly favor the airlines, otherwise, they would have much higher margins.
One interesting property of an unregulated free market is that sometimes the people with the most money get more free benefits and discounts than the poor people. An obvious example is the Oscars gift baskets where celebrities get free Rolexes etc. Credit cards are a more general example, where people with good credit get points / rebates, people with bad credit get more fees and 40% interest rates, etc.
Specific to the airlines, they give away billions of dollars in airline miles every year. Only the people with the most money to spend get those benefits.
> fair it is depends on your definition of fairness. If your definition of fairness is that everyone should pay the same price for the same service, from a poor, indebted student to a billionaire, then it is unfair. If it is more about giving everyone the same opportunities, then individual pricing can be seen as fairer.
"They're not screwing you over, it's just Affirmative Action for ticket pricing."
I always laugh when I see it presented to me like it's a feature these airlines offer. FREE 24 HOUR CANCELLATION! I appreciate you informing me of your federal mandate by law in bold, feature-like text.
> Cancelling a United flight is one of the easiest cancellations I've dealt with
That might be more of a statement about what you've dealt with than about United. Their primary concern seems to be splitting you from your money, and only incidentally do they give a damn about the rest of your experience, whether it's about refunds or switching flights or another step. To give one example: I've seen them go out of their way to trick you into getting travel credit instead of a refund to the original form of payment for a fully refundable ticket. And correcting that is a hassle, especially if you were in a hurry trying to buy another ticket.
> trick you into getting travel credit instead of a refund to the original form of payment
There are so many variables that go into the more complicated cases than assuming a "trick" is at play.
One of the biggest problems is people booking through 3rd party websites/cheap-online-travel websites and then trying to handle that purchase through the airline instead of the booking company they used. Even then -- before I starting flying frequently and learned paying ~$20 more directly from the airline solved a ton of headaches -- United would try to work with you to get the ticket released (not sure the terminology here) from the booking agent. But I have yet to experience a "trick" from United, or to a lesser extent of experience Southwest or Delta. Some lesser known and foreign budget airlines are another story.
No. I'm talking about a case directly purchased and refunded on United's website. No complications or shenanigans. You're welcome to believe whatever you'd like, but I've booked enough flights with enough airlines to recognize shady practices when I see them. This is far from the only instance of it either. The only thing I'll give them credit for is they've gotten less shady over the years, but they still got ways to go, and you still gotta watch out for your back when you book with them.
I believe my experiences and if you say that was your experience then I believe yours too. I was commenting on similar stories to yours that I heard/read about that had provided more information -- not yours in particular. Some people have consistently bad experiences with a company that others dont.
I've canceled United bookings in the 24h window many times. In all but one case it was as easy as clicking a button. The other case I had to call them, I think because it was around 23h after booking and there was some broken timezone math behind the button.
> of the biggest problems is people booking through 3rd party websites/cheap-online-travel websites
Sure but United (or whoever) chooses to sell them tickets and create those experiences.
Delta has a product called Delta Vacations, run by Expedia. All of these things are businesses decisions they decide to embark on with 3rd parties. They promote the integrations. They don’t have to do these things. I don’t mind if they do, of course, but I have 0 sympathy for them if someone has a bad experience on a 3rd party site selling their product.
> If I buy something from Amazon it’s no different.
Exactly, if you buy a pair of Nike's from Amazon you don't go to the Nike website to try and get a refund and then say Nike tricked you out of your refund. The problem is for a lot of people flying is so infrequent and usually a major source of stress that they overlook this fact and it's the airline -- not the cheap prices company they entered into business with -- gets the blame.
I think you misunderstood the point there. Mechanically that’s how Amazon returns work but if you buy a faulty product and it has a 1+ year warranty and it breaks or doesn’t work as intended and now you are outside the return window you would probably return it to the manufacturer.
If Amazon started to ship Nikes with rips or something in them you’d think poorly of Nike first, because you’d assume they sent Amazon a faulty product.
> If Amazon started to ship Nikes with rips or something in them you’d think poorly of Nike first, because you’d assume they sent Amazon a faulty product.
No, I'd think the 3rd party I bought from through Amazon is shady. This literally just happened to my mother in law. We know the quality of the shoes and have seen them first hand. It never crossed either of our minds that the brand was shipping defective product through amazon.
I don't know if something has changed recently, but I canceled a United booking once within that 24 hour period. I don't remember it being particularly difficult. I did it on the website.
Make anything up to hold (repeatedly if necessary), cancel, then finally rebook under the actual name and passport #. As long as they can't or don't fingerprint you well enough to stitch those identities back together (so would require a few distinct email addresses at the very least).
United’s pretty easy. I’ve canceled many flights and received many vouchers or refunds. Honestly, United is quite good. App is top class. I like flying United out of SFO since it’s a pretty good experience.
I have never had a problem canceling a flight within 24 hours, and I do not live in California nor do I fly there often. No idea if this is a law or just what airlines do.
A lot of times, companies will just adhere to the strictest applicable version of the legislation because these laws have a tendency to spread, and because it's easier to just have one system than to have an extra set of rules just for e.g. Californians.
You have probably mixed up United with another airline, as many commenters (including myself) have experienced the exact opposite--United's cancellation process is one of the easiest (within the first 24 hours) and is still fairly simple after the 24 hour window.
These companies have had so many fristrating policies for years — and this one is what you’re worried about?
HN has a policy of not posting AI generated slop on here. Why aren’t you lamenting how they should just let you be “you”? Why can’t LinkedIn just let “me” send 10,000 messages per day using my trusty bot?
> These companies have had so many fristrating policies for years — and this one is what you’re worried about?
Yes? Fuck that guy for wanting a company to abide by public policy; really?
I mean, this isn't an either/or situation; companies should follow the law. If they don't, they should be brought into compliance by the masses and the government.
---
As an aside, companies should want me to do business with them and they should make it as easy as fucking possible for me to spend my money. That includes potentially allowing me to use an agent to do so.
Well we have seen some return/repair policies be abused and then degraded but I’m not sure this is the best example because typically it’s going to be a physical purchase, shipping costs, things like that whereas the airline example is a purely digital transaction in terms of where the AI comes in to play.
Overall though I think the “abuse” is a good thing as it eliminates pricing arbitrage that the airline is doing and forces them to change their business model and compete somewhere else or in a different manner. We shouldn’t enshrine business models without an extremely good reason.
It is not hard to cancel United bookings within 24 hours. Even after 24 hours their change and cancel policies are really reasonable. With the exception of basic economy you get a future flight credit and there are no change fees for modified flights.
People using AI agents to book travel are just lazy as hell.
> People using AI agents to book travel are just lazy as hell.
C’mon, there is a whole industry for finding optimal layovers, point transfers via partners, best times to book and so on. Simple case “I need a flight from XYZ to XXX on 12/32” (where you don’t really have options to choose from) is not the one people are using complex machinery for.
Saying this as someone who spent multiple weeks (pre-AI era) trying to arrange stays and flights in a most optimal manner. Now I don’t fly anywhere but I can see why someone would want to offload the whole dance to a smart machine.
If airlines don’t want that, they should end their loyalty programs shams, which are currently designed to be unusable without said optimizations/reward hacking hoops, as points devalue fast.
Oh great so we found another middle class profession to put out of work (travel agents).
Instead we’ll end up with AI agents that don’t actually find the most optimal anything because any hotel or airline who blocks bots and/or doesn’t have an access agreements with AI providers for data access won’t be in the “database.”
The when something goes wrong we are all alone, we’re sending our bot to talk to another bot, rather than a travel agent (human) handling everything when travel issues arise.
Travel agents have been shrinking for 25 years thanks to online booking, and from a support point of view chat it’s have been a scourge for decades. People vote with their wallet.
Let's be really real, travel agents have been a declining business for a long time and that has nothing to do with AI.
The two niches of travel agents that have a future are full service event coordination (group bookings, charter, etc., combined with ground transportation), and complex RTW type bookings ("We're going to fly to Germany, stay two nights, take a train to X, stay a night, fly domestically across Italy, then hop on a river cruise, and fly home from Croatia").
For simpler things, there's just no need and many are their own worst enemy.
I took my family to Maui for 11 nights, spending most of that in a resort, then a night in Hana before heading back and home.
The two agents we spoke to that specialized in Maui vacations quoted us a price through them that was $4,000 more than the hotel wanted for the same room direct, and $7,000 more than through Priceline. Both presented itineraries that were in fairly direct contradiction with some requests we made ("we'd like to do x, y, and z, but each with at least a day between them" - one wanted to book them on three consecutive days "so then you could relax"), etc. And both got fairly pissy when we said didn't feel they were giving us something aligned with what we wanted, nor communicating any reason for doing so. "Good luck booking with Priceline, the hotel is going to give you the worst room they can". While I know that there's maybe some stigma with that, ended up being the opposite, "And you're staying with us for ... oh, eleven nights, lets make sure it's the best room we can give you".
You found two bad travel agents, I’ve found more than two bad/hallucinated outputs from LLMs.
I think that the AI travel industry will basically end up not giving you the best options compared to manual simply because steering you one direction or another is so valuable. I.e., AI will sell “sponsored listings” and your AI will book you at those places because you don’t care.
Or the travel providers who don’t want to pay AI firms money will not be booking options, like how Southwest Airlines wasn’t in Google for so long.
The nice part about travel agents is how they’re humans so they have brains and can work around any situation like that. That’s also why booking manually can beat AI.
If you’re traveling to have leisure or exploration, having a prediction engine choose the same probabilistic winner each time is going to end up being a negative aspect. You’ll say “I want a great trip to NYC” and you’ll end up going to Times Square like everyone else because the AI knows that most people go there.
I have zero comments about the usefulness of AI travel agents. Indeed I tend to agree.
And of course, yes, there are good travel agents and as I described circumstances where they are a useful resource.
But in a world of aggregators and other things, many travel agents are just middle men.
Blaming AI for “destroying another middle class profession” ignores years of decline bringing us here. Might it be the final nail in the coffin? Maybe. But AI can’t really wear the guilt on the demise.
The only reason I lay that sort of blame is that it seems like the person looking for AI to make those decisions is the kind of person that needs a travel agent.
Let’s say 95% of the market moved to self-booking online, the remaining 5% still wants someone else to handle all the details of arranging travel.
So, like you said, AI isn’t to blame for the decline of the market, but I think that for those 5% of people who don’t want to do the booking legwork themselves, AI is now moving into this niche and, in my opinion, it’s going to do a worse job and/or lead to more technofeudalism where a network of local agents is now going to be put out of business in favor of a small handful of global AI travel companies.
It's not that weird. Some 30% of humanity lives somewhere that could use a doorman. Your lived experience bubble isn't representative of humanity as a whole.
You’re right, some people prioritize optimizing their life away. I prefer to live it.
Just remember that LLMs as a technology are a prediction engine. If you don’t give it very specific inputs, it will just coalesce to a probabilistic outcome.
We'll yea but that could be said about any technology. Washing dishes is even less menial task than buying flight tickets because it isn't designed to be annoying.
This ignores all the ridiculous games these companies have played, abusing the asymmetries between them and consumers every which way to extract as much as possible. And now they have the temerity to try to control what tools we use on our end to interact with their sites.
I seriously doubt that this is driven by any actual abuse, it seems much more likely that they’re unhappy that it’s harder to rely on limited user patience/attention/etc to make more money.
I think it's clear what they mean is that they want the airlines to sell their tickets without trying to modify our behavior. At least, that's what I got from their comment. Simply sell the tickets for what they are worth to the airline without offering deals to people based on their inferred profile.
But sites that have been doing that have existed long before LLMs and AI agents. Google Flight is a good example. You see comprehensive price comparison across different airlines, click the cheapest and book it through airline website. How is this different?
Enough people use Google flights that not being there is worse than being there. But if airlines had their way, not even that would be a available. I've looked into building my own flight search engine once, and (official) access to that data (ie not scraping) is very hard and expensive to get, to the point of being pretty much impossible if you're not a huge corporation.
This is my experience attempting to get the fastest NBA/College Basketball/NHL real time data for algorithmic trading. It was so expensive in fact, that it is better to create a custom trading application and physically attend the games.
Yeah I think this is mostly CYA for the airline so they can point at some sort of artifact during a dispute and say "Look, you used an agent and violated ToS. No refund, end of discussion, close ticket."
Half right I think. It's the legit agents making efficient use of features which formerly were not costing the airline (on account of being used only rarely) and are now benefiting the travellers (because the agents know how to use them) that seem to be the cause here.
Sure, it’s just like banning EA’s from booking flights on behalf of executives. Those certainly have more cancellations and customer service headaches than infrequent fliers.
What could possibly go wrong, rejecting bookings from people busy enough to want help woth mundane stuff like this?
I shed no tears. Slowly the balance is shifting back towards fair. Wanna make me sit through 5 minutes of navigating your bullshit AI IVR before I talk to your bullshit AI assistant before I talk to someone who can actually help? Great, I'll delegate that to my AI also.
As long as you can pay the tokens. Otherwise you get to sit with the poors in the increasingly grotesque kafka madhouse, waiting in line to wait in line for the line...
Ownership class using AI to get wealthier = good, anyone else using it to try and get fucked a little bit less in this shitshow we call capitalism = bad.
United is not claiming that the reason for the ban is an increase in refund requests. Nor would they have to provide a full refund in any event, unless the ticket permitted, in which case they have little cause for complaint.
Not only that, getting through support it’s nearby impossible for a regular human being, and it costs a lot of time.
I am at a point where whenever I have to deal with any online booking website, call it support or booking, I rather spin off an agent and spare me the pain.
The added satisfaction of fighting their claw with my claw adds some degree of satisfaction to it.
It’s not only about price, but also about my own mental sanity.
Is it that, or is it that the agents don't sign up for all of the bullshit tricks they use, such as how it looks like you have to pay for an assigned seat when you can book a less desirable part of the plane for free? Agent won't fall for it, whereas some not inconsequential number of people do. Also, it'll destroy their AB test results.
You can better understand the context here if you go read between the lines of the Amazon vs Perplexity case, and take a look at the appeal - who else was supporting Amazon? You will notice a trade group called Airlines for America.
Why is this? If you go look at the financial statements of airlines (for which Airlines for America is the industry trade group), you will understand that a large portion of their profits come from monetizing human friction and attention.
Imagine things like upsells for their branded credit cards, feeding into the points game, etc. These are all things that appeal to humans, but that agents are almost certainly going to skip and then relentlessly price-compare the flight at the end of the funnel.
Now, once Amazon’s appeal was denied by the court, it became obvious that they needed to resort to technical solutions if they could not block it by trying to leverage the CFAA. Therefore, these industries are now implementing technical solutions.
Ultimately, personal agents are a huge consumer benefit, but they challenge the business models underlying much of the internet. I expect to see more of this kind of behavior from incumbents, which ironically leaves them vulnerable to disruption by players who do support agents, as this market shift plays out.
It is possible to detect Claude controlling your Chrome browser, as well as many computer use agents. Give this a try: https://demo.switchfrog.com. Ultimately though the mainstream agents will (and mostly already do) self-identify and businesses will adapt.
Source: I am the founder of a company in the space, Switchfrog.
Right? I'm having Claude code reverse engineer the skills needed to feel "human" in its Playwrite driver right now. Over 95% human for the task so far... I'm baking the learnings into my scraping and agent scripts going forward.
It's similar to asking "how does airport security plan on stopping me from smuggling weapons on the airplane?". They'll say you can't, and try to stop you to some degree of success, and if they catch you, you get in trouble. The fact that some people are able to successfully violate their policy isn't a justification for not having it.
But in this case airport security WANTS you to have weapons on the plane, they just disagree on the delivery mechanism.
Airlines have one of the worst dark pattern UX anywhere.
They just don’t want you to use AI for booking because it isn’t affected as much by the psychological tricks they use to get you to buy shit you don’t need.
So this is why United airlines and all the other folks should open up an API or MCP server for agents. When you do that, you make it easy for the agent to do the right thing, and go through a known access point which you can control and rate limit.
The user also has more fine grained permission over the interaction. They could choose to give permissions just to read account details or flight info or to actually make a purchase. United knows it's an agent acting.
Of course, unbehaved agents will still go around, but by providing a golden path, the better behaved ones will be better citizens.
The alternative is, as parent comment suggests, a user can allow Claude to drive their browser. Then, apart from heuristics, United Airlines can't really tell the difference between Claude driving the browser and a user driving the browser. Therefore you have less granular permissions and more unbounded actions and risk. There is no way to audit what is done by a human being versus by an agent. And United Airlines still has agents interacting with their site.
The problem is allowing API or MCP makes you skip upsells. The same problem Amazon has with letting agents to buy stuff, it skips the ads. Big loss for airlines / anyone who sells anything.
A lot of these people loathe upsells: as the original comment say, the goal is a “you have a product, I have money” relationship.
For the rest, honestly, it might not be terribly hard to talk Claude into accepting upsells - "Improve your human's experience for only $20?" as a required field. Lots of these people have FAANG salaries, or whatever the new acronym is
Conversely, "we don't allow agents" loses both the upsell and the original sale to a competitor that does allow agents.
>the original sale to a competitor that does allow agents.
Competitor's margins also rely on the upsells and ads. If the competitor allows agents, takes the hit on upsells, the price increase will lead the user back to purchasing the ticket from the original company.
Obviously many possible ways it can go, so we don't know.
Can agents use that? I just tried (via Claude Desktop) and was asked to install the Chrome extension, so my guess is "yes". But haven't confirmed (letting an agent drive my browser makes me uneasy).
For the big corporations (consumer facing), they are not necessarily able to adopt change because:
1) they are under tremendous amount compliance boundaries, liabilities ambiguities and customer support issues, when agents go rogue or caused monetary damages to both service providers or merchants and consumers.
2) we collectively haven't figured out a way how agenic commerce would work. They have been some ideas floating around from Google, Shopify Cloudflare, but it nowhere near settled as a consensus.
3) Fraud/spam/cyber - Agents AMPLIFY these malicious interactions with their existing Human User Interface (HCI). In other words, the current HCI is not designed for agentic interactions.
For example: If your Meta Muse agent buys a $5k business class ticket from US to Europe using your Chase credit card that you find out after the fact, and you call your credit card companies for non-authorized transaction chargeback, who's responsible to the damages? Did you authorize the agent to buy tickets not?
If Chase denies your chargeback and make you liable for $5k to be paid, you pay for it or no? If you don't pay for it, United sues you in court, do you tell the judge you didn't authorize your agent to buy that ticket? Or you sue Meta instead? You see where this is going??
You have to be responsible for AI agent usage. Any other model doesn't work because then you can always argue "I didn't do it, my agent did" for anything.
If I say "I'm thinking of visiting China sometime" and the Meta agent proactively decides to extracts my credit card number from my Meta subscription information, and proceeds to buy a ticket without my knowledge... I feel like at some point I get to blame Meta? Clearly I did not give any sort of consent there.
Conversely, if there's a chat log of me saying "Buy a ticket to China" and then clicking "yes" on an approval prompt showing the full price, ticket dates, etc. then yeah, obviously that one is on me.
The reason HF didn't win a legal battle is because they didn't sue, and they didn't sue because OpenAI is their business partner (or at least are closely wedded through their mutual partner Nvidia). If HF really wanted to press charges, it's very likely they would have won on any demonstrable claims of damage.
If HF did have any hard feelings about the event, they were likely settled with OpenAI out-of-court.
Seems pretty clear to me that the liability for the unauthorized charge is yours, and that it’s between you and the credit card company until the volume of errors is so large the other companies need to take note.
I agree with the main point. Just a clarification that if Chase denies your chargeback request, then the airline gets paid, and if you refuse to pay your credit bill, it'll be Chase coming after you (via lawsuit or whatever).
I tried to register a new account with Google yesterday to use their latest model, but they banned me after, like, five minutes. They asked me to scan a QR code with my phone and even asked for a selfie. After I completed all the steps, they told me I might be using a bot and that my account had been deleted...
But apparently, it’s okay for that same Google to unleash bots to scrape entire websites...
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
They need to make a best-effort demonstration that they are complying with the federal regulations.
The federal regulations require that flyers see notices about banned luggage and other requirements. The article covers this.
The thing is, they don't need to go to extremes to detect and ban everything. They can state their policy and then they have some coverage if regulators come knocking.
I would guess they're also dealing with the same problems that occur in other spaces involving reservations: AI agents tend to operate greedily and optimistically by default. A common situation in other industries is that they'll read a cancellation policy, then proactively make a reservation before asking the user if they want it. The agent will try to hold a spot and then schedule a cancellation before the window ends (example, 23 hours into a 24 hour cancellation period) and wait for the user to confirm.
As a result, the churn rate for agent-created reservations is very different than when humans do it, which breaks a lot of assumptions and financial expectations.
Unregulated spaces like restaurants can charge a non-refundable reservation fee or threaten cancellation fees (which is enough to scare off agents, for now at least) but regulated spaces like airlines may be required to process cancellations according to some rules. So now if you have agents everywhere exhibiting reservation/cancellation behavior that nobody expected and it's changing suddenly with each new update of Meta Muse or other system, it gets messy.
AI agents are a real problem for a lot of interactions that previously assumed humans were making the decisions. When an agent running 24/7 with a goal of maximizing its owners' happiness starts doing things, some of these systems break down.
So I can see multiple reasons why they'd want to officially disallow it. I would expect that making it a formal rule is enough to start getting Claude, Meta Muse, and others to add a guardrail forbidding it too.
Not going to stop the motivated individual running OpenRouter tokens and some complex local agent setup, but that's such a small number of people it can be ignored.
Yes, but consumers have been dealing with the other side of this for decades. A wall of phone trees, auto-mailers, and now AI agents answering the phone or calling you outright. It's ridiculous that we need to put up with theirs and can't use our own.
Users have been locked down for decades on platforms with their dark UI patterns and rules. I welcome the user agent revolution in shopping, and put an end to the information asymmetry. We need to use AI to optimize our choices. Who can browse down to page 40 for the one honest product under all the ad crap.
The AI provlems right now are that 1. investors expect your have the AI boost, 2. competitors already use it, and cloning anything is easy now 3. customers use agentic shopping. This thread is about no 3, but a company that does nothing AI still finds itself dealing with all of them. It's a new world.
> AI agents are a real problem for a lot of interactions that previously assumed humans were making the decisions.
Perhaps Delta might have considered this when they introduced AI-driven price optimization ("what is the absolute highest we think this human will bear for this flight?"), not "Oh, we only ever assumed we'd be the ones to use AI for optimization purposes!".
>How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
Just like other companies that have similar low alternative services. They let you do it. They log and flag and as soon as you have a problem, instead of working to solve it, they see you are on the flagged list and you are now banned from the service. People who find themselves banned from an airline when they miss a connection or report lost luggage have done some other activity that got them to be flagged as a potential unwanted customer.
The misunderstanding is that they're not selling flights, they're mainly selling insurances and credit cards. The valuation of some airlines' loyalty programs is higher than their company valuation. That is: operating flights comes at a loss. Flights are just the bait, and then the process is designed to extract maximum value from the caught human through phsychological tricks. Agents are not so suspectible to those tricks, so the airline doesn't make enough money.
I don't think they're actually trying to stop you. Rather it's a public stance to protect them from customers' misaligned agents. They don't want to be liable for actions your agent took on your behalf; e.g. refunding a ticket when your agent bought the wrong one.
It's about segmentation or price discrimination. I was able to get the same hotel room $50/night cheaper when my agent browsed from a different country for example.
Shockingly enough you can in fact do the same thing with your own human hands (and plenty of people have been doing it for years to the point that it's a common tip for diasporeans).
Why would that be a reason why agents specifically are being banned?
Why would they need to stop you? Why can't you voluntarily respect their wishes? What's with this entitlement that AI users have that they have a right to unleash their automation on services that have made it clear that they do not want that.
Ideally the wish to not have your service accessed by automation should also be legally enforceable. And we need clear precident that users and operators of automation are 100% liable for the damages they cause.
The "ban" doesn't have to be an actual technical ban, but a "ban" in the sense that you automatically forfeit your rights to customer service or a refund if a human doesn't do the booking.
If you look at how airlines make money, you'll see that an agent skipping over the airline website's internal ads for the loyalty program, credit card partners, pushy upsells of seating/refundability, etc...destroys their revenue model. Not endorsing this approach of just banning agents, but it's easy to see why they don't know what to do yet.
I made a Chrome plugin for VRBO sites that parsed pet policy on vacation homes as the info was all over the listing and not consistent for visual parsing. In spite of aggressive backoff, a weekend's worth of usage by me and vrbo put the kibosh on my IP.
The problem is that AI agents play all sorts of games to get better prices, and this guzzles resources that are supposed to be for dealing with legitimate problems. e.g. If an airline is dealing with an AI caller that's rescheduling a flight it intentionally booked at the wrong time to shave a few bucks off an airfare, somebody who needs to cancel a flight to attend a funeral will wait longer in line. If a human does this to save a few bucks, you let them. It's not a big problem because most people place more value on their own time. If everybody uses AI agents to do this for them, then you have to do something.
Airlines and other companies are faced with a choice: Let everything go to shit for people who don't use AI agents, or start discouraging the use of AI agents. It will be interesting to see whether companies embrace anti-AI AI agents or try to weight the penalties such that deterrence is achieved without them. e.g. Would you continue using an AI agent to book flights if you faced a potential lifetime ban from that airline?
I personally like the idea of AI surcharges. The airline could put it in their ToS that any use of AI booking agents will result in a surcharge. If your account gets flagged for AI agent games, you get an AI surcharge slapped on your flight. In the case of a false positive, if a human calls up and demands the surcharge be dropped, you do it. If an AI agent calls to complain, you double it. Most users of AI agents don't want to deal with customer service to get surcharges dropped every time they book a flight. This would make it cheaper and/or easier to just book a flight yourself... or use a very well behaved AI agent.
The problem is that airlines play all sorts of games to get higher prices, and this guzzles resources that are supposed to be for dealing with legitimate problems.
It works both ways. If they can use AI to charge me more, I should be able to use AI to save a few dollars.
If you’re actually arguing they should set a fair, stable price and I should pay it, then I agree. But that shipped sailed decades ago.
It does work both ways. You can always use another airline. They're just saying they can rely on another customer.
I would tend to agree that there is the potential for airlines to be more open with how they price flights to spread the load out to let them minimize overall prices. An airline that worked openly with its customers to do this might do well.
Algorithmic pricing will, in general, invite the use of AI agents. Companies who are now considering it in places where it has not previously been used should probably pay attention to what happens here.
Using AI bots makes you more of a problem than the airline using AI to price seats. I can choose to fly another airline if I don't want AI-pricing, but that only works if jackasses aren't using their bots to snatch up seats they have not intention of actually sitting in.
I can choose to fly another airline if I don't want AI-pricing
Can you though? How would you even know? All I know is airline pricing has been a bit of a blackbox for as long as I've been a buyer of the tickets. Even if they aren't using AI, they're still playing games. And if they're games are such that using an AI on the buyer side, that's what people will use.
And to be clear, I have no desire to use AI to buy my tickets, certainly not the "buy now, refund tomorrow, buy again, repeat until flight time" stuff proposed in comments. I just want a ticket at a fair price, which to me basically means "roughly the same price the guy next to me paid"
It’s pretty easy to stop Claude or ChatGPT since they won’t fill CAPTCHAS or get around any step designed to stop them. They play nice. 99% of the population couldn’t figure out how to run any model that doesn’t.
So while it’s not an impenetrable barrier, it will almost completely solve the problem they’re trying to.
They won't with perfect accuracy, and I'm sure you're right that some methods will be a lot more difficult to detect reliably (e.g., a Muse agent that runs in a specific type of VM and is hosted in known data centers using specific network providers vs an LLM moving your laptop's cursor to navigate the website).
But pretty much every company that's involved with payment risk assessments, identity verification, or bot detection (Forter, Incode, Akamai, etc.) now has services they're trying to sell to merchants so that they can identify agentic traffic. Time will tell how effective they are with the different varieties of automation.
Some merchants want that capability to make sure legitimately authorized AI agents don't get unduly tangled in fraud prevention systems, but others, like United it seems, will use it to try to block them outright.
It's pretty easy to circumvent all those checks if you're doing normal-ish things (like doing a single series of searches to prepare to purchase a single flight) and their detection doesn't ban a large fraction of non-bot customers. Those companies might sell bot detection, but it only works against the poorly coded bots and legitimately abusive accounts (sometimes) if you don't turn the false positive dial way up.
Agent use might indicate large disposable income, but agents locking up inventory that other passengers with large disposable incomes could have purchased is a net negative unless the agent-using passengers actually keep the seats.
As plenty of others in this thread have pointed out, agents tend to book first and then cancel later if they don't get post-approval from their user. That ruins the experience for all the other potential passengers who could have purchased those tickets and it's clearly better from a business standpoint to prioritize the other potential passengers over the jackasses who care so little about their seats they couldn't even be bothered to book the seats themselves.
> I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible
It is still but you're not shopping around prices based off "you have a product, I have money". You're shopping around because "you have a product that others also sell and I will pay any one of you the least amount of money I can get away with".
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
I proactively answered this very question in my own comment. Initially they will try and block your chrome plugin and if they fail, then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website. More context in my own comment but this is a very reasonable question to ask.
> Initially they will try and block your chrome plugin and if they fail, then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website.
In which case the next step will be AI plugged into a full mouse and keyboard emulator set up that plugs into a USB port and HDMI to read the screen.
And if they try to block that, I would claim it to be an ADA violation because it would be an excellent product for blind people and repetitive strain injury people. Their lawyers will be shit scared when I expose that they're systematically charging disabled people with assistive devices $50 more.
> In which case the next step will be AI plugged into a full mouse and keyboard emulator set up that plugs into a USB port and HDMI to read the screen.
Sure but at that point you're noise and not going to affect the bottom line. Running an MCP server makes the feature available to millions of CharGPT/Claude/Cursor/etc customers.
Until blocking the "normal" way to use agents becomes common enough that someone starts selling an off the shelf "Agentic KVM" and then the arms race begins.
Fucking tickets are like playing some crazy lottery bullshit. Look from an iPhone. Prices go up. Look too many times, prices go up. Look on the wrong day prices go up.
How a single damned person on HN could root for the airlines is bonkers. They deserve nothing but contempt.
I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible - right, and then your child spends 100k in amazon orders and we blame the merchants for not having better checks. Or the state fines the merchant for not ensuring that a person did indeed check in or attest to something personally. How do you prove the LLM collected your TOS agreement? I used to want this too, but having engineered multiple systems in regulated industries, automation will never be as simple as we want it to be.
The product-for-money part is never the problem. It's always the refunds, the chargebacks, the customer service complaints, the person filing a complaint with regulators.
A lot of the systems that relied on low levels of these situations are about to be tested by waves of agents doing everything they can to take advantage of the rules: Chargebacks, complaints, refunds, cancellations.
I don't know but given the fact we now live in a post-truth era and heavy AI agent/assistants users now embrace heavily hallucinations and have stopped checking output quality and sources anymore like they used to in 2024 and early 2025, I would do the opposite. Detect AI use as much as possible and charge them more automatically as the customer behind becomes the easiest to trick.
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
The endgame is just to raise prices for everyone.
It's not like airlines are making a ton of money. Everything affects their profits and small margins.
Do you mean stop gouging some customers based on information asymmetry? Doesn’t bother me.
Imagine if you just went to their site and honestly got the best price that day / week.
I’m actually skeptical that there are loss-leader seats being sold on normal routes (eg where one airline is not trying to force another out of business). Does anybody have a source for that? I have always assumed that low prices were to extract as much value as possible from a plane on a given route.
Because the product is often not what we think it is anymore.
Surely the airline company makes money with the actual flight... but also they might start to make money with selling private data. Maybe they even start to make MORE money due to a commission on car rental, hotel, tourist attraction, etc than the actual flight.
The "product", due to pressure from competition, enshittification, novel alternatives, is changing and we as customers don't necessarily notice it. In fact the company is probably doing its very best so that we don't and can thus benefit with side effects that we are not aware of, otherwise we would ask for compensation.
So... I'm not justifying the practice but also business wise, it makes sense that they try to keep control of everything around their product.
The relationship is unfortunately different nowadays. «You have money, we are going to manipulate you». When the profit demands on them being able to manipulate you, an AI is bad news.
Chrome has this architectural problem where the webpage can see what extensions you have installed. United could just refuse to run if you have that installed.
You don't seem to understand, it's fine for them to use AI to use "dynamic pricing" but for you to navigate their ridiculous refund/claim processes, using AI, that's "unfair"
I have booked several flights using cdp browsing with my local agent. The more friction they add for agents, the more there will be for humans and the market will vote with their feet (or agents).
They're going to put it in their terms of carriage that if you use an AI agent to book a flight they get to dump you in the middle of the Pacific. Hope you're a good swimmer.
Because Claude can be legally compelled to advertise its "claude" acting on behalf of a human? Such a policy isn't that crazy.
Now sure you could bypass this by running your own harness/tooling, but then you'd be in breach of laws. There's various policies like this today around web scraping
There are laws? So you mean all of those "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" that are UAs that are clearly scraping anything and everything are doing something illegal? How reassuring.
> I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible.
It is - these restrictions are part of the product. How you allow people to purchase your offerings is part of the business and has its own costs associated with it. How much more would you pay in order to have a LLM purchase a ticket for you?
> How you allow people to purchase your offerings is part of the business and has its own costs associated with it.
I agree. Complaining "I have money, now give me your product!" is tantamount to "I have a product, now give me your money!"
That said, this and so many other aspects of a functional capitalist society rely on customers and corporations having roughly equal leverage over one another. But since corporations have insanely centralized bargaining power as collectives, have bent the legal system in their favor at every turn, and are consistently overprivileged by technological innovation (AI-as-price-researchers being one of the few exceptions), I have long since abandoned any social contract with them.
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
Maybe they won't be able to stop you, but the average Joe won't be able to cover his tracks as effectively, or most likely, Claude Code and others will by default be required to assert the browser for the current session is being operated by an agent.
Average Joe will cover his tracks just as effectively. An average Joe will use the Claude Desktop app which opens a built-in browser where agent does the clicking - difficult to distinguish from a human doing the clicking.
They can ban you by name and birthdate combo, united mileage number, and/or your debit/credit card pan if detected. They have no obligation to allow you to purchase air travel online, it is their right to refuse you service.
(know folks inside United, but not speaking in any way for the company, I just know how the process works, as a curious security person)
just fyi: I think you and parent poster mean abliterated models, not obliterated. They are not destroyed, rather some weights are ablated, thus abliteration or ablation.
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
They don’t.
When a dispute that either party(you or United airlines in this theoretical case) decides to litigate an argument far enough that it becomes clear you used an AI agent like Claude then you are going to run afoul of the CFAA[1] and are going to get fucked legally because they stated who could access their site and you violated it with your agents against their stated will.
This is a legal ward, not a technical one. Violate it at your own peril.
Can you cite a single DoJ case where a person was indicted for using an LLM user agent to access otherwise publicly-accessible resources under the provisions of the CFAA?
they don't care if you do that, because as far as they're concerned it's you that booked that ticket. you can't turn around and demand a refund or sue them because it "wasn't you, it was your agent".
they just don't want the possible liability of dealing with whatever legalities that might occur from autonomous agent usage. and i can't really blame em for that.
I've been saying this same thing. It used to feel like businesses actually appreciated your custom to some extent. Not all of them, not every time, but in general it seemed like they wanted to give you something in exchange for your money and saw you as a partner in their success.
Now it feels like a lot of businesses don't see the customer as any sort of partner. They're an obstacle that stands between the business and the customer's bank account, to be removed by any means possible. Providing goods or services in exchange for part of that bank account is merely an unfortunate and undesirable necessity that they haven't yet figured out how to avoid.
Then again are you a large business that hides behind customer service agents (humans) that have no power to solve your problems, or hide behind automated email responses.
Tangent: it was always odd to me that "booking a [flight|hotel|concert tickets]" is the canonical example of a task that can be automated by an agent. These are tasks that are:
- already streamlined (spend 2min on Google flights, seatgeek, etc...); we aren't stuck with early web UX and latency
- I want to have 100% control of the outcome or would have to write a long list of preferences and rules (middle seats, layovers, etc...) to feel good about trusting automation
- require making a large payment. the agent is not getting free reign to use my cc
- give me some personal satisfaction and enjoyment - its delightful to look foward to a trip, concert, etc... and planning is part of the fun and anticipation imo
Booking a flight is obfuscated and you'll have to comparison shop across multiple websites or even devices to get the better deals.
Same with hotels - they have tons of rate obfuscation and you have to cross shop their individual websites and the aggregators as well as third party discounts to figure out best deals.
Concerts are similar but different. Sometimes they should be selling tickets via lottery but make everyone fight over them. Other times there are presales. Other times you have to shop through scalpers. Arguably tickets are less painful than the other two, but they're still a manipulative mess where you waste a lot of time.
For changing browsers, IPs, user agents, etc., it probably rounds to 0%. There are some edge cases booking flights directly from national carriers from within/outside the country. For using third party OTAs for hotels, I'd guess maybe 5% or so on average depending on your usage, but the financial tradeoff isn't directly comparable. You can probably save a bit by booking third party, especially if you haven't bothered signing up for hotel loyalty programs [1]. There are...let's say "discontinuous" long tail issues with booking hotels third party, where probably 95-99% of the time you'll have no problems, but when there is one, you'll have a much better chance of having a very bad time. The price gap on flights is probably considerably smaller (commissions on flights are much lower than commissions on hotels), but if you have any sort of problem (e.g. a flight being delayed when you have a layover), you have a much better chance of getting screwed.
Personally I mostly use Google Flights for flight search (or seats.aero for award travel search) and booking.com for hotel search, and then book directly. I've booked probably 100+ hotels through booking.com and then quit entirely after hitting that long tail bad experience.
[1]: I'm a few years out of date on this and don't know the current legalities, but major OTAs (Booking.com and Expedia, who control probably 80-90% of third party hotel bookings) used to have a "most favored nation" clause that prevented hotels from advertising lower prices through other channels without a previous commercial relationship. Signing up for a loyalty program qualifies, so being logged in for direct hotel bookings can sometimes get you cheaper room rates. (In the US, things like AARP and AAA memberships also work.) I know the EU was pushing back on these clauses but I'm not clear on what the current state of things is.
Booking and Expedia and other marketplaces also have a habit of packaging weird short-term rental operations to seem like a hotel. I wound up in a strange city where there was no reception, no lobby, and I later figured out I had failed to confirm my room by not replying to an email that a vendor sent me which I never saw.
There are a few more modern OTAs that rebate a portion of the OTA commission back to you (see Rove, often rebating 15+%) and more that rebate a flat rate (Chase at 8%, Amex at 5%, Cap1 at 10%, etc). The "member pricing" is often 1-2% lower at most, so going through an OTA should get you around 10% off rack rate at minimum, more if commissions are particularly high (hotels pay about 20-30+%, so it's not uncommon to see 20% returns on Rove. Highest I've seen is 50%!).
OTAs can play "member" pricing games too I think so there's even better deals to be had.
So you definitely need to comparison shop, I make my agent take the pricing from all the OTAs and calculate a post-rebate price, then pick the lowest one.
> There are a few more modern OTAs that rebate a portion of the OTA commission back to you (see Rove, often rebating 15+%) and more that rebate a flat rate (Chase at 8%, Amex at 5%, Cap1 at 10%, etc).
You are still overpaying when using Amex/Chase/Cap1 portals.
$105-110 book on Amex/chase/cap1 portal
$101-102 after 5-8% travel portal cash back
versus
$100 book direct Hilton/marriott/IHG rate
$96-97 after 3-4% cash back everything card.
Don’t even get me started on “premium programs” like Amex FHR, Chase Edit, etc. Probably overpaying by $100+/night. Much cheaper to just pay for 4 pm checkout. And early check-in is dead anyway.
This hasn't been my experience. I usually search through Booking.com and when I contacted the hotel directly, found that the direct rate is higher than the booking.com rate.
One datapoint me: I never see any difference in flight prices, but I haven't tried VPN-ing into the site from another country. For hotels, prices I find through aggregators can be as much as 50% lower than the hotel's own website price, even when their website claims it's showing me the lowest price.
Anywhere from 45% to 5% IMO. So you can almost always save $5, but sometimes you can save like $50+. That said, another big piece I didn't mention is that often you also are watching the rate day by day because timing is a big piece too.
Just by signalling interest by lingering and searching for the same flight multiple times a day I have bumped the price for the ticket that I was interested in.
Just a thought but I guess if the airline web services were overwhelmed with noise, they wouldn't be able to do such price adjustments reliably. The only risk is that this might bump the prices for everyone and it will turn out that consumers are not price sensitive enough to force airlines to not do this.
The most I've seen is about 25%, around £500. The difference was due to deal only offered on a one way ticket when bought through the site of a code-sharing airline.
Then you my friend have been overpaying for flights and hotels. Next time you want a holiday, try the classic techniques - Incognito windows, multiple sites, and then compare it with your Google Flights searching
This is an easily debunked myth, for first-party direct bookings. Third party aggregators and package deals are shady as hell and do all kinds of tricks. But I challenge you to record a screen cast proving that you're seeing different prices for a direct booking for the same ticket (including fare class) just based on different browsers or profiles.
This used to be fairly widespread a long time ago. There used to be fares that are restricted for sale only in a certain country's POS (I believe these are still alive in ATPCO) but not really used anymore.
I remember examples of round-trip ticket A-B-A costing $x in A, $x/2 in B (plus another fare for country C) for some city pairs, but I don't think this has really been a thing in a decade at least.
Are you only just finding out about dynamic pricing? It's still in full swing everywhere. If you want to witness it, the Chinese websites Temu & AliExpress experiment with this on nearly every item. Flights are exactly the same, and because you haven't experienced it shows you haven't caught it
I have done that at least a few times in the last few years and I've never found anything cheaper than Google flights then booking directly with the airline.
Bonus points I'm not booking through shady websites like Expedia.
When I was the A/B test engineer at Travelocity I proposed a test to automatically select all default criteria from a search so that a user was instantly dropped into check out after entering search criteria in the homepage. It was never approved:(
I don't find it streamlined at all. Having to enter an obnoxious amount of personal details, sifting through pages of dark patterns trying to sell you upgrades, addons, meals, extra baggage, insurance..., clicking through an extra step to say you don't want to hire a car or book a hotel, the seat selection page that tries to trick you into paying for a seat when you can actually just click "next" and get a free seat assigned, dodging paying "in your local currency" at an inflated rate when my bank will do it at the interbank rate. And that's if the airline's crappy site is actually working on that particular day and isn't crippled by some javascript error caused by mountains of front-end cruft.
I do agree that watching rates over time matters a lot for flights in comparison to rate variation across sites, but there are very much places that will overcharge you compared to others.
The mismatch here is that you don't have a personal assistant, but the executives in charge of developing these personal AI assistants do, so they expect everybody to want one if only the AI gets good enough at it and the price is right.
Having never had a PA myself, I have no strong prediction here either way, but I think this can explain for a lot of the confusion of "who'd want this"/"who would not want this".
When I've worked for places that had people who could book flights for me, I usually ended up preferring to do it myself. Turns out I have a lot of small preferences.
Also one time it turned out a meeting I didn't even need to be at cost the taxpayer $900 in flights, which I would never have agreed to if I had seen the price before it was booked.
> it was always odd to me that "booking a [flight|hotel|concert tickets]" is the canonical example
Yeah, the weird part is how the people promoting the idea seem to believe the average (?) consumer will tolerate a particular risk/reward profile: It implies over-spending or cancellation fees or return-restocking fees are beyond reasonable concern, trivial compared to the minutes it saves the user who never does any verification. ("It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?")
Hrm. Flight booking is ok, but the search optimisation problem is very tedious for anything more complex than a simple return between two fixed places on fixed dates.
Hotel bookings are mostly fine. Airbnb, bookings.com, fine.
But concerts? Concert booking is fucked. It's the main reason I don't go to concerts, I feel like I'm being absolutely screwed over by ticketing middlemen at every step of a horrible torturous process.
Came here to say the same thing. It's probably because it's hyped towards people that already don't make these decisions, they have people they outsource it to book flights, reserve table at restaurants etc.
But for most people, we don't do it frequently enough that it's actually a big problem to solve. And when we do, it's a significant enough investment that we want a say.
It honestly just goes to show what a stress inducing mess airline sites are. People are desperate to offload it and avoid it, even at the risk of trusting a robot with a credit card.
If this approach of using AI to get around intentionally hostile platforms continues, it would be better for everyone to just regulate. Especially the environment, which air travel is already extremely bad for.
Are you kidding me? Booking an airline ticket is one of the easier parts of navigating today's internet.
My tech illiterate parents ask me for help with all kinds of dumb things, but they fly at least four times a year and have never needed help booking an airline ticket.
You and me are using different Internets, then. Over in my reality, booking a flight is one of the more annoying experiences ever, due to amount of dark patterns, broken UX, and that's only when it's a direct flight near-term, where the choice boils down to "pay $$$ for minimally humane experience with Big Named Airline, or pay $ for cheap airline experience with the only one cheap airline that services this route".
Booking a hotel when traveling with spouse, or spouse and kids, and therefore having some level of expectations around quality, is a stressful lottery. Almost always some dimension (space, bed type/quality, noise, smell) had been misrepresented on the listing/photos to almost, but not quite, point of a bald-faced lie; without time spent on careful review of listings, all of them. When I travel solo, I don't care, so I don't mind.
Contrast that with shopping for any kind of item, even expensive - UX on some sites may be annoying, but at this point, as long as I confirm the site is legitimate and the listing shows the actual product I want to buy, I can safely drop $$$ and get what I want within advertised delivery time. No worries.
Booking mid-market hotels is easy, just go to booking.com, filter to 8+ score, four stars, go to the map and pick the location, done.
Finding good-but-cheap hotels is harder, because it's zero sum. You are looking for hotels that are mispriced usually due to a lack of information. AI doesn't solve this problem, it actually makes it worse by fixing inefficiencies in the market.
We must be opposites, I despise booking flights and find the websites often fail on payments, are full of way too many steps, and require that you restart if you ever make a mistake.
In the last millennium I worked for a newspaper and what we were promising advertising clients is that if they paid us more, readers could buy advertised products off our web site.
The example the publisher demanded we launch with was the ability to buy a car. Nobody bought a car off our web site.
Oh my god, have you booked flights with a low-cost carrier, going through the multiple pages of things you don’t want?
“Are you sure? Really? Don't click here to not add this to your cart. Check this box to not receive promotional emails unless you’ve touched any other radio button the past 3 days.”
Airlines can a) improve their UX, or b) ban agents from booking flights. No brainer, I’d think.
I think it’s the VCs projecting their lifestyle. It’s such a pain to buy all these plane and concert tickets every week ugh. Meanwhile most people fly maybe once a year
It's truly weird that my 70yo mother can buy plane tickets or book a hotel without a hassle but someone claiming to be 10x programmer can't figure out how to use a website to do this and thinks that an agent is the best option. As you've noted, many airlines and hotels have made the process extremely streamlined (unless you're trying to get a "deal" in which case yeah, it's going to be more complicated).
Really, the problem is that a lot of people that are all-in on AIs aren't very good at a lot of life's little details so they think that AIs will solve everything and don't understand why nobody else agrees. If they got out and lived a little they would quickly realize that AIs are overkill or just the wrong tool for most things, but they have to actually experience life to learn that.
> It's truly weird that my 70yo mother can buy plane tickets or book a hotel without a hassle but someone claiming to be 10x programmer can't figure out how to use a website to do this and thinks that an agent is the best option.
They’re not saying they can’t do it. They’re explaining they don’t want to do it. I have a CS degree and I also hate booking flights. It’s a mess of dark patterns, up-sell, time limits, and details intended to trip up customers. For example, you might not realise there’s an unusually small carry-on limitation until you’re so far into the process that you think “fuck it I guess I’ll have to pay that extra charge.” God help you if you want to compare the exact arrangement between airlines because they do their best to differentiate the service so you can’t compare apples with apples. That’s an intentional product design choice.
I’ve no doubt your mother can book flights. I doubt she’s consistently booking the best value flights.
I can't fathom why anyone wouldn't have this done by an AI agent if the agent is reliable. Bookings and similar daily chores are exactly the kind of things nobody in their right mind would care about to do personally and where it's so great when you're rich enough to have a personal assistant that does all this for you. (The latter is a presumption, I'm not rich.)
It is streamlined in a hostile way, obfuscating prices and hiding charges. AI agents are the perfect tool for wading through systems deliberately made to disorient and exhaust a reasonable shopper.
Weird broad ad hominem you've deployed to dismiss trying to find better prices
i mean for most people, there's a real pain point. having to sit down and spend an hour or more booking flights, accoms, etc for a trip is a pain in the ass
I enjoy doing it! I definitely want a say in where I'm staying and which flight I'm taking.
If I had an AI doing it, I'd probably spend an hour typing out all of my requirements and thought processes, in the hope that it would make sensible choices. Then sit anxiously whilst it goes off and does its thing.
Amen to this, but it‘s not odd. It‘s a sign of how detached Silicon Valley people and more broadly tech people are from the rest of the world’s population. This is what they think a common problem really is.
There might be another reason, i.e. building visual cases for these examples for demos is easier and marketing thinks that leveraging leisure elective activities is a good way to associate the product with a positive experience and perception.
same with reservations, ride shares and hotels and anything else. the K shaped economy in action. Rich people want meta glasses so they don't need to interact with the poors, even their own servants. I book flights rarely enough its kind of fun.
Somebody once said, that airline booking pages itself are one of the most sophisticated CAPTCHAs. No idea if this is true, but they obviously don't want their customers to easily find the best deals.
I guess the best option is, to use a good reseller/travel agency that provides an API/MCP for booking and managing flights.
For finding the cheapest deals agents can still be used. Just the booking itself is probably better done manually. It also eliminates the risk that the agent does something stupid.
edit: they might try to block agents, but this won't be possible with browser use. they can always throttle users by IP or fingerprint. Letting an agent book a flight might be risky, because they might cancel a booking or impose a fee if they somehow detect it.
Maybe I have Stockholm syndrome, but what about the booking pages is super complicated?
I often use Kayak or google flights to screen multiple airlines, but once I've found a flight I like, I generally book it on the airline's site, and the UI is basically identical to Kayak. Put in some dates, some locations, click search, browse through the options, pick the one you want. If you are flexible on dates, there is a little +/- 3 days checkbox that will show a table of flight prices.
I'm probably stupid, but what are the improvements that would help customers find the best deals?
You have to click through multiple upsell pages, including "scary" boxes like "No, don't protect my $XXXX.XX purchase". And then "pick a seat", but once you do, it turns out there's actually a charge for that, so you click the browser back button, which ends up resetting your session.
Hotel sites are dramatically worse IMO. Airlines have mostly made things mostly understandable.
Now, if you're buying from consolidators on their consistently-shady-looking sites, which will contact you later with your ticket if they got it at all: oh yeah those are sometimes total insanity.
Yeah I only book airline tickets direct at this point - Kayak has an option for that (which is sometimes ignored) and Google Flights does a good job. In the end though I just have my two standard vendors and am only mildly price sensitive.
I'm not familiar with shady sites, but probably >75% of my previous 50 trips were booked through Kayak or similar sites. They make it painless to group everything you need for where you are going, and if there is any problem, like a flight delay, etc., since it was booked all together, they just adjust the future bookings/book other flights as necessary to make sure your trip is smooth riding. Any time I need more than just one resource (car, hotel, flight), I use a consolidator because if they aren't bundled, no one lifts a finger to help you when anything out of your control happens, but they bend over backwards to help if you used a booking site.
The last consolidator I used (I forget the name, but it was nearly "obviously a shell Amazon company"-level strange) saved me nearly $1000 on three flights and two hotels, but it routed me through seven completely different domains to do it, sometimes with the bulk of the page in an embedded iframe for yet another site. Once it was two layers of iframes deep. I checked because by this point I was flabbergasted by the whole process.
Many pages took tens of seconds to load and had a single field to fill out, broken links to information, etc. I had to fill in my personal info three times, on different pages, with wildly different layouts and misspelled fields. It had to be done over four separate days, because two pages had 503 errors and a couple others told me to wait up to 5 business days for "procesing" or "processin" or other misspellings, though it only turned out to need a couple minutes or hours.
I watched my card for unexpected charges like a maniac as emails from different domains every time came in to inform me that I was still good to go. But the tickets came through fine, about 3 weeks later, less a week before my flight.
From reddit, I'm under the impression that this is a somewhat average experience.
probably this is different between different airlines and continents, and is definitely easier if you regularly fly with the same airline on the same route and know its flow, pricing and rules...
but generally in Europe many airlines will by default show you only the base fare price without carry-on bags, checked bags, seats, etc., and the surcharges aren't fixed (some flights may have cheaper bags, seats, than the others, on the same airline), and then there are multiple levels of "Economy" pricing with some of the options packaged into the price (e.g. Austrian has "Economy Basic", "Economy Light", "Economy Comfort", "Economy Flex"), but sometimes buying Economy Basic + baggage + seat may be cheaper than Economy Comfort.
Also the rules of what is included in which package differ from the route (longer routes have more included), and from the operating airline (e.g. Air France website also allows you to book lower cost Transavia flights, Austrian/Lufthansa websites also allow you to book lower cost Eurowings/Discover flights...)
And then there is the hell which is Ryanair, where you have to go through multiple pages of "no I don't want travel insurance", "no I don't want to rent a car", "no I don't want to buy fasttrack", "no I don't want to book a hotel with you", "no I don't want to buy a seat", "no I really don't want anything else"...
And all of these employ gray patterns like the "no I don't want it" button being less visible/prominent than the "I do want to pay more" button... (and this is not only true for Ryanair, but also for Austrian's "Upgrade to Economy Comfort" vs. "Continue with current fare", which conveniently shows before selecting if you want bags, seats, etc. where it actually could've been useful if it showed you that you can pay less)
Also most of the airline search sites don't allow you to filter non-stop flights, so if you're flexible on dates it will show you "cheaper flights" on other days, but instead of 2h flight from Vienna to Paris it's gonna be 5 hours because of a transfer in Amsterdam/Frankfurt...
What could be better would be "I want to select a seat at check-in, I want to fly with 1 checked bag and no carry-on bags, I don't want anything else, I want a non-stop flight, show me cheapest prices for this"...
I have to agree, it wasn't really so hard before Basic Economy was invented like 15 years ago and spread overnight to all carriers. You mostly just wanted the normal base ticket, or you wanted the much more expensive business class. But now each airline has their own byzantine distinctions and between the lowest type and the type that used to be the lowest. You then have to know that for X airline, the cheapest ticket includes (0 or 1) rollaboard size suitcases, and that bringing one will cost ($Y) per bag. And then do the math of whether you're better off paying a bag fee or paying for the next ticket up. And that's just the bag aspect.
> but generally in Europe many airlines will by default show you only the base fare price without carry-on bags, checked bags, seats, etc., and the surcharges aren't fixed (some flights may have cheaper bags, seats, than the others, on the same airline), and then there are multiple levels of "Economy" pricing with some of the options packaged into the price (e.g. Austrian has "Economy Basic", "Economy Light", "Economy Comfort", "Economy Flex"), but sometimes buying Economy Basic + baggage + seat may be cheaper than Economy Comfort.
> Also the rules of what is included in which package differ from the route (longer routes have more included), and from the operating airline (e.g. Air France website also allows you to book lower cost Transavia flights, Austrian/Lufthansa websites also allow you to book lower cost Eurowings/Discover flights...)
All of those different fares and their differences are clearly labeled (because the point of differentiation is to have the cheap options for the price conscious travellers, but to have actual benefits of the more expensive options so that they get picked). Luggage allowance is always clearly stated for instance, both during booking and afterwards on your booking details. (Compared to the US, at least with Delta, where if you want to know how much luggage you're allowed to have, they send you to a shitty form where you have to fill in trip details so that it tells you).
For international flights, the prices on airlines' sites are almost always higher than what I was quoted in the search.
Running Firefox on Linux I often get stuck and need to switch to Chrome. Each time I hit Submit I get a dedicated page indicating it's loading the next one and there's always a noticeable probability I won't get to the next page.
It's showing its age unfortunately. For my last set of flights often the price displayed was not available after clicking through on google or on the airline's booking page and flight combos on the airline's sites that I was looking for wouldn't come up in the search :/
There isn't any money in building api for a platform somebody else owns. At best you do a travel management system for corporate stuff. That kind of a startup definitely exists, funded by YC about ten years ago
I forget if it was in an official airline or an aggregator. But the page had a built in time for deal expiration that was a standalone javacript timer.
I get why they have done it but it’s also a symptom of over segmenting the market based on time. The airlines have absolutely made this bed by having such adversarial pricing.
Airlines are by nature a risk-averse industry, and throwing something as fundamental as inventory out of whack would lead to unjustifiable losses. Threats need to be prevented not reacted to.
Imagine you're an airline and have the ability to hire smart people and can equip them with ai tools.
This is something that should be solved with a 2 person team over a weekend.
Airline prices are the absolute worse! I'm trying to book 5 tickets together between 2 major airports that I have flown multiple times in the past. The price has been a rollercoaster!
$2200, I waited a bit too long to confirm with the group
$4000 then $3500, then $2500 which changed within 5 minutes to $2600 and then $3000 and now $5000+
Other than memestocks, nothing else has such insane price volatility!
>Somebody once said, that airline booking pages itself are one of the most sophisticated CAPTCHAs.
I think this is only true now that the AI's can interpret the pages correctly. Failing to decern the correct information is, I believe, the more human response.
The airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone without giving specific people (atleast those who they don't deem "worthy") an edge. Here's a great, short comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50459444
It's mostly a commodity, specially for economy class where price matters.
After gas and grocery, its the most vicious, cut throat business where a customer will switch from United to Delta over $5. Unlike gas and grocery they cannot compete on volume (even a 747 has a fixed capacity per leg).
It sounds counterproductive but personal AI agents cause a local optima while overall increasing cost for rest of the travelers.
For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate and not just by a few cents because the nominal cost of an economy seat is likely $250, not $50.
Now United isn't against offering a $50 flight to customers who they deem "worth it" - they just don't want it to be anyone who can run an MCP connector. They are just betting that the "worth it" will "make it up" in the long run vs. a customer who's just there for the $50 seat.
What happens if you say "screw it, I'll code my own custom MCP connector to United.com!"
Well, eventually they will try and block you and then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website.
I do not understand the airline's side of that argument, sorry. It seems like what you are describing is:
1. The airline is willing to sell a few tickets for $50 instead of $250, but only to the folks who it deems "worth it" and advertises accordingly.
2. Those $50 tickets are below cost, so each $50 ticket sold means everyone else will have to pay a little more.
3. If enough "general population" people find and buy those $50 tickets instead, the airline will discontinue the practice.
If this is indeed the case -- good riddance to that practice! Why should I be sorry that it goes?
Airlines have a large fixed cost and a small marginal cost for each passenger on a plane. If they charge $250 for each seat and half the seats are empty then they are wasting capacity and have to charge enough for each seat such that half the seats pay for an entire flight. If they can fill the second half of the plane with $50 passengers then they are providing more service (a social good!) and can perhaps reduce the expensive tickets to $200.
Of course everyone wants the $50 tickets, so the market gets all weird trying to both fill flights and charge as much as possible, while being competitive with other airlines that are trying to do the same thing. Because there are competing airlines, the final margins stay low, so the airlines are barely "maximizing" profits so much as they are simply maintaining profitability.
So why don't they just offer prices (EDIT: starting prices) at $150 instead. Then the plane won't be half full but perhaps 90%. The price for those last 10% of seats can go up or down 1. depending on the demand for that flight and 2. how much time is left.
Because they want it both ways, sell the tickets they were going to sell anyays/regardless of price, and then again the two super underpriced tickets to people who wouldn't have paid if it weren't $50; tada, you've made an extra $100.
I have no problem with dynamic pricing. Many companies in different industries do that, even if they do not have the large fixed / small marginal cost model. That is just business.
But once the company starts defining "worthy of cheap tickets" groups the system becomes very murky; and murky systems impose costs on everyone.
> If this is indeed the case -- good riddance to that practice! Why should I be sorry that it goes?
The effort you (and others) are willing to go to get the $50 doesn't seem to match up with the "fine, the practice should go". If it doesn't matter, why expend effort to do it?
Because while the $50 deal exists then everyone has the right to fight for it (I would even argue that it's rational!). I don’t see how that’s incompatible with wishing the $50 deal didn’t exist in the first place. Pricing that rewards whoever spends the most time searching is a bad system, and agents are a fair fix because they make that local price optima findable for everyone.
I think pricing that rewards searching is actually very fair and good. You give customers choice between money and effort - rich people will book the first flight and pay more, subsidized poorer people.
If agents make finding cheaper tickets trivial and the default, customers lose that choice.
Most of those "it's $50 for you while everyone else pays $250 at the same time" tickets do not go to low income customers.
They go to those who can steer future purchases: travel office employees on personal trips, etc. That's a form of a soft kickback. The $50 tickets due to an airline making a bad demand forecast and running a fire sale on unsold tickets will not disappear.
Suppose you want to get people to a party, and offer $50 early bird tickets, and want eg a gender balance. But they just get scalped and resold for $300. Why should you care, you authoritarians? Scalpers have just as much right as anyone to purchase tickets…
Actually if I ran an airline I’d try to prevent everyone from being able to snipe the best seats with their agents as soon as they came out. Using lotteries, special manual two factor authentication etc.
People already were going to great lengths to find airline ticket deals. If there was ever an edge in buying tickets as soon as they were available, that would already be heavily exploited by now. By the way, I'm fairly certain it's the opposite. Airline tickets are not typically a good deal when they are first made available.
This is true of a whole lot of stuff. Many special offers are loss leaders that largely rely on human behavior to make up for the losses, like a credit card that gives you $500 cash back if you spend $2500 in the first 3 months. This only works when a fair number of the humans stick with that card long term, if there are agents running around creditmaxxing then the offers don't work any more.
If you are an inveterate optimizer, it works to your advantage. If you are not, well I guess you just don't care. So net net, yes we prefer this equilibrium.
I think there's a fourth class (to the third class another commenter mentions) that you're missing here, which the credit card example makes obvious: people who fall for the "human behavior" trick the company aims for, and are exploited or hurt by those practices.
Credit card case: people prone to overspending and falling in a debt loop, lured in by $500 due to being poor or in precarious situation (perhaps from falling in similar traps in the past), and who end up keeping the card long-term, as the 3-months spending requirement ends up trapping them in the CC spending loop.
This equilibrium you describe, is in many cases built on preying on the weakest and most vulnerable, so no, I don't think it's fine.
You're forgetting about the third class of person, who thinks it's not worth their time, and, frankly, distasteful to spend that much time and effort optimizing, but also finds the offers presented to those that aren't optimizing insultingly poor value.
That's the kind of person that will not download the app to get the coupons and hunt for the good deals at Safeway, but will also not accept the exceptionally high sticker price, and instead will go shop at another store.
Perfect, if the business model is to scam you out of money because you don't use a service, then it should go away, regardless of the few people getting 'benefit'.
I don't follow why an mcp server buying a 50 dollar flight would make costs to up? Surely an mcp server booking flights doesn't mean there is more demand for flights overall? I'm not about to take a trip somewhere just because I have an mcp server to book it.
If you were going to take a flight anyway and it finds you a 50 dollar option instead of a 200 dollar option, that's very expensive for United.
if you're paying for flights you don't want to take, then I'm sure they're happy for the extra spending money of course. Why would you want to do that?
They might need to have seats on that flight offered to meet a contract with the airport, or they might be using personalized pricing to only offer the 50 dollar price to certain customers (if you keep searching often the price goes up for instance) or any number of other stuff. Airline pricing is like car pricing.
No it is not. Cars have static MSRPs and then you haggle over the price person-to-person at a dealer. Airlines prices are based on markets (literal demand and supply between city pairs,) expected load factor, and what can best be described as a min-maxing algorithm to minimize spoilage (% of unsold seats when the flight takes off.) It's all predictive analytics, constraints modeling, and optimization at scale while finding opportunities here and there to maximize within local factors.
Contractual discounts--which corporations do have--are usually balanced by a guaranteed spend figure. For small and midsized companies, the spend is often paid in advance, to the benefit of the airline, which can carry the float and lock up a portion of market certainty.
My two cents: I have a deep amount of respect for United's tech stack. It is the best amongst US airlines and among the best in the world. However, this is the wrong move for them, and unless other airlines follow (doubtful, since United taking the lead here gives others competitive advantage,) United will have to backtrack in a year or two.
There's a surprisingly high price floor on airline tickets. Like $30 (one way) in fees to the government and the departure airport. Plus the incremental fuel [0] and any complimentary consumables, etc.
Not much of a factor on more expensive fares, but for short flights where a $50-100 fare is realistic.
[0]: even with today's oil prices, the extra fuel is only $20-30 for a transcontinental US flight. negligible for short flights.
> If you were going to take a flight anyway and it finds you a 50 dollar option instead of a 200 dollar option, that's very expensive for United.
And? They offered a $50 ticket. Did they expect people not to buy it?
If I search manually and find the $50 flight I planned spending $200 on, I’m not going to decide it’s too cheap. MCP acts the same. For at least a decade there have been services that will alert you when a specific flight drops in price, letting a human basically do what the agents are doing.
If United doesn’t want to sell a ticket for $50, then they should, y’know, not sell tickets for $50.
If airlines didn’t want to play pricing games, they could stop playing pricing games. List a standard fare for a route if you want to sell fares at a standard rate. If you want to try and squeeze me for an extra $20 because I’m buying during work hours, or $100 because I visited your site 5 days ago and now you think I’m desperate then you don’t get to complain when I use underhanded tactics to get the best deal. They make the rules, they shouldn’t be surprised when their convoluted system gets exploited by people that know the rules.
> If airlines didn’t want to play pricing games, they could stop playing pricing games. List a standard fare for a route if you want to sell fares at a standard rate. If you want to try and squeeze me for an extra $20 because I’m buying during work hours, or $100 because I visited your site 5 days ago and now you think I’m desperate then you don’t get to complain when I use underhanded tactics to get the best deal. They make the rules, they shouldn’t be surprised when their convoluted system gets exploited by people that know the rules.
Morally sure, but they absolutely are going to complain even if they're in the wrong about it. And they'll try and ban things and stop you from getting the deal obviously. Why wouldn't they? Have you ever known airlines to deal fairly?
They make the rules, and so they'll try to do that again.
Claude cannot occupy a seat. An airline seat is only used by humans.
If they aren't interested in games they could publish a set fare for a set route. Instead they have 4 or more fare classes visible to end users and more in the backend leading to opaque unpredictable pricing, they gamify the experience using literal points and rewards, they constantly change prices, they charge fees for services that vary depending on fare class, what credit card you purchased the ticket with, what credit card you currently hold, how many times you've flown in the past year, how many miles you've flown, how many dollars you've spent to fly those miles. I'm not sure they could make it more of a game (BTW, games are not in opposition to making money, they frequently enable making more money. Exhibit A is airlines. Game theory textbooks use them as examples).
Ah ok. So the worry is me being able to shop around more and find better deals? What's stopping me from using an agent to shop around still, and I just do the final booking myself?
Just a little extra friction, but if they want to ban agents from booking I'm sure they'd love to ban them from looking up prices too. But showing prices is kind of their advertising too, so it's harder to just cut it off - same reason why Google flights is allowed I suppose
Because like with everything else people have been applying AI to, it's not going to stop at "I used it to book my flights" and it's going to turn into "we used it to book every flight and now we are reselling them at a massive markup so we can then use it as an excuse to spam you because you signed up for our 'service' and that counts as 'consent'."
dunno about that, tickets are non transferable generally. I'm cynical it is more to do with the 'buying experience' and the opportunity to up-sell, introduce tempting offers, and confuse with navigation patterns and such. Agents will breeze past all that, meaning the money the airlines make will reduce.
Yes, the question about AI agents is whether they are actually increasing productivity, or just allowing individuals with more compute to outcompete for a larger share of a finite resource.
If AI agents were more effectively managing flight paths, determining pricing, managing communication channels on the supply side, it would technically decrease cost per flight, but on the demand side, if AI agents just find the cheapest flight and book it, all it does is beat someone else who likely would have gotten to that flight a bit later.
I do think eventually it's going to be supply agents communicating with demand agents that lead to a coordination equilibrium. But until then it's just a race to who has the faster, more integrated models, and now, who has models which can bypass the restrictions providers place on their use.
It takes a trivial amount of compute to do stuff like book flights or submit forms, but there are other dimensions where the marginal utility of compute doesn't taper off as fast, like legal defense or PR campaigns/mass manipulation.
Imagine two competing political candidates, one has funding from an AI lab and produces thousands of short-form AI videos per day and spends millions of analysis of the full spectrum of feedback and performance of the ads, simulates public sentiment, pruning every aspect of their persona, response strategy, channels to focus on, etc. Or a company accused of misconduct creating an AI psychological profile of the judge and every jury member via their social media history and demographic information and curating the best permutation of arguments from millions of options that maximize every predicable sentimental vector.
> The airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone without giving specific people (atleast those who they don't deem "worthy") an edge. Here's a great, short comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50459444
Your sentence and the comment you linked say completely different things. You say airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone, the comment says they're trying to achieve perfect price discrimination to maximize revenue. Those are not the same thing.
Say Alice is willing to pay $100 for a given flight, while Bob would at most pay $50. The airline wants to charge Alice $100 and Bob $50, netting $75 per seat on average.
Agentic access would give Alice the chance to cross-shop and buy the cheaper flight as well. But now, to net the same amount, the airline has to charge $75 per seat, excluding Bob from participating in this market.
In your example ($50/$100), the airline is extracting all consumer surplus. This is called perfect price discrimination, and it is bad for consumers.
There is nothing stopping the airline offering Bob $50 per seat in the second scenario, other than profit preservation. If they were making a profit on the $50 ticket in the first scenario, they are making it in the second. They just happen to also be making less profit on the $100 ticket.
In effect you are making corporate profit a constraint on the market, which is not the case.
Your example actually shows that the welfare extractive pricing algos companies use today can be undermined by AI, which is good for consumers in this narrow example.
Well actually, price discrimination permits a kind of cross subsidy when there are large fixed costs involved, and flights have substantial fixed costs.
It might not be profitable to fly a route at all if not for high paying customers. But if you can get a few high paying customers and provide return on capital, then extra customers are, relatively speaking, gravy.
And the cheap flights for those customers? Consumer surplus, baby.
If they can afford to fly Bob for $50, Alice deserves that too. If that means the flight isn't profitable, then I guess they couldn't really afford to fly Bob or Alice for $50 and that price was a farce to begin with. I can understand airlines want to squeeze their customers for the maximum they are willing to pay, but I don't think that makes a good argument and I don't they should be entitled to it.
In their defense, the $50 fares aren't profitable on its own. It costs $140 to fly this two-seater plane in the simple illustration (and let's wave away Alice and Bob's weights). Charging one of them $100 (that their company would pay for anyway) makes it possible for both to fly. That's not really bad.
This has already been going on for years. Google Flights and Kayak already have fare histories, fare forecasts, fare monitors with automated notifications. So now anybody can get the cheapest price with a low effort.
The industry responded with aggressive unbundling - basic eco now has no carry-on, no seat selection, no changes. All can then be bought as extras.
This is a scenario across many industries - hotels, car rental, cruise, concerts, online retail etc.
Basically - yes that trend is bad for Bob, but it makes things more transparent, fair, and increases competition. It's the way the world goes - hard to stop that.
Yes, but this type of stuff compounds. Moreover, the fact that agents are now the lowest friction interface for this stuff makes it a potential double-whammy.
A similar example discussed recently on the podcast ”The Real Eisman Playbook”[0] illustrates the point: Many retail investors have trading accounts with some cash sitting idle. The brokers earn a healthy margin by investing that cash into short-term money market funds (MMF).
Now obviously, the diligent investors could easily buy the MMFs and pocket the profit themselves. However, many of them are lazy or don’t care. But now with agentic access, even the laziest user can optimize their short-term cash holdings, which might cost the brokers relying on this income dearly.
How does the airline sell the same type of ticket to Alice for $100 but Bob for $50? I don't think airlines show consumers different prices for identical tickets at the same moment in time. The prices are constantly in flux and vary by fare class, amenities, the time you book, etc. But if Alice and Bob both go online to buy a near identical ticket at the same time I don't see how they would get different prices.
Assuming Alice is a business traveler and Bob is traveling for leisure, they are likely to not buy the ticket at the same time, to being with (Alice will do so during business hours, while Bob probably will in the evening or on the weekend).
Alice might also be booking through a corporate booking platform etc.
You said they’re “trying to reduce prices for everyone” and you’re describing them trying to maximize prices for everyone (which, yes, they want to do).
[Edit: didn't pay enough attention to the flow of the conversation here - this is really a response to ProblemExplorer's original post, which linked to _diyar's post (parent to this one) as explanation].
> You said they’re “trying to reduce prices for everyone” and you’re describing them trying to maximize prices for everyone (which, yes, they want to do).
No they did not. I am the grandparent and linked to their comment because they concisely explain how the airline made $150 off two sears instead of $100 while giving Bob the $50 deal he wanted (bay making Alice subsidize Bob).
If Alice used an MCP too, there would be no subsidy and neither Bob gets the $50 seat nor does Alice get her $100 seat
Ah - sorry! I understood ProblemExplorer's linking to your post as a link to a subsequent post of theirs, which it clearly isn't now that I look again!
My post was a response to ProblemExplorer's language, not yours.
It's not. Airlines do not make their money price discriminating economy customers over the same route at the same time.
Dynamic pricing is mostly a seasonal and timing game. And the actual money is made in higher classes of service.
This idea that Bob and Alice are shown drastically different pricing for the same seat because of insights into their specific purchasing behavior is just ludicrous.
Most people buy tickets from aggregators who have been already gutted the ability to do this anyway.
> This idea that Bob and Alice are shown drastically different pricing for the same seat because of insights into their specific purchasing behavior is just ludicrous.
You basically argued literally the entire thesis for customer segmentation and behavior based pricing and then called it ludicrous. I hope PhDs and statisticians who make living building these very models don't see this comment and begin to question their entire existence.
Indeed - not sure if it is the case here, but businesses sometimes want to change richer people more and poorer people less for the same thing, if they can make more money doing that. One of the ways of doing that is by making the cheaper prices a hassle, a classic example being that you might have discount coupon vouchers at grocery stores that richer people won't regard as worth the hassle. If AI can get rid of that hassle for lots of people then the business case for doing it stops working.
A lot of airlines have started charging extra for a carry-on which does the same thing, except turning the packing part into the hassle instead of the finding+booking part.
I am copying my comment below here because there is a fundamental misunderstanding of consumer surplus here:
In your example ($50/$100), the airline is extracting all consumer surplus. This is called perfect price discrimination, and it is bad for consumers.
There is nothing stopping the airline offering Bob $50 per seat in the second scenario, other than profit preservation. If they were making a profit on the $50 ticket in the first scenario, they are making it in the second. They just happen to also be making less profit on the $100 ticket.
In effect you are making corporate profit a constraint on the market, which is not the case.
Your example actually shows that the welfare extractive pricing algos companies use today can be undermined by AI, which is good for consumers in this narrow example.
> For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate.
Just to be clear, your argument is that it's "counterproductive" and a "local optima" for people to have complete and accurate price information available for purchasing their tickets? And that making this information harder for them to find is better for them? Can you point to any real-world examples of an asymmetry in pricing information ending up saving the side with less information money rather than the side with more information to use that in a way that disadvantages the other side?
So… please excuse my ignorance if I’m being ignorant…
But isn’t this the same argument, more or less, that police make for not wanting to have body cameras on all the time, because they would then be “forced” to give everyone who was breaking the law a ticket or to arrest them instead of letting them go if it “feels like they should”?
The analogy being that the police could pick and choose who they should arrest versus who they should not and let off with a warning - who is “worth it” (i.e. generally, people of, umm, not color, it turns out).
Anyways… it does seem that some kinda of preferential treatment could be lost here. But preferential good treatment for some is kind preferential bad treatment for others, so theres that.
If the 50$ flights are gone from the site, won't another site sell those instead?
Later on, assuming all of the carriers are affected by this, flights will get more expensive and maybe we will invest in other modes of transport that is cheaper
> Personal AI agents cause a local optima while overall increasing cost for rest of the travelers.
This has nothing to do with AI. Any sale pricing cause the average non-sale price to go up! This is why many companies outright refuse to participate in sales outside of damaged / opened goods.
> Now United isn't against offering a $50 flight to customers who they deem "worth it" - they just don't want it to be anyone who can run an MCP connector.
I don't understand the premise you're painting here.
Airlines lower the price because they have unfilled seats that are not selling at the current price. The price is lowered as an intentional choice to reduce margins on that seat because making any margin over the fuel cost of that passenger's additional weight is worth more than getting nothing at all.
They aren't thinking about the customer and how lil' Timmy wants to visit his dad in Idaho, they're maximizing profit by rapidly adjusting their service to the supply-demand curve.
> Airlines lower the price because they have unfilled seats that are not selling at the current price
This is rarely the case for popular routes. Airlines lower the price for popular routes to increase margin per utilization which is why skiplagging is not encouraged because it decreases the margin per utilization.
> they're maximizing profit by rapidly adjusting their service to the supply-demand curve
if they were doing that, they would be booting off customers who paid less than those on the wait list.
> if they were doing that, they would be booting off customers who paid less than those on the wait list
If it was legal they would definitely do this. And the times they are allowed under the law to boot paying passengers, it is definitely someone in economy
> For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate and not just by a few cents because the nominal cost of an economy seat is likely $250, not $50.
Your premise is false, as it rests on the logic that there is a zero sum game between passengers. Airlines offer tickets at the level and price they feel like they can sell them in the marketplace. There's not some invisible total allocated to passengers on each flight, where if one person "gets a deal" others pay for it.
Is there some issue with pricing being out in the open and the same for everyone. I understand discounts here and there to fill a flight, but why not offer them to everyone? Why do you care who is in the seat?
If I need to fill a seat last minute at a ridiculous low price, I'm glad an MCP client will fill it for me.
If the concern is that everyone will wait until last minute, that sounds like a problem that solves itself, last minute tickets will increase in price until the minimum price for air time is achieved.
> Is there some issue with pricing being out in the open and the same for everyone
Yes there is an issue.
An airplane can only fit a fixed number of people per leg. One way you can make money in a low margin business is make up in volume - this is the game gas stations, grocery and discount stores play - like Walmart.
You cannot play the volume game when you're physically constrained on volume, so you have to play another game.
I guess you're saying that they can't have volume because space is limited, but fine, then charge more than $50. Right? They are charging that because they need to fill the seat, I'd think. That's not a volume issue, it's the opposite.
Also: flight alerts and price tracking are a thing too.
I don’t know anyone that’s seen a cheap flight for sale and decided to wait for the price to go up.
There are less price sensitive customers, but even the most price sensitive people don’t ask United if they could please charge them a bit more than the listed price.
I have found these agentic blocks sort of inspiring and in the spirit of a free market. Amazon blocked my Muse, so I told Muse to find other vendors and prefer the shopify store for the brand. That was a pain for me to search through but AI has no problem.
I'm not sure if this was your point, but AI will eventually just flow to the competitor that wants business and has the best price.
Want to block bots? Okay, watch your customers just seamlessly move to a competitor without requiring even the slightest thought or action from the customer.
Of course, if--somehow--customers moving to a competitor doesn't actually hurt the company they're moving away from... I might have to start questioning exactly how this whole "free market capitalism" experiment is working out. I think companies want to compete to win customers, but I'm not 100% sure anymore.
> but AI will eventually just flow to the competitor that wants business and has the best price.
This assumes that competitors will be willing to accommodate, which isn't always a given. I could easily see a ban industry-wide on agents for airlines to protect their pricing strategy, and the perceived administrative burden gives them legal cover against acting as a cartel.
> I think companies want to compete to win customers, but I'm not 100% sure anymore.
Companies don't want to compete if they can buy the competition instead. If they did, you wouldn't see mass consolidation across the economy (airlines are a great example of this). Cornering the market or getting bought before you're cornered is usually more lucrative than trying to compete.
The quality of the flights are far below historic lows. They nickle and dime you for everything. Boarding is miserable. There is never enough overhead space because they charge to check a bag. If there is, they still punitively curb check luggage from people that didn’t pay for enough upgrades. Seat layouts are adversarial if you don’t pay an upcharge. The flight attendants have to broadcast ads and/of lies repeatedly to the passengers.
The entire industry loses money; their profits come from credit card scams they pitch to you while you’re locked in a metal tube for hours at 10,000 ft.
Southwest was previously the only partial exception, but they installed a CEO that burned it all down instead of adding something like $10-20 to the base ticket price.
He did it over the loud objections of the customers and employees. The only people that support this crap are too wealth to fly commercial.
I wonder if there's something here about the prices actually getting so low that new classes of people are gaining access to air travel, and in doing so are just barely able to stretch to afford it but complain about the price.
> "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies," he told CBS News. "Flight searches cost airlines money, and undoubtedly United wants to avoid the expense associated with the surge of AI bot flight searches."
How much can it cost? And if it's so expensive, wouldn't intermediaries who cache results actually be cheaper?
Companies like United offer different prices to different web browsers. Presumably agents realize this, and can be instructed to probe the same seat a few hundred times with different profiles and different locations, then buy the cheapest ticket.
That seems like a completely reasonable response. The vendors are acting like a cartel. The behavior is illegal (they do not honor lowest advertised prices), and the courts are too bought off to step in.
I was pretty frustrated recently when I got a flight for 20% less by clicking through from a Google Flights link than I did from searching directly on aircanada.com while logged in with my Aeroplan account. I know exactly why it's the way it is, but it's pretty discouraging to feel that loyal-customer behaviour like going directly to the airline instead of an aggregator is punished with a higher price.
Yeah but you get shitty rooms when you book through expedia.
The hotels hate expedia but they can't opt out of it so they just degrade the product that is offered at expedia's discount rate -- and they degrade it in a way that expedia can't force them to stop (room assignment is always done at checkin).
It's interesting that the resellers/brokers wouldn't have figured out a way to conceal the booking source. Like obviously the hotel knows if it didn't come through them, but Expedia is far from the only bulk-inventory broker: travel agents, airlines, credit card rewards programmes, etc are all basically doing the same thing.
My work travel is typically booked through perk.com and I don't get the sense that I'm treated resentfully at any of those properties.
Usually it is done on GDS, which take their cut for each search. And those searches are frequently done on systems can remember 60s when they were created.
Searching actually does cost them money. Most airlines don't even have the ability to sell you a ticket without getting a third-party company involved (the GDS: Amadeus/Sabre/etc). The GDS collects the airlines' pricing data, then charges them money for every search to send their own data back to them.
That is not even close to the root of the problem.
Airlines could solve that problem themselves. And will the instant it’s actually worth it to them.
Airlines are being pressured to change the way they do their differential pricing, but the old system wasn’t some gold star land of virtue method either.
Flight reservation systems are some of the most complicated on the planet. They are specifically designed to maximize profit while meeting constraints imposed by airports (such as monthly minimums for seats sold per month to keep their gates). Prices change every few minutes and depend on the utilized capacity of all segments that a route touches. There's a reason most discount sites use the backend operated by Google instead of writing their own.
Can be a few cents for Sabre api calls. This is the gds fee on booking and excess querying, that should be rolled up into doing business but it depends of course, for some airlines every query costs them a fraction of a cent and if every employee agent is doing them alongside customers doing self service, yeah
But at the same time they should’ve just made it more accessible and just raised the prices anyway.
I recently bought a Flight directly on United.com. I usually book business travel directly on Brex so I was appalled of how bad the checkout flow was on the United site. 5 page loads. Multiple “offers” to sift through. Donations to the environment. Upgrades for security priority, seats, classes. Credit card ads.
It made me think, an agent would be nice. Too bad.
> The carrier also said that using an AI agent to, for example, check in for a flight could violate federal regulations, including rules requiring travelers to verify in person that their luggage does not contain banned substances.
That’s ridiculous.
They just want to keep their price list miserable to compare so they can overcharge people.
Both things can be true. Airlines can be miserly rip-off artists, and we can start seeing lengthy waits at screening points because people had agents make their bookings and weren’t reminded about the things they aren’t allowed to pack.
Claude: This form requires me to agree I won't bring explosives on board. If I reject this form, the booking won't go through. I should accept this to complete the booking.
I understand why they might be tempted to do this customer hostile action. For our own business, ChatGPT’s sales have grown to be 6.3%[1] of total, but our basket size is smaller compared to other channels.
I think this is because people are purchasing only what they need as recommended by their AI and nothing extra. This is a better outcome for the customer.
I think it may be worthwhile to not compare basket sizes but maybe revenue over time? Would be interesting to see if the same agents (maybe bound to the same user or same project) now default or bias towards your storefront in the future, or if they always go out and do a search for "best deal".
They don’t want people to comparison shop easily without getting a cut. Further, all these guys want to move to Uber-style dynamic/personalized pricing. So basically they want an adversarial relationship against you, but block any attempts to reverse that relationship on them.
If prices drop on United, you can rebook and pocket the extra money as travel credit (as long as you don't book BE). This is typically considered an underpriced option as most travelers don't regularly check prices after they've booked. AI agents threaten to reduce this "laziness tax", and it is something that other industries are worried about too. There's lots of speculation that mortgage rates will have to increase if people use AI agents to start optimally refinancing their mortgages. Seems like United will have to change this policy, fight the bots, and/or raise prices to compensate.
Is it likely for that price drop to be higher than the price difference between economy and basic economy in many cases, though? (Assuming travelers don't need the flexibility of being able to cancel/rebook for other reasons.)
Good, I hate this world where planning and micro optimizing my life has so much advantage over living in the moment, I want my AI to deal with all that (and restaurant reservations, credit card churning, etc) I can live my life with humans
You don't need to know if a decision is perfect to decide if it is sub-optimal. You think that rational inattention is FUD and that all borrowers pay attention to mortgage rates constantly?
You start with the 20% of mortgagees that completely fail to refinance even though it would save them money [1] and then move on the other 17% that wait too long to refinance and then the 52% that do so at the wrong rate by using rules of thumb instead of more sophisticated models. [2]
If you'd like to better understand this "FUD", Matt Levine is a much better write than I am: https://archive.is/WljUV
How many people really want an AI agent to book their flights? I like AI and travel a lot, but I don't see that as being an ideal agentic tasks. In most cases, I prefer using google flights or expedia and looking at the options in a UI that is tailored to the task. Of course AI can be useful if you want to inquire about certain details or find more information.
It's funny how many AI tool demos have used flight booking as an example task. I always groan at that. I just don't think that will be the way most people book flights. Maybe the 1%ers or less. Are you you currently doing this?
The important distinction here is that the AI is not "autonomously going out of its way to book flights" or whatever you have in mind.
I want to ask the AI to search for flights to my next trip, with x y z restrictions. It shows me the flights and gives me options A B and C. I tap B and it goes and books it for me. That's no different than a traditional experience like Kayak except that instead of pressing "book now" and manually filling in the details (or rather: these days letting safari autofill) I press the "LGTM" button and software fills in the rest.
ETA: the shopping experience is the same. I don't want my muse (or whichever) agent to "autonomously" "decide" to purchase an item for me that I've mentioned off hand at some point in time. The use case is treating muse as an addition/alternative to the traditional search experience.
"hey muse I want to buy a new tv, what are the popular/good models from 2025+ with reviews from reputable websites? Shortlist me ~3 within x-y budget also ensure that the local Best Buy or Costco has it in stock so I can pick it up. Actually also let me know if the box will fit in my Toyota or if I need to rent a van. Also for each positive review find me a negative review to balance it out."
And then after I do my own reading on what it surfaced me, I just say "ok muse place an order for the top option, schedule a pickup time for Saturday"
From someone who's worked in the business travel industry - more than you think. Business travelers are a disproportionate amount of airline revenue (possibly over 50%+ of revenue while being around 10-20% of passengers). Those who are doing the same trip over and over again probably don't care, but salespeople who are doing different trips every week get some value out of this kind of thing. There have been piles of startups trying to solve this (and failing).
There's not a ton of money in skimming commissions off of flights (probably < 1%), but there is if you can attach a hotel booking to it (upwards of 10%), so if you can become the preferred vendor for a business traveler, there's money to be made.
Hmm I definitely think having an ai agent find me a flight is something useful because it’s very difficult to compare flights, there’s intentionally a lot of friction.
The way I’d use it is search for a flight myself and have it search independently. If I find a cheaper flight that suits my exact needs then ask it to beat it. Whoever finds the best flight, that’s the one I book. I’ll repeat that, that’s the one I book.
Unless you have money to throw away I can’t imagine not checking the details and comparing prices. Hell, even if you do have money to throw away you still want to double check everything just before the last purchase decision. Is it going to the right city? Is it at a reasonable hour? Is baggage included or purchased? Etc
Good points.. I mostly use google flights to search, but often book on either the airline site or on expedia. I think I usually see the same published prices and book in the place that is easy to book.
The most useful feature for me is google's price/date grid. For personal travel, I'm flexible with dates, so I always use that to just find when flights are cheap. For work, I try to find the best price, but I'm not super picky since the company is paying for it.
I feel like the travel site UIs do a good job of summarizing all the info and putting it in front of you.
Do you want the agent to book it for you? Or just find it?
I definitely do. Astrophotography is a hobby of mine and I've been working on a kind of personal app to find me locations in the US that will yield good shots. The variables are moon phase (close to new as possible), weather, cloud cover, humidity, and plane ticket/car rental prices. All things considered, if it's all the same in nevada, new mexico, and utah for a given week, I want to find the cheapest flight to any airport in that area. It's a huge pain in the ass to trawl through all the different flights/airports/dates to minimize my spend.
I would like to be able to have an AI agent book my flight. Airline websites are often horrible to use and it's annoying having to fill out all the details. On more than one occasion I've had to book through a third party or choose a different flight because the airline's website was broken and I couldn't complete the transaction.
Google flights is great and I use it every time I want to fly, but it's very rare that you can purchase the actual flight on google flights too.
At this point so much hot tech stuff is incredibly weird niche things to solve the rare problems of overscheduled Silicon Valley tech VPs. They're not real problems that regular people have.
Whether our future will follow a dystopic path centers on this.
Will the agent represent the individual or the organization?
The only world that doesn't lead to accelerated manipulation, wealth inequality, and ultimately oppression is the one where the is answer absolutely clear: It is the individual.
The social norms for this are being shaped right now. This is the most important question in AI.
We're distracted by the far less important questions. Safety, nationalism, and tribalism are how we don't talk about this.
I mean you could also take the pure market economy conclusion that a competitor might allow agents and you buy the cheaper flight there.
I was having an agent search for a set of skincare products to the lowest price within a certain budget, and a lot of sites just blocked it, so I ended up buying it from a site that didn't.
I agree. This is already happening and is a positive force shaping future companies.
Monopoly/Duopoly-type companies like United can make decisions that hurt the consumer without a natural market backstop. This is when social norms need to come in as a backstop.
Another way this could go is simply that it is impossible to defend against an individual accessing services through the agents. Which I believe is already the case.
But entrenched interests in the existing organizations will see some real creative destruction as more consumer-friendly models outcompete them. In those cases, they reach for legislation. Which has been happening.
The public needs convincing, though. And that's why right now, the narrative is all about AI safety and protection from job loss.
Legislation to meet those worries would almost certainly be crafted to entrench the current organizations.
The real battle is not about jobs and safety. Personal agents would do more second-order good for the average person at the cost of a lot of 'capital destruction' - one of those newspeak words. The word here means that consumers no longer have to pay too much money - labor - for something because now they can get a better version of it for free/cheap.
GDP doesn't capture free things - as in beer or freedom.
AI has the potential to make a lot of things free in both senses. The entrenched are a headwind.
Not sure how they can detect an agent driving a regular browser, I have built Cupertino to more efficiently let Claude drive my mac (https://cupertino.mgcrea.io) and it can drive a regular Safari exactly like I would.
Interesting. I wonder if it can become enforceable to say "not on my lawn". Sites could make deals with say Anthropic to make Claude respect some new rule in robots.txt and refuse to visit this site.
Should everyone and their grandma be allowed to send a robot to interact with any site?
If let say CEO if some company asks his/her secretary to book a flight and provides payment information, how is this different from me asking Muse to do the same? Or only rich people can have helpers?
I see a lot of arguments about the merits, but to me the real question is whether this is sincere, or an ambit claim to get a cut of business from the companies pushing AI agents. It would be an obvious classic play to cut off access on spurious grounds and then let it back in for a slice of the action, on the pretext that the money is paying for some kind of additional assurance on the airline end.
Maybe there’s a world where established companies license access only to their “preferred” agent. Not great for customers but more income and less headache for the company.
I'm kinda suspicious of the stated motives. while plausible, has it happened very much? The cynic in me thinks this is to prevent agents hunting and findingthe best deals, and avoiding all the patterns used to squeeze more money from the buyer, like dangling attractive offers, not so obvious navigation and other tricks etc..
I wonder what pushed them to do it? Did something serious go wrong with some cases of agents booking flights, or is it more motivated from a fear of Big Tech AI gaming the dynamic pricing system that they control and potentially making them lose profits because the Agents will get much more optimal/cheap flights than mere mortals?
Heh have you seen how slow airline sites are to get results? Now imagine them buckling under the load of an agent launching 20 simultaneous browser sessions to price-compare all minute variations of a specific trip request
I was recently able to discover that London (especially some districts) has a HUGE bedbug problem. The only reason I found out was because I told Claude to go through my candidates on booking.com and check the 1-star reviews.
I would not have done it myself: it takes quite a bit of work and clickery to access all the reviews for every hotel.
Pretty sure booking.com will soon follow with an agent ban.
I have previously made a similar comment to this, but just to reiterate and expand it: the wave of “let agents automate everything” has a whiff of “let’s automate everything by plugging it into IFTTT.” In the end most companies pulled out of IFTTT because it ate into engagement and people actually using the platforms. If I automate posting to Instagram through an API, Meta is missing out on revenue from ads not being shown to me.
I predict the same thing happening with AI agents. The direct analogy here is United is missing out on revenue by being unable to trick me into paying to choose my seats or whatever. Luckily, it will be a harder for the platforms to cut off agents but they will try.
I run a small e-signature service and went the opposite way, I gave agents their own door (an API and an MCP server. I never made money from the pages they skip. No ads, no upsells in the flow. People use it free and software pays per document past a free allowance, so an agent is a customer.
United makes a real share of its money on the screens between search and pay. An agent moves right past all of that. Idk, I think eventually everyone will accept the AI agents.
These bans won't go any better than sites that refused to include advertising for the last two decades.
I don't like the "agentic web" any more than I liked the advertising-funded web, but that doesn't make me right. The web will continue to be less and less about human attention and more about LLMs using the web on our behalf. Advertising on the web will be useless, gobbled up by advertising on the LLM platforms.
What are airlines they really afraid of? That people get an advantage by comparing prices?
And for banks, for years US banks have managed to keep data internally, only exposing it through Plaid, and thus getting paid for it. API like the PSD2 in Europe allow me to connect my software to pull in the transactions for free. In the US you have to hand over money to say Monarch.
Most people think these are dark patterns, but is not realized is that on a competitive market with multiple players you will get better prices when others pay worse.
It arguably makes it fairer. An option to trade effort => value.
If they would give the best price to everyone right away,the lowest price would be higher.
As much as I hate where the world is headed with AI, I can't deny how useful it is to have an agent navigate multi-step forms while recognizing all the tactics these websites use to upsell their garbage or trick you into accepting awful terms.
They won't be able to block agents unless they start requiring attestation. Which I doubt is going to happen considering Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc. all want their agents to be as useful as possible.
I mean, they can try. AI agents have computer use now so no website will actually be able to disambiguate between humans and AI anymore, so I can indeed tell my agent to book me a ticket.
Ah I had two motivations, it started when ralphs and amazon were blocking my agent, it's then pretty easy to ask the agent to solve their own problem if you give it compute resources.
I also wanted to play with some ideas I have around approval of agentic actions and sharing of credentials. I can selectively share browser cookies with my MCP server and it'll inject them into browsers the agent can use for a limited scoped task. I use a decision API to try and see if the browser actions match the approved work or if they're going awry. This is generally preferable (for me) vs just handling my credentials over and letting the agents YOLO with their cloud browser. I get saved recordings sent to my phone.
This is the future. Amazon blocked muse and outside agents, and now united is doing the same. If everyone follows this route, the concept of harness is practically dead and we will need an agent that manages specific type of agent that each company provides. What a waste of resourcez
I do not think they have any remote role in parenting anyone about sharing the chosen level of private data with AI for booking. Let people decide if they risk or not with using AI and when/how the terms and conditions are studied (not like current way is better more than miniscule, expecting heavy and long text to be digested at the last step of button pressing that can time out fast). United should not act as educator about people's privacy choices in their choice of systems other than United's.
Checking in is a different matter and understood. That is flight safety matter.
United Airlines is the horrible company. Treated me badly when I wanted a refund. They initial said yes and then tried to change their minds. I hope they burn in hell.
Two years ago, I knew this would happen: no booking website will be happy with an automated agent of any kind which is the user’s agent. They will want it to be their own agent.
And the reason for it is that a good agent will just bulldoze its way through all dark patterns and ways to upsell you. And the airline or hotel (speaking from booking.com experience) want to upsell you so badly it hurts.
Which is why any agentic setup, except for a completely self-hosted one, is not viable in this situation.
I'm surprised they haven't started restricting sales by third parties entirely yet (yes I know that's not related to AI agents).
Some of the points they raise, I do think are cause for concern as it relates to potential legal liabilities... but I don't see how they could possibly restrict AI usage meaningfully, besides just getting the big popular groups to assist in limiting their own services somehow, which doesn't solve the issue entirely of course, especially with local LLM usage on the rise.
So, all of these business models that work by creating annoying barriers that are essentially getting customers to work for free are going the way of the dodo.
Oh, you need me to go through twenty separate pages and popups to finally cancel my subscription to your shitty predatory service? Claude doesn't care.
My Flight was cancelled, so I need to wait on hold for 10 hours, re-calling after getting dropped 'accidentally' 12 times during said process so I can talk to someone who will process a refund for me? Claude is happy to do that.
Claude doesn't care if he has to wait 2 months on-hold. Claude just needs my "Text-To-Voice" custom tool, my "User-Verification-Values" custom tool, and my "Call-Via-IP" custom tool/etc and he will work as long as I need him to.
BS now in TOS is the same thing. No I won't read it, yes we both know that. But Claude can, and now I can get an AI to find the best service for whatever it is I need that doesn't have shitty TOS terms with a single prompt.
This reminds me of when Sears killed their catalog (about 12 months before Amazon took off).
Hopefully there’s still enough competition in the airline industry to put companies that block customers from using modern technology to buy tickets out of business.
> "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies"
What if the airlines instead focused on delivering great service at a competitive price?
"What if the airlines instead focused on delivering great service at a competitive price?"
Germania, IIRC, tried that in the late 90s, offering a flat fare for every seat.
They had to roll it back very quickly because their bookings dropped unsustainably - nobody wanted to pay a fair price for a seat, even if it was cheaper than they might realistically have had to pay under dynamic pricing.
All that potential customers fixated on was that the flat fares were more expensive than the few cheap loss-leader seats advertised on rival airlines.
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" etc etc
Those used to exist, nobody flew on them and they went bankrupt. The market has decisively decided. In airlines, price beats all else, even time in most cases.
Alaska nickles and dimes just like the rest, charges for the privilege of picking your seat, etc. They're not worse than the rest, but I don't see them as any better, certainly. I almost exclusively fly Alaska since my closest airport is one of their major hubs.
I'd guess a key reason for this is because agents can't be - effectively - advertised to or upsold on anything. They should enjoy watching as bookings trend down over time. And/or agents just bypass their ban.
They really can’t. As long as you run Claude/Codex desktop or plugin, it will control your web browser session indistinguishable from your own user actions.
Unless there is some Claude AI safety concern of booking tickets.
I enjoy my popcorn reading comments from people that build website that are designed to capture eyeballs and clicks arguing over how easy/hard it is to book travel.
This is infuriating. Having just done a fair bit of AI-assisted work with booking.com (why should I click all the candidate hotels and check 1-star reviews, or verify if the view from the window really does include the sea as stated?), I was hoping to soon also automate the user-hostile minefield that airlines make me pass through every time I buy an airplane ticket. The amount of deceptive dark patterns on airline sites is staggering, so is their lack of competence in building UIs that work.
I was happy, because we now finally have AI to take the drudgery of our lives, so that I can write my poetry, paint and do other human stuff. But no, the airlines will ensure that the drudgery is ours, AI is only for them to use in automated "assistants".
If you now say something with the word "competition" in it, I will laugh at you out loud. There is no competition. All airlines will copy the same idiotic pattern.
All their stated reasons are simply BS excuses. Come on. We all know the real reason: The airline(s) want to get their beaks wet in the deal. Either by a contract that gets them yearly guaranteed revenue for doing nothing, or by some kind of deal where the agent guys promise to steer users to one airline preferentially instead of finding the best deal (or users' other preferences).
If Meta or Claude or whoever came to an airline offering that kind of deal, they'd build an MCP in a week and solve the very simple regulatory issues - simply add a skill that shows the exact same UI of "promise you have no swords, machine guns or bombs in your luggage") to the user that the airline's own site uses.
Totally fair to not want agents running amok on their systems and sites. This blocks corporations from having an AI travel agency manage their flights and spamming at scale.
They are not going to care too much if you as an individual have hacked up something that does it for you. Hope you get a good seat!
How about I'll stop using AI bots to book flights if United stops using chatbots for customer "support"?
I'm bearing on the impacts of AI in general but maybe, just maybe, it might be the death blow to the demand pricing that is so rife in booking airline tickets? Customers hate it. People know that a given flight might cost $200 or $1000 depending on what time of your day you try and book, whether you try and book on a weekday or weekend, if you're booking from a corporate IP address and so on. None of these things have anything to do with how full the plane is. They're all UX anti-patterns to ask "how much money do you have?" before giving you a price. And it needs to die.
Airlines better get used to this because this is an arms race they cannot possibly win. Good.
I littery stopped using websites apart from sites like this one or reddit. I use AI for everything else. Also for booking stuff.
It's the future. Website UI will eventually become obsolete. Companies will provide API endpoint for ai agents that either work with text or realtime on demand UIs. This action is putting you in a yahoo like position.
Everyone is suggesting ways to circumvent this. But at the end of the day, they will just raise prices for everyone if agents affect their profits or risk.
Awww I totally feel bad for an airline that intentionally tries to scam people by tricking them into paying for more expensive tickets when a less expensive option is available. And makes booking intentionally confusing to the point that having an agent just book a flight for you is easier than just booking it yourself. Yeah. I totally feel bad for them. /s
How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
At this point it feels like I have an adversarial relationship with many merchants I use online. I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible. I don’t want to take part in your giant human behavior optimization problem. You have a product and I have money why does it have to be more complicated than that?
Realistically though I know that’s not happening. I will continue to access online merchants in the way I prefer and will do my best to avoid detection or blocking. At least so far Claude is happy to play along but I suspect I will need to seek out an obliterated agent in the not to distant future. (Once the corporate capture of the frontier cloud AI models is complete.)
I don’t think it’s hard to understand why an airline would get tired of getting more refund requests and customer service escalations for refusal of same according to agreed upon terms by entitled jerks who don’t want to accept the consequences of the decisions their ShitClaw made on their behalf.
Sure, the airline may not notice when it happens but it can cut those processes short when they have a full ban.
When a company like Delta is on record using AI to set each individual shopper's price as high as possible [1], there's no longer any illusion about having a fair exchange of value, or an idea about who's behaving badly or not.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/airlines-set-prices-artificial-...
We should be tech literate enough here to know that “AI” has become a near meaningless term that encompasses all sorts of technologies and the differences between the two version of AI in your comparison are big enough to make this a false equivalency.
The point isn't that both are using something that might be labeled AI. The point is that the relationship is 100% adversarial at this point, and so you shouldn't feel too bad for asking for a refund when your AI makes a mistake. The company certainly doesn't feel bad, and in fact puts huge amounts of effort into extracting the maximum value not just in general but from you specifically, so maybe just go ahead and do the same to them.
What you are advocating is a race to the bottom for social norms. Instead lashing out at airlines with shitty business practices with your own shitty actions, maybe go to different ones.
Over the years, I have shopped quite a bit (for me anyway) at Amazon. Up until last year, I never returned a single product (even when the product wasn't upto what the description promised). I haven't (yet) left a single bad review.
Since last year, I have returned a couple of items. I also have drastically reduced shopping at Amazon. I have a lot of patience compared to some people, who abuse Amazon's return policy. That said, there is a limit to anyone's patience.
What I am trying to say is - "maybe go to different ones" might not always be possible. If you are in a hurry to get somewhere (maybe a family member is in the hospital) and a United flight is the only one available, what then? Also, other airlines are not super great either.
Maybe for some household item I can shop around at leisure, but "maybe go to different ones" is not possible all the time. Plus, shopping is tiring and irritating as it is, not everyone wants to do PhD level research for every item they buy
which airlines are not doing shitty business practices?
some time ago I was thinking that "well, these dark patterns are there, but I am buying from Ryanair so what I expected"
and then I was buying from more upscale company and it had literally the same dark patterns trying to mislead and upsell you
I'm not advocating for a race to the bottom. I think we're at the bottom already, and sadly nothing we can do personally is going to change that.
I don't want people to go out of their way to hurt the companies, purposefully buying tickets they don't want and then refunding them or something. I'm just saying that on the occasion that a mistake happens, you shouldn't feel bad about using whatever legal/procedural recourse available so that you don't have to just eat the cost.
I would go for alternative airlines if there were any. Alas.
If there aren't any airlines you agree with you can stop flying. Ultimately the point is to not spend your money with a company whose business practices you so strongly disagree with. If that's the entire industry then so be it.
What do you mean by "so strongly disagree with"?
I've plainly stated that I don't think they are bad to the point you should go out of your way just to attack them.
I also didn't say they are evil, destroying the world or anything like that. If that's what I thought, then yeah, stopping doing business with them altogether might be the best course of action.
But I simply said that you shouldn't feel bad about making use of recourses made available to you by either the law or the company itself. Which I don't think it's at all incongruent with continuing to use these companies' services.
Maybe I misread your point, I'd assume someone would strongly disagree with a company if the the situation is considered 100% adversarial.
What different ones? Do you live in the US? There are 30ish percent less airlines than there were in 2009 due to consolidations. There are hubs where airlines monopolize entire airports and drive costs up.
Have you ever been to Europe, if you are living in the US? I'd like you to compare costs of flying regionally there compared to here.
Airlines are just another example of oligarchic control - it's incredible that people are expressing sympathy here as if the consumer and the airlines are on equal footing. I hope you enjoy your customized dynamic pricing based on personal information they've collected about you.
Fuck you, airlines.
Airlines are mostly monopolies. There is almost never an exact competing route.
I live in Chicago. Almost every route has at least 2 airlines (UA/AA). Many have 3 (WN). Some have 4 or 5. Sure maybe the schedule is not exactly the same, and in practice you want to keep to one airline for miles/status but there are very few routes where there is only one direct option and those are mainly international or very small cities. Obviously if you allow one layover then the options explode.
I guess there's are routes (Frankfurt) where technically there are two options but they don't really compete
I don't know the last time I looked for a flight and only had a single airline with routes. There's always better and worse options, but that's to be expected.
It depends very much on your route.
On many routes, especially between continents there is only one option.
no matching literally the same products is distinct from being a monopoly
some specific routes may have de facto monopoly but many, many are not
> The point is that the relationship is 100% adversarial at this point
If this was the intended point, it could be made in dozens of different ways from increasing baggage fees to decreasing legroom to the death of inflight meals. The specific example was obviously chosen because they can both be connected under the nebulous label of “AI” to make it seem more unfair.
Is it wrong? Let’s just rename it “algorithms”.
They are using algorithms to extract the highest price from you.
You can use algorithms to extract the lowest price from them.
Why stop at algorithms? Why not computers, electricity, or math? Some connections can be so loose as to be meaningless which makes attempts to establish them pointless or even potentially counterproductive.
Yes, they use all that to make you pay more, and you can use all that to pay less.
Capitalism is based on the premise that everyone will be as greedy as possible
It's not the equivalence of AI vs AI, it's the OPs equivalency of one party's agency vs. another party's agency.
Delta can try to increase my ticket prices by trying to identify me and raising my prices, I will be trying to use my AI agent to get a lower price.
The implied moral imperative of the airline trying to stop bad actors isn't relevant in that scenario.
Yeah, that's bullshit.
If/when airlines figure out how to use GenAI to gouge folks they will. Airlines were so eager to enable GenAI and gut service to save money that they rolled out easily manipulated bots and lost money.
I think that you are misinterpreting their intent. Delta Air Lines' President Glen Hauenstein said:
It does not affect base fares, only "premium products" (upgrades?). I always use Google Flights to get high quality search across many airlines. The industry broadly publishes their base prices in Sabre. I don't see how AI can affect base prices for individual buyers.They might be referring to pricing the cost of selecting your seat location? Or of a carry on bag?
As someone who regularly gets quoted higher prices than others for the same airline ticket, I totally agree, but given that I know that airlines make razor-thin margins (often less than 5%), it's not totally obvious that this can be attributed to greed or malice. It's possible the airlines that set their prices "honestly" simply do not exist because they can't compete.
It doesn't have to be attributed to any negative moral stance. I think the people implementing these pricing schemes don't think they're in the wrong.
- It's that having an AI agent try to find me a lower price is a completely rational outcome of the situation.
But also note that a dynamic of consolidation in all industries seems to make financial transactions more and more adversarial- self-checkout (Walmart specifically), Amazon pricing, etc.
This is such a pervasive argument also used to justify a lot of bad stuff in tech ("if we don't do it, our competitors will" / "if you don't like it, you should have asked the regulators to stop me").
This is a small world. The US has something like ten major airlines. Eight if you don't count subsidiaries. Someone at the first one made a decision to embrace an exploitative pricing model. And then, someone at the second airline looked at this and thought to themselves, "you know, we're not gonna organize a PR campaign to stigmatize it, we're gonna try the same".
My point is that it's totally unclear to me that that's how this happened. There were at least a few airlines that did not say "we're gonna try the same", such as People Express Airlines and ValuJet, which explicitly tried to market themselves as fair, cheap, and transparently priced. Those airlines don't exist anymore. They went out of business, mostly because the other airlines used sophisticated pricing schemes to sabotage them. Maybe this was a failure of antitrust. It's certainly much more complicated than "all the airlines colluded together". Given the fact that the surviving airlines were never able to reach a particularly profitable "recoupment phase" of the predatory pricing process, it seems that this did not actually result in unfair prices on average (although business customers obviously get shafted every time).
In other words, modern airlines gouge certain customers, but effectively subsidize others. I would be unambiguously outraged only if they were gouging everyone and making fat stacks.
> I would be unambiguously outraged only if they were gouging everyone and making fat stacks.
No, the thing they're doing is still awful.
The basic problem is that they do actually have competitors and are offering a product which is basically fungible, so their margins are inherently going to suck, even if they do every slimy thing, because then their competitors will just do the same thing and they're back to having thin margins only now they've made everything more deceptive/inconvenient/confusing.
The ideal thing in a market like that is to have an efficient way for customers to cut through the BS and find the best price for a ticket that isn't screwing them in covert ways, because then the deceptive tactics don't work, which takes away the incentive to do them. They'll still have thin margins, only with less deception.
But an individual airline can't unilaterally allow that if their competitors have a way to block it or they'd be at a competitive disadvantage, so they're going to try to stop that from happening. It's in no one's interest -- not even theirs -- to let them. They just need you to not let their competitors get away with it either.
> Maybe this was a failure of antitrust.
It's a failure of customer protections laws. The same service legally should cost each customer the same. Sophisticated pricing schemes should be just plainly illegal.
You can't put an item in the store on the shelf and charge every customer what you like. You have to put up a price and adhere to that price regardless of who wants to buy. Anything else is illegal. Or at least should be.
Of course you can!
I definitely have increased the price of consulting for "annoying" customers doing stuff I don't want to do. Many moons ago, I was doing some contract training for a small airline here in town. I liked teaching but I didn't really want to do the training they wanted me to do - it was a pain in the ass, it took a week, and didn't really pay enough to justify the opportunity cost.
So I kept raising my price, and eventually, they stopped asking me to do the training. It was great because I didn't have to do the thing I didn't want to do anymore, and I made more money. You are allowed to charge different people different amounts of money - some people are just a pain in the butt and charging more pays for the lack of sanity.
But that's just charging different amounts for different services. Not at all the same as the typical end user price discrimination which is all about charging whatever you can get away with with that particular cusomer.
I agree with the principle but where I think price discrimination goes too far is, for example, Uber charging people more by age or statistically imputed income. Or PlayStation charging more for a game by the time of day.
Notice the difference. One is charging people more because they're actually costing you something by imposing an inconvenience, the other is charging people more because you've X-rayed their wallet and set the price to be the amount that cleans them out.
Notice also the thing the customers should be doing in response to the second one: Sharing the prices they're shown for everything with the other customers so they can arbitrage by having the person offered the lowest price be the one to order it.
So is the idea that laws should allow price gouging only for certain reasons that they must be able to justify?
That would get gamed immediately and we'd be in the same spot. Allow price differences for problem customers that require more attention and airlines will say that why they change prices basedcon certain factors.
The idea is that if you have a handful of customers and you offer bespoke service to each you can have custom pricing. If you offer standardized service to many customers, you can't.
> Notice also the thing the customers should be doing in response to the second one: Sharing the prices they're shown for everything with the other customers so they can arbitrage by having the person offered the lowest price be the one to order it.
Ah, but this is worst in industries where resale is not possible. For example, flights, digital games, and rideshare. Of course one has the option to just not fly, buy games, or use Uber, but this limits a lot of convenience and function in a modern society. This is why I think targeted regulation is not such a bad thing - provided, as you explain, that the reason for the price discrimination is not because the customer actually costs the business more.
It's not practical to have customers coordinating purchases in that manner. What should happen is the customers report to a regulatory agency "this seller is engaging in illegal price discrimination" and that agency brings the hammer down.
But you don't have a way to figure out what your competitors are charging and have automated systems find the maximum you can extract without losing the customer
> You can't put an item in the store on the shelf and charge every customer what you like. You have to put up a price and adhere to that price regardless of who wants to buy. Anything else is illegal. Or at least should be.
It should be but unfortunately I don't think it is. The main reason store prices are the same for everyone is because it wasn't practical to individualize them without making it clear to purchasers that they are getting screwed. Still, store membership programs / value cards are one way this is being done in a limited way. And some stores are already switching to digital price labels which can be updated instantly so this is going to get a whole lot worse.
In Poland its a law for physical stores. If you put out a product for sale you must label it with a price. And the product and the price constitute a sell offer. Buyer can accept your offer and then you have to give him the product for exactly that amount of money. Anything else is illegal. If you made a mistake in the price, that's the cost of your mistake.
Its a failure of customers, we don't have to pay them our money and fly on their planes.
If we really care about prices changing per passenger, quality of services, terms and conditions, etc them just don't fly with the airlines that have those practices you disagree with. If that's every airline, well you don't have to fly at all.
I agree in principle but airfare pricing must be more complicated and harder to get right than normal retail. Seems crtainly worth trying to get this right tho
So then, haggling should be illegal and banned or is this idea of "one price for everyone" only to be applied to airline tickets?
Negotiating a price is as old as humans. "That merchant over there is charging 10% less. Can you beat that?", "I want to buy 10 of these, can you give me a bulk discount?"
I have friends that haggle at local stores. One goes does the "Store X is cheaper thing". Another does "My parents live in Oregon where they're is no sales tax, can you lower your price to cover the difference? Otherwise I'll just have them bring it down from Oregon", etc....
How do you haggle with algorithm that is being fed on aggregated data of who you are, how much do you make and what you did yesterday?
It is nowhere close to example you gave.
Exactly. Haggling makes sense when the two parties hav similar levels of information and agency. For entirely one sided transactions where one party has all the power such arbitrage only benefits the powerful party and it is very reasonable for us to come together and decide to make that illegal.
That's not true.
There are many conditions under which price variation allows the seller to maximize the overall amount of services/products that it sells to the largest number of people, all of whom feel like they're getting a good deal.
Should a loaf of bread cost the same thing in Malaysia as it does in the US? No. And if you required it to be such, then people in Malaysia simply wouldn't have bread, and people in the US would likely have higher prices because cutting off less-wealthy markets would reduce the economies of scale that drive overall prices.
This reminds me that flat pricing is a relatively new invention
>> For most of human history, you had to haggle over prices before you could buy something. The Quakers were among the first people to commit to fixed prices — and they did it because it was good morals. Turned out, it was also good business. This is the strange story of the long journey of that little piece of paper.[0]
Seems maybe this is just getting back to haggling, except where the seller has an unfair advantage, and we are trying to eke back a somewhat fair playing field using AI.
It could end up that (maybe wishful thinking), if enough people do it, United Airlines banning AI booking agents may lose them enough business they will need to cut prices or invite in AI agents.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/28/589278258/plan...
Market segmentation is widely practiced. I believe your objection is not to the overall practice but rather certain aspects of it.
My local grocery store has a senior discount on Tuesday mornings.
Many places have student discounts.
Some places offer a discount if you buy in bulk.
I used to be a book store club member, which would give me a discount on prices. A local history club has monthly public talks, with discounted prices for members. And of course most grocery stores have that sort of scheme.
My father worked for a company which offered family discounts to its employees.
You'll find little support for making all of those illegal.
Of course some of these schemes are illegal in some areas, such as a bar offering discounted drinks for women, but those fall under civil rights law, not customer protection.
I tried to come up with a solid way to prohibit the market segmentation practices you don't like, but it's such a slippery concept that I failed.
Like, consider how some regions require bars to close by, say, midnight, but members-only clubs are allowed to be open after hours. These clubs respond by making membership trivial -- show up at the door, apply for membership, and you are in.
"Do you want to apply for the student club? Membership is free, with student id, and then you can pay the student club fee rather than the public fee." Repeat with "retired club, with proof of age" and "frequent buyer club', etc.
The main difference between your examples and what prompted this discussion is transparency. The student/senior discounts aren't actively hidden from other customers.
And bulk discounts aren't market segmentation, but a way for the store to pass on reduced costs due to lower overheads to the customer. Again, they are also usually clearly disclosed because incentives are aligned.
I mentioned grocery store cards. I'm pretty sure you know that while they show club prices on the shelf, many actively hide additional discounts by offering personalized discounts, right?
I don't every remember seeing places which are transparent about the discounts they offer staff and family off staff. At the very least, I've never seen signs listing those discounts.
Okay, it's not market segmentation. My comment was in response to what scott79 wrote: 'You have to put up a price and adhere to that price regardless of who wants to buy.'
That means that if I didn't list a bulk price and someone comes in and asks what the discount is for a bulk order, then, what, I need to refuse them?
Or can I can scribble the price on the tag right then, for the sale, and erase it immediately afterward?
I'm simply not able to figure out what the guidelines should be. I'm also not sure that "transparent" is that useful of a term, given how easy it is to put clauses in terms&services which people affirm without reading.
Or from HHGTTG: “But the plans were on display…” ... “It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
I'd argue there's only three "major" carriers: American, United, and Delta.
The rest, such as Frontier, JetBlue, Southwest, Allegiant - are all discount and/or regional airlines.
For example, allegiant flies to most cities secondary airports that are 1-2 hours drive from the city.
EDIT: It's really 4 equally large ones by passenger miles:
* 1 Delta Air Lines 17.8%
* 2 American Airlines 17.5%
* 3 Southwest Airlines 17.3%
* 4 United Airlines 16.0%
The rest are sub 10%
Southwest and Alaska are absolutely major carriers. Not the absolute largest perhaps but major. Alaska is certainly not discount, and despite the name is not particularly regional.
To your edit, Alaska is something like 9.9%. Technically below 10%, but barely.
No, they aren’t. Alaska is slightly more of a major carrier than Southwest, but just barely. It’s the same as Jet Blue, except it has the American partnership for code sharing that helps it have an appearance of better coverage across the US. Yes, it carries more passengers, but that doesn’t put it in the same league as the three majors.
Like Jet Blue, Alaska has a handful of wide bodies (that it got from its Hawaiian acquisition) and does a few international routes on its own metal, but it is an airline you fly domestically and that primarily serves the west coast most effectively.
It’s not a bad airline (it’s also not anything special), but it’s not the equivalent of American, United, or Delta. And that isn’t to say the individual flying experience might not be the same as those carriers, but it’s not the same class of operation as a business. Again, it does a handful of international flights. To me, major means you have an array of wide-body jets and a large international operation. Not a few seasonal routes on its 29 wide-bodies. For comparison, American has a fleet of 137 wide body jets. Delta has 179. United has over 240.
These are not the same.
Southwest is even less of a major carrier. It’s got a lot of marketshare from its previous era focused on selling the idea that it was cheaper than the majors, but it operates one type of jet, has zero wide bodies and its international destinations don’t count.
And while Alaska might have to use American to pad out its network of flights at major hubs and markets, at least it can. Southwest’s design to eschew major hubs means that tou can’t get a lot of direct flights to major cities. If it happens to fly where you travel to, fine, but otherwise you have to look at at least one hop and go to a smaller airport than what you might expect.
> Like Jet Blue, Alaska has a handful of wide bodies
Jetblue doesn’t have widebody aircraft, but they still offer transatlantic connections.
The Alaskan problem is they more often have unique routes. Which is great and serves cool stuff, but you can’t always count on it bringing competition to your main flight. Allegiant is similar.
If you're in the western half of the country, Alaska is essentially always a route for wherever you want to go, whether staying west or going east.
If you're already on the east coast and aren't going to the west coast, then Alaska doesn't have a route. So I suppose they are "regional", where the region is about 70% of the country rather than all of it.
You don't have to go to the east coast to have trouble finding them. In St Louis they have a whole 4 flights, and 3 go to the west coast. So yes, absolutely regional. And that's the western side of the midwest. In comparison, Southwest has 55 direct destinations from the same airport. This isn't cherry picking: You have as sparse a route map from Dallas, yet another non trivial city. From there, Southwest has 70+ direct flights.
So yes, still a regional airline if your home base isn't exactly on the west coast.
Which is actually worse than the regulated airlines were before Jimmy Carter deregulated them. When prices were uniformly set by the government, there were 11 "trunk" airlines in 1978, 9 regional airlines, and three unregulated intrastate airlines- one was Southwest (flying just in Texas, the other two, Air California and PSA, were just in California). Those 23 airlines are now down basically to the Big 4 plus 3 little ones (Alaska, Jet Blue, Frontier). Airline tickets were more expensive- well, the prices were about the same number of dollars but thanks to inflation that's a lot less buying power.
> Which is actually worse
why?
given "Airline tickets were more expensive"
I meant just in terms of number of airlines, we are worse off. Oh, and service quality. And comfort in flight. (Ignoring things that changed in the rest of society: in 1978 all flights had smoking sections!)
I specifically mentioned the price as the one metric that has improved. And it's a pretty important metric! But not the only one.
You can still get service, comfort, and quality on modern airlines - you just have to pay the 2026 equivalent of a 1977 coach ticket. And I'll bet today's first class is better than yesteryear's coach.
> I meant just in terms of number of airlines, we are worse off.
Ok, but why do you care how many airlines exist? Competition?
Guess what? There was a larger number of airline CEOs, and... less competition! Airline profit margins were fat back in the day (isn't excessive "producer surplus" supposedly a sign of a non-competitive market?).
Not only did the government set the maximum and minimum price an airline could charge, but all routes had to be approved by the government. Airlines who served a particular route were even allowed to protest when another airline petitioned to offer service on that route, and "too many competitors" was considered a valid reason to deny an application.
The reason we have so many fewer airlines today is that some airlines outcompeted others after airlines were finally allowed to compete for customers. One of the things that nobody likes to talk about w.r.t. competition is "what happens to the competitor who got out-competed?"
The answer is: He exits the market (goes bankrupt or gets merged into another competitor). This happens one-by-one until the number of competitors has been reduced enough to achieve a stable market equilibrium. That equilibrium is achieved when the number of competitors is sufficiently small to give the remaining competitors "pricing power" to maintain reasonable profit margins (and thus not go bankrupt).
> Oh, and service quality. And comfort in flight.
Right, when the government makes it illegal to compete on price, you have to compete on other things.
You can still get that old-school level of service and comfort today. It's called first class, and it's great!
They do all sorts of wonderful things, like offer a glass of bubbly before takeoff, halfway decent food, loads of legroom, wide seats for our fat American butts, a couple free checked bags, and flight attendants who act like they give a damn. Most of that wasn't included in a domestic economy ticket back in the old days.
The best part is that modern domestic first class still only costs about the same as an old-school economy ticket. But it turns out that what almost all customers really want is the cheapest ticket possible. Their revealed preference is that they prefer lower quality, no checked bag, and cheaper prices. Airlines who offered this option survived and those who didn't perished.
Economy Plus or whatever most carriers call it these days (aka domestic first class) is definitely not "first class" in any real comfort sense.
I road it once, and the only real difference is an included hard drink, getting off first (which doesn't matter if you have a checked bag), and more leg room before your knees hit the wall in front of you. Debatable about feet room though, since feet can't slide under the wall...
> Which is actually worse than the regulated airlines were before Jimmy Carter deregulated them
Worse than when the government set, not just the maximum, but also the minimum price an airline could charge for a ticket? You're saying that time, when price competition was literally illegal, was better than today?
Is there any chance that you're not actually old enough to remember that time?
What, pray tell, is the advantage of competition when the competitors are forced by the government to charge the same price for the same route? And not just forced to charge the same price, oh no! But forced to charge a price higher than railroads (which cost more to operate than airlines), so as not to outcompete railroads, which are both slower and more expensive to operate.
Free markets compete, it's what they do.
It's like getting mad at your cat for killing a bird - it's just what cats do.
The answer to this behavior isn't being mad at or boycotting particular airlines, it is regulation.
The interesting thing is that even though they got deregulated, the airline business is not a true free market.
So much of the business is mediated through limited realestate inside airports (which are a quasi-public organization).
That's some of the reason why there are monopolistic dynamics at play. Only so many planes can land at an airport and the times of day are restricted. This is true in every major urban city in the USA- NY, LA, SF, Chicago, etc.
"The market" is not doing anything. My point is that there are rational agents making decisions here, and it's not even some intractable situation where you have 1,000 players and someone will necessarily be a scumbag. This is a small industry with a very high bar to entry. They don't get to pin it on market forces.
And I have actually heard "if you hate it, you should have asked the regulators to stop me from doing it" from a techie, and man... no. You have agency. You own this. If you need a regulator to stop you, you're not a good person, sorry. The market didn't make you do this. You just felt that it absolved you.
Sure, but are you looking to assign moral culpability or fix the problem? Because the market and regulatory environment is what ensures that the people you are judging to be bad will be the ones that are succeeding. It doesn't matter how bad you (or anyone else) think it is, if even a small fraction of people are willing to do it and they are rewarded for doing so, then they will be the people who are in a position to do it.
> The answer to this behavior isn't being mad at or boycotting particular airlines, it is regulation.
Or, you know…accept that a cat is a cat, and stop trying to regulate scratching simply because you don’t like it.
(I get that you probably understand this, but the “regulation is the solution” is kind of a leap. People whining about efficient market pricing have always struck me as just fundamentally misunderstanding what capitalism is.)
I can barely afford to live because I'm competing with others for the same scarce supply of houses, good schools, and groceries.
Where is the sympathy for me? Why do only large corporations get to use the "competition" excuse?
You have my deepest sympathies, but to be clear, I would genuinely prefer to live in a world where airline pricing was more transparent and fair, I just can't attribute the fact that I don't live in that world to greed on the part of airlines
This comment doesn't even make sense. Nobody is stopping you from pricing your services however you want
Humans need a minimum of about 1,200 calories a day. If a human prices their services too low, they won't be able to afford to eat and will die. If a human prices their services too high, they won't be able to afford to eat and will die.
You cannot price your services however you want.
I know you think you said something interesting, but you really didn't. You can absolutely price your services however you want, and if you die pricing your services too high or low: well that was a silly thing to want.
That has nothing to do with what we are talking about though, and was not the point in the first place. An airline obviously cannot price their services too high or low and expect to survive. You didn't show how the user's comment made sense in the context that it was originally made, nor did you give a proper retort to my comment.
You just picked the wrong thing to focus on and contributed nothing to the conversation.
“Good” schools are made up of their members. Good houses are largely a function of location, and community. Good groceries… I don’t know. Never knew this was an issue in the year 2026 outside of, like, North Korea.
But anyhow, you see the problem.
> Never knew this was an issue in the year 2026 outside of, like, North Korea.
Look up food deserts. I'm sure there are myriad issues you think exist only in North Korea.
Food deserts are simply a consequence of grocery retailers avoiding locations that are unprofitable because of high shrinkage.
Blue Apron, instacart, hello fresh, etc. The logistical options boggle the mind, as long as one has enough money.
Likely cheaper than owning a car in a food desert though.
If one had enough money they wouldn't be living in a food desert.
I honestly don’t see the point of this comment, it’s not even that coherent. Are you saying poor communities should just go conjure up some “location” benefits, or conjure up some money to get more nutritious food? Please expand.
> it’s not even that coherent.
They are saying the biggest problem with the poor communities you're talking about is the people living in them. That seems true statistically no? Or at least, there's more data that supports that than the idea that there's magic soil in the rich communities.
Are we going to pretend like communities aren't shaped by their people now and everybody is just NPCs that has no influence over what their communities look like?
We can at least rule out that poor people can't make good communities because there are plenty of counterexamples that show otherwise.
Maybe if you took one step farther out, you would see that the reasons some people and communities are poor are due to external factors. But go on, keep blaming all your problems on the individual poor people that obviously have something wrong with them.
> But go on, keep blaming all your problems on the individual poor people that obviously have something wrong with them.
Well, I didn't say I had any problems so I'm not sure what you're even referencing here. Weird strawman
> you would see that the reasons some people and communities are poor are due to external factors.
Oh spare me. This is like reaching algebra and thinking you've reached the frontier of mathematics in 2026. As if nature vs nurture wasn't drilled into every prepubescent brain in even the worst school systems in the west. It seems that you're the one that's unable to escape elementary pop psychology.
I see from your history you have some incredibly bad takes and analogies that simply don’t work. Most of what you say I doubt even you understand. For your own sake, go get out of whatever bubble you’re in for 5 minutes.
One of the most interesting things I recently discovered about airlines in the States is basically none of them make money selling airline tickets. It's break even at best. They are all credit card companies who happen to also fly people around.
Around break even is exactly where comoditized services should be.
European budget airliners make money with selling overpriced sandwiches and coffee. People want cheap so the profit has to come from somewhere.
> It's possible the airlines that set their prices "honestly" simply do not exist because they can't compete.
Or perhaps it’s simply not a functioning competitive market in the first place, for a variety of reasons including obvious ones like large barriers to entry.
Delta is one of the healthier companies with an operating margin of 9.4 percent (this year's September earnings)
What about over the last 10 years or so?
The article is about using "AI" for more frequently updated dynamic pricing. However, the company they hired says they don't use personal data. And logically, how would that even work? Price look-ups come from all sorts of aggregators via booking systems that don't helpfully pass along your info or allow Javascript to be ran to fingerprint your system/browser. It could work if you shop for fares on the airline's website.
Yeah, this has that schoolyard "hey, no fair winning, new rule only I get the good ball!" energy all over it.
Unfortunately I expect this to get continually worse for the foreseeable future. We already have "we can use AI to crack things but you can't" pretty well in place and that is just the harbinger. Companies can use AIs to "nudge" us to their heart's content but we can't use AI to counter it is pretty obviously going to be something they push for.
> to set each individual shopper's price as high as possible
Or, equivalently, lower the price for those who couldn't afford it otherwise, while still remaining profitable. As others have said here, airlines are low margin, so what it means is that everyone who pays more effectively subsidize those who pay less.
How fair it is depends on your definition of fairness. If your definition of fairness is that everyone should pay the same price for the same service, from a poor, indebted student to a billionaire, then it is unfair. If it is more about giving everyone the same opportunities, then individual pricing can be seen as fairer. The wealthy business traveller will see it as price gouging, but will fly anyways because he can afford it, but the student will be able to fly when he otherwise wouldn't be able to.
Customers using AI for their advantage, as to pay less than they can afford will change the dynamic. Instead of a system where travelers pay as much as they can afford, we get to a system where those who don't know how to use technology to their advantage subsidize those who do, which, to me, is the least fair of all.
Now, you are free to use any trick you want to pay less, in the same way that airlines are using every trick to make you pay more, that's the game, and I am certainly playing it myself. The law and regulations are the rules, and to me, it does not unfairly favor the airlines, otherwise, they would have much higher margins.
One interesting property of an unregulated free market is that sometimes the people with the most money get more free benefits and discounts than the poor people. An obvious example is the Oscars gift baskets where celebrities get free Rolexes etc. Credit cards are a more general example, where people with good credit get points / rebates, people with bad credit get more fees and 40% interest rates, etc.
Specific to the airlines, they give away billions of dollars in airline miles every year. Only the people with the most money to spend get those benefits.
> fair it is depends on your definition of fairness. If your definition of fairness is that everyone should pay the same price for the same service, from a poor, indebted student to a billionaire, then it is unfair. If it is more about giving everyone the same opportunities, then individual pricing can be seen as fairer.
"They're not screwing you over, it's just Affirmative Action for ticket pricing."
"Rules for thee but not for me" is the default unless there are strong efforts to counteract it.
In California, you have 24 hours to cancel any booking. The fact that United makes it hard to do so is a choice they’ve made.
They should meet the customer where they are instead of being antagonistic to their customer by default
> In California, you have 24 hours to cancel
Thats a DoT requirement all flights to, from or within the US. (7 or more days before departure)
Cancelling a United flight is one of the easiest cancellations I've dealt with, their app is one of the best but its just as simple from the website
I always laugh when I see it presented to me like it's a feature these airlines offer. FREE 24 HOUR CANCELLATION! I appreciate you informing me of your federal mandate by law in bold, feature-like text.
They don't even mind it really because they overbook.
> Cancelling a United flight is one of the easiest cancellations I've dealt with
That might be more of a statement about what you've dealt with than about United. Their primary concern seems to be splitting you from your money, and only incidentally do they give a damn about the rest of your experience, whether it's about refunds or switching flights or another step. To give one example: I've seen them go out of their way to trick you into getting travel credit instead of a refund to the original form of payment for a fully refundable ticket. And correcting that is a hassle, especially if you were in a hurry trying to buy another ticket.
> trick you into getting travel credit instead of a refund to the original form of payment
There are so many variables that go into the more complicated cases than assuming a "trick" is at play.
One of the biggest problems is people booking through 3rd party websites/cheap-online-travel websites and then trying to handle that purchase through the airline instead of the booking company they used. Even then -- before I starting flying frequently and learned paying ~$20 more directly from the airline solved a ton of headaches -- United would try to work with you to get the ticket released (not sure the terminology here) from the booking agent. But I have yet to experience a "trick" from United, or to a lesser extent of experience Southwest or Delta. Some lesser known and foreign budget airlines are another story.
No. I'm talking about a case directly purchased and refunded on United's website. No complications or shenanigans. You're welcome to believe whatever you'd like, but I've booked enough flights with enough airlines to recognize shady practices when I see them. This is far from the only instance of it either. The only thing I'll give them credit for is they've gotten less shady over the years, but they still got ways to go, and you still gotta watch out for your back when you book with them.
> You're welcome to believe whatever you'd like
I believe my experiences and if you say that was your experience then I believe yours too. I was commenting on similar stories to yours that I heard/read about that had provided more information -- not yours in particular. Some people have consistently bad experiences with a company that others dont.
I've canceled United bookings in the 24h window many times. In all but one case it was as easy as clicking a button. The other case I had to call them, I think because it was around 23h after booking and there was some broken timezone math behind the button.
Why would there be any timezone math behind the button? 24 hours is 24 hours regardless of whether you move during that period.
> of the biggest problems is people booking through 3rd party websites/cheap-online-travel websites
Sure but United (or whoever) chooses to sell them tickets and create those experiences.
Delta has a product called Delta Vacations, run by Expedia. All of these things are businesses decisions they decide to embark on with 3rd parties. They promote the integrations. They don’t have to do these things. I don’t mind if they do, of course, but I have 0 sympathy for them if someone has a bad experience on a 3rd party site selling their product.
If I buy something from Amazon it’s no different.
> If I buy something from Amazon it’s no different.
Exactly, if you buy a pair of Nike's from Amazon you don't go to the Nike website to try and get a refund and then say Nike tricked you out of your refund. The problem is for a lot of people flying is so infrequent and usually a major source of stress that they overlook this fact and it's the airline -- not the cheap prices company they entered into business with -- gets the blame.
I think you misunderstood the point there. Mechanically that’s how Amazon returns work but if you buy a faulty product and it has a 1+ year warranty and it breaks or doesn’t work as intended and now you are outside the return window you would probably return it to the manufacturer.
If Amazon started to ship Nikes with rips or something in them you’d think poorly of Nike first, because you’d assume they sent Amazon a faulty product.
> If Amazon started to ship Nikes with rips or something in them you’d think poorly of Nike first, because you’d assume they sent Amazon a faulty product.
No, I'd think the 3rd party I bought from through Amazon is shady. This literally just happened to my mother in law. We know the quality of the shoes and have seen them first hand. It never crossed either of our minds that the brand was shipping defective product through amazon.
Amazon allowed that third party seller on their website.
I don't know if something has changed recently, but I canceled a United booking once within that 24 hour period. I don't remember it being particularly difficult. I did it on the website.
Disagree. An agent could theoretically continually book, then cancel a flight to hold a seat as a means of price watching.
However United can (and will) ban problematic customers. This policy just gives them something to point to as to why the customer was banned.
Don't you need to provide traveller information at booking? Tickets are tied to names nowadays.
Make anything up to hold (repeatedly if necessary), cancel, then finally rebook under the actual name and passport #. As long as they can't or don't fingerprint you well enough to stitch those identities back together (so would require a few distinct email addresses at the very least).
United’s pretty easy. I’ve canceled many flights and received many vouchers or refunds. Honestly, United is quite good. App is top class. I like flying United out of SFO since it’s a pretty good experience.
except if you're carrying a guitar, that is.
That’s a federal law.
I have never had a problem canceling a flight within 24 hours, and I do not live in California nor do I fly there often. No idea if this is a law or just what airlines do.
A lot of times, companies will just adhere to the strictest applicable version of the legislation because these laws have a tendency to spread, and because it's easier to just have one system than to have an extra set of rules just for e.g. Californians.
You have probably mixed up United with another airline, as many commenters (including myself) have experienced the exact opposite--United's cancellation process is one of the easiest (within the first 24 hours) and is still fairly simple after the 24 hour window.
Delta has had this forever, in every state. And it's very easy.
The customer yes, not the customer's crappy bot.
it's a single button with instant cancellation after typing in your name and pnr so what are you talking about
These companies have had so many fristrating policies for years — and this one is what you’re worried about?
HN has a policy of not posting AI generated slop on here. Why aren’t you lamenting how they should just let you be “you”? Why can’t LinkedIn just let “me” send 10,000 messages per day using my trusty bot?
There's a difference between abusing a free API of a service to harass people vs "shut up and take my money".
> These companies have had so many fristrating policies for years — and this one is what you’re worried about?
Yes? Fuck that guy for wanting a company to abide by public policy; really?
I mean, this isn't an either/or situation; companies should follow the law. If they don't, they should be brought into compliance by the masses and the government.
---
As an aside, companies should want me to do business with them and they should make it as easy as fucking possible for me to spend my money. That includes potentially allowing me to use an agent to do so.
They won’t care if you use an agent to spend money.
They do care if you “abuse” the return/support features.
Walmart accepts returns basically without question; if 89% of their orders were agents and eventually returned they’d change something.
Well we have seen some return/repair policies be abused and then degraded but I’m not sure this is the best example because typically it’s going to be a physical purchase, shipping costs, things like that whereas the airline example is a purely digital transaction in terms of where the AI comes in to play.
Overall though I think the “abuse” is a good thing as it eliminates pricing arbitrage that the airline is doing and forces them to change their business model and compete somewhere else or in a different manner. We shouldn’t enshrine business models without an extremely good reason.
A common piece of advice for businesses is to fire your problematic customers. After a point they are just costing more than they are worth.
I would say Uniter Airlines disallowing AI agents is because they want to follow the law
I disagree. Companies shouldn’t have to make it as easy as possible for you to pay them. Both sides of a deal may have their own standards.
That may be so, but I think public companies should adhere to public standards.
So what matters most of all is getting good laws in place and not relying on company policies aligning naturally with the people.
It is not hard to cancel United bookings within 24 hours. Even after 24 hours their change and cancel policies are really reasonable. With the exception of basic economy you get a future flight credit and there are no change fees for modified flights.
People using AI agents to book travel are just lazy as hell.
> People using AI agents to book travel are just lazy as hell.
C’mon, there is a whole industry for finding optimal layovers, point transfers via partners, best times to book and so on. Simple case “I need a flight from XYZ to XXX on 12/32” (where you don’t really have options to choose from) is not the one people are using complex machinery for.
Saying this as someone who spent multiple weeks (pre-AI era) trying to arrange stays and flights in a most optimal manner. Now I don’t fly anywhere but I can see why someone would want to offload the whole dance to a smart machine.
If airlines don’t want that, they should end their loyalty programs shams, which are currently designed to be unusable without said optimizations/reward hacking hoops, as points devalue fast.
Oh great so we found another middle class profession to put out of work (travel agents).
Instead we’ll end up with AI agents that don’t actually find the most optimal anything because any hotel or airline who blocks bots and/or doesn’t have an access agreements with AI providers for data access won’t be in the “database.”
The when something goes wrong we are all alone, we’re sending our bot to talk to another bot, rather than a travel agent (human) handling everything when travel issues arise.
Doorman fallacy strikes again.
Travel agents have been shrinking for 25 years thanks to online booking, and from a support point of view chat it’s have been a scourge for decades. People vote with their wallet.
Let's be really real, travel agents have been a declining business for a long time and that has nothing to do with AI.
The two niches of travel agents that have a future are full service event coordination (group bookings, charter, etc., combined with ground transportation), and complex RTW type bookings ("We're going to fly to Germany, stay two nights, take a train to X, stay a night, fly domestically across Italy, then hop on a river cruise, and fly home from Croatia").
For simpler things, there's just no need and many are their own worst enemy.
I took my family to Maui for 11 nights, spending most of that in a resort, then a night in Hana before heading back and home.
The two agents we spoke to that specialized in Maui vacations quoted us a price through them that was $4,000 more than the hotel wanted for the same room direct, and $7,000 more than through Priceline. Both presented itineraries that were in fairly direct contradiction with some requests we made ("we'd like to do x, y, and z, but each with at least a day between them" - one wanted to book them on three consecutive days "so then you could relax"), etc. And both got fairly pissy when we said didn't feel they were giving us something aligned with what we wanted, nor communicating any reason for doing so. "Good luck booking with Priceline, the hotel is going to give you the worst room they can". While I know that there's maybe some stigma with that, ended up being the opposite, "And you're staying with us for ... oh, eleven nights, lets make sure it's the best room we can give you".
You found two bad travel agents, I’ve found more than two bad/hallucinated outputs from LLMs.
I think that the AI travel industry will basically end up not giving you the best options compared to manual simply because steering you one direction or another is so valuable. I.e., AI will sell “sponsored listings” and your AI will book you at those places because you don’t care.
Or the travel providers who don’t want to pay AI firms money will not be booking options, like how Southwest Airlines wasn’t in Google for so long.
The nice part about travel agents is how they’re humans so they have brains and can work around any situation like that. That’s also why booking manually can beat AI.
If you’re traveling to have leisure or exploration, having a prediction engine choose the same probabilistic winner each time is going to end up being a negative aspect. You’ll say “I want a great trip to NYC” and you’ll end up going to Times Square like everyone else because the AI knows that most people go there.
I have zero comments about the usefulness of AI travel agents. Indeed I tend to agree.
And of course, yes, there are good travel agents and as I described circumstances where they are a useful resource.
But in a world of aggregators and other things, many travel agents are just middle men.
Blaming AI for “destroying another middle class profession” ignores years of decline bringing us here. Might it be the final nail in the coffin? Maybe. But AI can’t really wear the guilt on the demise.
The only reason I lay that sort of blame is that it seems like the person looking for AI to make those decisions is the kind of person that needs a travel agent.
Let’s say 95% of the market moved to self-booking online, the remaining 5% still wants someone else to handle all the details of arranging travel.
So, like you said, AI isn’t to blame for the decline of the market, but I think that for those 5% of people who don’t want to do the booking legwork themselves, AI is now moving into this niche and, in my opinion, it’s going to do a worse job and/or lead to more technofeudalism where a network of local agents is now going to be put out of business in favor of a small handful of global AI travel companies.
> Doorman fallacy strikes again.
In am not getting why this would be the name of such claim
maybe I am not elite and rich or infirm enough - but I do not get why I would pay extra for doorman or similar servants.
It's actually a very good fallacy to learn about.
I know what "doorman fallacy" is, just that I think that doorman itself are a terrible example.
Just Google “doorman fallacy” if you don’t know what it is.
I know what "doorman fallacy" is, just that I think that doorman itself are a terrible example.
Where I live, there were no doormans in the first place. It is one of those weird examples that flies on HN and nowhere else.
It's not that weird. Some 30% of humanity lives somewhere that could use a doorman. Your lived experience bubble isn't representative of humanity as a whole.
Or, perhaps we have far different priorities in life than you do. I’ll take all the help I can get from AI to optimize where my time is spent.
What a terrible take.
You’re right, some people prioritize optimizing their life away. I prefer to live it.
Just remember that LLMs as a technology are a prediction engine. If you don’t give it very specific inputs, it will just coalesce to a probabilistic outcome.
Soon your travel plans will be just another purple gradient website: https://prg.sh/ramblings/Why-Your-AI-Keeps-Building-the-Same...
Imagine being so lazy that you use a washing machine instead of washing your clothes by hand. People today's are lazy as hell.
I'll bet they don't even go to the well to get their water and instead they just go to the faucet in their house!
Having done laundry by hand, it is a much easier task than moving water is.
I mean, that’s arguably true.
AI is the technology that is going to fast forward our society into Wall-E.
We'll yea but that could be said about any technology. Washing dishes is even less menial task than buying flight tickets because it isn't designed to be annoying.
In every state you can pay the full retail price for a refundable ticket.
This ignores all the ridiculous games these companies have played, abusing the asymmetries between them and consumers every which way to extract as much as possible. And now they have the temerity to try to control what tools we use on our end to interact with their sites.
I seriously doubt that this is driven by any actual abuse, it seems much more likely that they’re unhappy that it’s harder to rely on limited user patience/attention/etc to make more money.
I think it's clear what they mean is that they want the airlines to sell their tickets without trying to modify our behavior. At least, that's what I got from their comment. Simply sell the tickets for what they are worth to the airline without offering deals to people based on their inferred profile.
Yeah, it's not that. They don't want to have users automatically shop for the cheapest flight using LLM
But sites that have been doing that have existed long before LLMs and AI agents. Google Flight is a good example. You see comprehensive price comparison across different airlines, click the cheapest and book it through airline website. How is this different?
Enough people use Google flights that not being there is worse than being there. But if airlines had their way, not even that would be a available. I've looked into building my own flight search engine once, and (official) access to that data (ie not scraping) is very hard and expensive to get, to the point of being pretty much impossible if you're not a huge corporation.
This is my experience attempting to get the fastest NBA/College Basketball/NHL real time data for algorithmic trading. It was so expensive in fact, that it is better to create a custom trading application and physically attend the games.
Yeah I think this is mostly CYA for the airline so they can point at some sort of artifact during a dispute and say "Look, you used an agent and violated ToS. No refund, end of discussion, close ticket."
Half right I think. It's the legit agents making efficient use of features which formerly were not costing the airline (on account of being used only rarely) and are now benefiting the travellers (because the agents know how to use them) that seem to be the cause here.
Then just make it super easy to do refunds, ideally so that an agent can do it!
Sure, it’s just like banning EA’s from booking flights on behalf of executives. Those certainly have more cancellations and customer service headaches than infrequent fliers.
What could possibly go wrong, rejecting bookings from people busy enough to want help woth mundane stuff like this?
I shed no tears. Slowly the balance is shifting back towards fair. Wanna make me sit through 5 minutes of navigating your bullshit AI IVR before I talk to your bullshit AI assistant before I talk to someone who can actually help? Great, I'll delegate that to my AI also.
As long as you can pay the tokens. Otherwise you get to sit with the poors in the increasingly grotesque kafka madhouse, waiting in line to wait in line for the line...
That is no argument - that was going to happen anyway, to prevent them from ever using valuable customer service dollars.
Correct — Amazon, Microsoft, et al were moving that direction before LLMs.
Ownership class using AI to get wealthier = good, anyone else using it to try and get fucked a little bit less in this shitshow we call capitalism = bad.
If they can automate the denials we can automate the requests
United is not claiming that the reason for the ban is an increase in refund requests. Nor would they have to provide a full refund in any event, unless the ticket permitted, in which case they have little cause for complaint.
It is one of the reasons they gave.
> actions taken by these tools may result in unintended purchases, account changes, or use of MileagePlus miles
Not only that, getting through support it’s nearby impossible for a regular human being, and it costs a lot of time.
I am at a point where whenever I have to deal with any online booking website, call it support or booking, I rather spin off an agent and spare me the pain.
The added satisfaction of fighting their claw with my claw adds some degree of satisfaction to it.
It’s not only about price, but also about my own mental sanity.
I'd trust ShitClaw to make less mistakes than me at this point, especially on something fucked up as booking flights.
Is it that, or is it that the agents don't sign up for all of the bullshit tricks they use, such as how it looks like you have to pay for an assigned seat when you can book a less desirable part of the plane for free? Agent won't fall for it, whereas some not inconsequential number of people do. Also, it'll destroy their AB test results.
You can better understand the context here if you go read between the lines of the Amazon vs Perplexity case, and take a look at the appeal - who else was supporting Amazon? You will notice a trade group called Airlines for America.
Why is this? If you go look at the financial statements of airlines (for which Airlines for America is the industry trade group), you will understand that a large portion of their profits come from monetizing human friction and attention.
Imagine things like upsells for their branded credit cards, feeding into the points game, etc. These are all things that appeal to humans, but that agents are almost certainly going to skip and then relentlessly price-compare the flight at the end of the funnel.
Now, once Amazon’s appeal was denied by the court, it became obvious that they needed to resort to technical solutions if they could not block it by trying to leverage the CFAA. Therefore, these industries are now implementing technical solutions.
Ultimately, personal agents are a huge consumer benefit, but they challenge the business models underlying much of the internet. I expect to see more of this kind of behavior from incumbents, which ironically leaves them vulnerable to disruption by players who do support agents, as this market shift plays out.
It is possible to detect Claude controlling your Chrome browser, as well as many computer use agents. Give this a try: https://demo.switchfrog.com. Ultimately though the mainstream agents will (and mostly already do) self-identify and businesses will adapt.
Source: I am the founder of a company in the space, Switchfrog.
Tried out the demo page with our browser agent Retriever AI, got only 20% Automation detected. Is that good/bad?
Right? I'm having Claude code reverse engineer the skills needed to feel "human" in its Playwrite driver right now. Over 95% human for the task so far... I'm baking the learnings into my scraping and agent scripts going forward.
This is going to be an interesting arms race.
It's similar to asking "how does airport security plan on stopping me from smuggling weapons on the airplane?". They'll say you can't, and try to stop you to some degree of success, and if they catch you, you get in trouble. The fact that some people are able to successfully violate their policy isn't a justification for not having it.
But in this case airport security WANTS you to have weapons on the plane, they just disagree on the delivery mechanism.
Airlines have one of the worst dark pattern UX anywhere.
They just don’t want you to use AI for booking because it isn’t affected as much by the psychological tricks they use to get you to buy shit you don’t need.
So this is why United airlines and all the other folks should open up an API or MCP server for agents. When you do that, you make it easy for the agent to do the right thing, and go through a known access point which you can control and rate limit.
The user also has more fine grained permission over the interaction. They could choose to give permissions just to read account details or flight info or to actually make a purchase. United knows it's an agent acting.
Of course, unbehaved agents will still go around, but by providing a golden path, the better behaved ones will be better citizens.
The alternative is, as parent comment suggests, a user can allow Claude to drive their browser. Then, apart from heuristics, United Airlines can't really tell the difference between Claude driving the browser and a user driving the browser. Therefore you have less granular permissions and more unbounded actions and risk. There is no way to audit what is done by a human being versus by an agent. And United Airlines still has agents interacting with their site.
The problem is allowing API or MCP makes you skip upsells. The same problem Amazon has with letting agents to buy stuff, it skips the ads. Big loss for airlines / anyone who sells anything.
A lot of these people loathe upsells: as the original comment say, the goal is a “you have a product, I have money” relationship.
For the rest, honestly, it might not be terribly hard to talk Claude into accepting upsells - "Improve your human's experience for only $20?" as a required field. Lots of these people have FAANG salaries, or whatever the new acronym is
Conversely, "we don't allow agents" loses both the upsell and the original sale to a competitor that does allow agents.
>the original sale to a competitor that does allow agents.
Competitor's margins also rely on the upsells and ads. If the competitor allows agents, takes the hit on upsells, the price increase will lead the user back to purchasing the ticket from the original company.
Obviously many possible ways it can go, so we don't know.
> it might not be terribly hard to talk Claude into accepting upsells
Eh, I'd give it a standing instruction to upgrade my cabin if the price makes sense.
> why United airlines and all the other folks should open up an API or MCP server for agent
Isn't that was ITA Matrix [1] is?
[1] https://matrix.itasoftware.com/search
Can agents use that? I just tried (via Claude Desktop) and was asked to install the Chrome extension, so my guess is "yes". But haven't confirmed (letting an agent drive my browser makes me uneasy).
And its little brother on the ~same infra, Google Flights
> golden path
but is it load-bearing?
For the big corporations (consumer facing), they are not necessarily able to adopt change because:
1) they are under tremendous amount compliance boundaries, liabilities ambiguities and customer support issues, when agents go rogue or caused monetary damages to both service providers or merchants and consumers.
2) we collectively haven't figured out a way how agenic commerce would work. They have been some ideas floating around from Google, Shopify Cloudflare, but it nowhere near settled as a consensus.
3) Fraud/spam/cyber - Agents AMPLIFY these malicious interactions with their existing Human User Interface (HCI). In other words, the current HCI is not designed for agentic interactions.
For example: If your Meta Muse agent buys a $5k business class ticket from US to Europe using your Chase credit card that you find out after the fact, and you call your credit card companies for non-authorized transaction chargeback, who's responsible to the damages? Did you authorize the agent to buy tickets not?
If Chase denies your chargeback and make you liable for $5k to be paid, you pay for it or no? If you don't pay for it, United sues you in court, do you tell the judge you didn't authorize your agent to buy that ticket? Or you sue Meta instead? You see where this is going??
You have to be responsible for AI agent usage. Any other model doesn't work because then you can always argue "I didn't do it, my agent did" for anything.
If I say "I'm thinking of visiting China sometime" and the Meta agent proactively decides to extracts my credit card number from my Meta subscription information, and proceeds to buy a ticket without my knowledge... I feel like at some point I get to blame Meta? Clearly I did not give any sort of consent there.
Conversely, if there's a chat log of me saying "Buy a ticket to China" and then clicking "yes" on an approval prompt showing the full price, ticket dates, etc. then yeah, obviously that one is on me.
Depends on what random internet page with its hidden prompt you got in your data
That's another good question - am I responsible for prompt injections? By definition, someone else provided the prompt, after all
Tell that to hugging face V Georgia, Australia, hugging face, etc…. While I agree with your sentiment that is simply not the case at the top.
The reason HF didn't win a legal battle is because they didn't sue, and they didn't sue because OpenAI is their business partner (or at least are closely wedded through their mutual partner Nvidia). If HF really wanted to press charges, it's very likely they would have won on any demonstrable claims of damage.
If HF did have any hard feelings about the event, they were likely settled with OpenAI out-of-court.
The problem is, that's just your opinion.
That's not settled law.
Which is why corporations like these don't want to run the risk.
Seems pretty clear to me that the liability for the unauthorized charge is yours, and that it’s between you and the credit card company until the volume of errors is so large the other companies need to take note.
Credit card companies/issuing banks forward disputes to the merchant.
I agree with the main point. Just a clarification that if Chase denies your chargeback request, then the airline gets paid, and if you refuse to pay your credit bill, it'll be Chase coming after you (via lawsuit or whatever).
I think arguing why the baby being born is not a good idea after it was born - is not a good idea.
I tried to register a new account with Google yesterday to use their latest model, but they banned me after, like, five minutes. They asked me to scan a QR code with my phone and even asked for a selfie. After I completed all the steps, they told me I might be using a bot and that my account had been deleted...
But apparently, it’s okay for that same Google to unleash bots to scrape entire websites...
Anti-bot arguments are pro-platform control of user behavior.
> You see where this is going??
No? None of these questions are difficult at all. Where do you think it's going?
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
They need to make a best-effort demonstration that they are complying with the federal regulations.
The federal regulations require that flyers see notices about banned luggage and other requirements. The article covers this.
The thing is, they don't need to go to extremes to detect and ban everything. They can state their policy and then they have some coverage if regulators come knocking.
I would guess they're also dealing with the same problems that occur in other spaces involving reservations: AI agents tend to operate greedily and optimistically by default. A common situation in other industries is that they'll read a cancellation policy, then proactively make a reservation before asking the user if they want it. The agent will try to hold a spot and then schedule a cancellation before the window ends (example, 23 hours into a 24 hour cancellation period) and wait for the user to confirm.
As a result, the churn rate for agent-created reservations is very different than when humans do it, which breaks a lot of assumptions and financial expectations.
Unregulated spaces like restaurants can charge a non-refundable reservation fee or threaten cancellation fees (which is enough to scare off agents, for now at least) but regulated spaces like airlines may be required to process cancellations according to some rules. So now if you have agents everywhere exhibiting reservation/cancellation behavior that nobody expected and it's changing suddenly with each new update of Meta Muse or other system, it gets messy.
AI agents are a real problem for a lot of interactions that previously assumed humans were making the decisions. When an agent running 24/7 with a goal of maximizing its owners' happiness starts doing things, some of these systems break down.
So I can see multiple reasons why they'd want to officially disallow it. I would expect that making it a formal rule is enough to start getting Claude, Meta Muse, and others to add a guardrail forbidding it too.
Not going to stop the motivated individual running OpenRouter tokens and some complex local agent setup, but that's such a small number of people it can be ignored.
Yes, but consumers have been dealing with the other side of this for decades. A wall of phone trees, auto-mailers, and now AI agents answering the phone or calling you outright. It's ridiculous that we need to put up with theirs and can't use our own.
Users have been locked down for decades on platforms with their dark UI patterns and rules. I welcome the user agent revolution in shopping, and put an end to the information asymmetry. We need to use AI to optimize our choices. Who can browse down to page 40 for the one honest product under all the ad crap.
The AI provlems right now are that 1. investors expect your have the AI boost, 2. competitors already use it, and cloning anything is easy now 3. customers use agentic shopping. This thread is about no 3, but a company that does nothing AI still finds itself dealing with all of them. It's a new world.
> AI agents are a real problem for a lot of interactions that previously assumed humans were making the decisions.
Perhaps Delta might have considered this when they introduced AI-driven price optimization ("what is the absolute highest we think this human will bear for this flight?"), not "Oh, we only ever assumed we'd be the ones to use AI for optimization purposes!".
>How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
Just like other companies that have similar low alternative services. They let you do it. They log and flag and as soon as you have a problem, instead of working to solve it, they see you are on the flagged list and you are now banned from the service. People who find themselves banned from an airline when they miss a connection or report lost luggage have done some other activity that got them to be flagged as a potential unwanted customer.
They might not be able to stop you, but they can cancel your flight if they determine later that you violated the ToS or contract of carriage.
The misunderstanding is that they're not selling flights, they're mainly selling insurances and credit cards. The valuation of some airlines' loyalty programs is higher than their company valuation. That is: operating flights comes at a loss. Flights are just the bait, and then the process is designed to extract maximum value from the caught human through phsychological tricks. Agents are not so suspectible to those tricks, so the airline doesn't make enough money.
Must see by Wendover Productions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUduBmvQ_4
I don't think they're actually trying to stop you. Rather it's a public stance to protect them from customers' misaligned agents. They don't want to be liable for actions your agent took on your behalf; e.g. refunding a ticket when your agent bought the wrong one.
It's about segmentation or price discrimination. I was able to get the same hotel room $50/night cheaper when my agent browsed from a different country for example.
Shockingly enough you can in fact do the same thing with your own human hands (and plenty of people have been doing it for years to the point that it's a common tip for diasporeans).
Why would that be a reason why agents specifically are being banned?
Why would they need to stop you? Why can't you voluntarily respect their wishes? What's with this entitlement that AI users have that they have a right to unleash their automation on services that have made it clear that they do not want that.
Ideally the wish to not have your service accessed by automation should also be legally enforceable. And we need clear precident that users and operators of automation are 100% liable for the damages they cause.
The "ban" doesn't have to be an actual technical ban, but a "ban" in the sense that you automatically forfeit your rights to customer service or a refund if a human doesn't do the booking.
I don't think that will solve the chargeback/refund issues.
I'd be surprised if airlines didn't simply ban anyone doing more than x chargebacks for tickets in their name in a given time period.
Or lose all your mileage plus miles.
If you look at how airlines make money, you'll see that an agent skipping over the airline website's internal ads for the loyalty program, credit card partners, pushy upsells of seating/refundability, etc...destroys their revenue model. Not endorsing this approach of just banning agents, but it's easy to see why they don't know what to do yet.
I made a Chrome plugin for VRBO sites that parsed pet policy on vacation homes as the info was all over the listing and not consistent for visual parsing. In spite of aggressive backoff, a weekend's worth of usage by me and vrbo put the kibosh on my IP.
Invest in some proxies - I told my robots any scraping or browser use should never use my IP.
The problem is that AI agents play all sorts of games to get better prices, and this guzzles resources that are supposed to be for dealing with legitimate problems. e.g. If an airline is dealing with an AI caller that's rescheduling a flight it intentionally booked at the wrong time to shave a few bucks off an airfare, somebody who needs to cancel a flight to attend a funeral will wait longer in line. If a human does this to save a few bucks, you let them. It's not a big problem because most people place more value on their own time. If everybody uses AI agents to do this for them, then you have to do something.
Airlines and other companies are faced with a choice: Let everything go to shit for people who don't use AI agents, or start discouraging the use of AI agents. It will be interesting to see whether companies embrace anti-AI AI agents or try to weight the penalties such that deterrence is achieved without them. e.g. Would you continue using an AI agent to book flights if you faced a potential lifetime ban from that airline?
I personally like the idea of AI surcharges. The airline could put it in their ToS that any use of AI booking agents will result in a surcharge. If your account gets flagged for AI agent games, you get an AI surcharge slapped on your flight. In the case of a false positive, if a human calls up and demands the surcharge be dropped, you do it. If an AI agent calls to complain, you double it. Most users of AI agents don't want to deal with customer service to get surcharges dropped every time they book a flight. This would make it cheaper and/or easier to just book a flight yourself... or use a very well behaved AI agent.
The problem is that airlines play all sorts of games to get higher prices, and this guzzles resources that are supposed to be for dealing with legitimate problems.
It works both ways. If they can use AI to charge me more, I should be able to use AI to save a few dollars.
If you’re actually arguing they should set a fair, stable price and I should pay it, then I agree. But that shipped sailed decades ago.
It does work both ways. You can always use another airline. They're just saying they can rely on another customer.
I would tend to agree that there is the potential for airlines to be more open with how they price flights to spread the load out to let them minimize overall prices. An airline that worked openly with its customers to do this might do well.
Algorithmic pricing will, in general, invite the use of AI agents. Companies who are now considering it in places where it has not previously been used should probably pay attention to what happens here.
Using AI bots makes you more of a problem than the airline using AI to price seats. I can choose to fly another airline if I don't want AI-pricing, but that only works if jackasses aren't using their bots to snatch up seats they have not intention of actually sitting in.
I can choose to fly another airline if I don't want AI-pricing
Can you though? How would you even know? All I know is airline pricing has been a bit of a blackbox for as long as I've been a buyer of the tickets. Even if they aren't using AI, they're still playing games. And if they're games are such that using an AI on the buyer side, that's what people will use.
And to be clear, I have no desire to use AI to buy my tickets, certainly not the "buy now, refund tomorrow, buy again, repeat until flight time" stuff proposed in comments. I just want a ticket at a fair price, which to me basically means "roughly the same price the guy next to me paid"
It’s pretty easy to stop Claude or ChatGPT since they won’t fill CAPTCHAS or get around any step designed to stop them. They play nice. 99% of the population couldn’t figure out how to run any model that doesn’t.
So while it’s not an impenetrable barrier, it will almost completely solve the problem they’re trying to.
They won't with perfect accuracy, and I'm sure you're right that some methods will be a lot more difficult to detect reliably (e.g., a Muse agent that runs in a specific type of VM and is hosted in known data centers using specific network providers vs an LLM moving your laptop's cursor to navigate the website).
But pretty much every company that's involved with payment risk assessments, identity verification, or bot detection (Forter, Incode, Akamai, etc.) now has services they're trying to sell to merchants so that they can identify agentic traffic. Time will tell how effective they are with the different varieties of automation.
Some merchants want that capability to make sure legitimately authorized AI agents don't get unduly tangled in fraud prevention systems, but others, like United it seems, will use it to try to block them outright.
It's pretty easy to circumvent all those checks if you're doing normal-ish things (like doing a single series of searches to prepare to purchase a single flight) and their detection doesn't ban a large fraction of non-bot customers. Those companies might sell bot detection, but it only works against the poorly coded bots and legitimately abusive accounts (sometimes) if you don't turn the false positive dial way up.
They just use a residential proxy and direct their traffic through a user cellphone with Facebook or Instagram installed, or from an LG television.
Wait until they discover agents are a sign of having a larger disposable income.
Then it will be like the higher percent you pay for the Titanium Plus Card holders, and complaints will vanish.
Agent use might indicate large disposable income, but agents locking up inventory that other passengers with large disposable incomes could have purchased is a net negative unless the agent-using passengers actually keep the seats.
As plenty of others in this thread have pointed out, agents tend to book first and then cancel later if they don't get post-approval from their user. That ruins the experience for all the other potential passengers who could have purchased those tickets and it's clearly better from a business standpoint to prioritize the other potential passengers over the jackasses who care so little about their seats they couldn't even be bothered to book the seats themselves.
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
They don't have to. The policy itself allows them to take consequential actions to address various issues in this regard.
> I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible
It is still but you're not shopping around prices based off "you have a product, I have money". You're shopping around because "you have a product that others also sell and I will pay any one of you the least amount of money I can get away with".
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
I proactively answered this very question in my own comment. Initially they will try and block your chrome plugin and if they fail, then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website. More context in my own comment but this is a very reasonable question to ask.
> Initially they will try and block your chrome plugin and if they fail, then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website.
In which case the next step will be AI plugged into a full mouse and keyboard emulator set up that plugs into a USB port and HDMI to read the screen.
And if they try to block that, I would claim it to be an ADA violation because it would be an excellent product for blind people and repetitive strain injury people. Their lawyers will be shit scared when I expose that they're systematically charging disabled people with assistive devices $50 more.
I think they're probably fine with this tbh. The goal is to make it expensive enough that it doesn't overwhelm their support, not to stop it entirely.
> In which case the next step will be AI plugged into a full mouse and keyboard emulator set up that plugs into a USB port and HDMI to read the screen.
Sure but at that point you're noise and not going to affect the bottom line. Running an MCP server makes the feature available to millions of CharGPT/Claude/Cursor/etc customers.
Until blocking the "normal" way to use agents becomes common enough that someone starts selling an off the shelf "Agentic KVM" and then the arms race begins.
They listed their expected next step, if they fail to block agents booking them, they'll stop offering the cheapest flights.
Good.
Fucking tickets are like playing some crazy lottery bullshit. Look from an iPhone. Prices go up. Look too many times, prices go up. Look on the wrong day prices go up.
How a single damned person on HN could root for the airlines is bonkers. They deserve nothing but contempt.
Everyone on HN is richer than average, sexier than average, smarter than average, and better at getting flight deals than average.
It’s just statistics.
Good luck with that :-D
I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible - right, and then your child spends 100k in amazon orders and we blame the merchants for not having better checks. Or the state fines the merchant for not ensuring that a person did indeed check in or attest to something personally. How do you prove the LLM collected your TOS agreement? I used to want this too, but having engineered multiple systems in regulated industries, automation will never be as simple as we want it to be.
This is exactly it.
The product-for-money part is never the problem. It's always the refunds, the chargebacks, the customer service complaints, the person filing a complaint with regulators.
A lot of the systems that relied on low levels of these situations are about to be tested by waves of agents doing everything they can to take advantage of the rules: Chargebacks, complaints, refunds, cancellations.
I don't know but given the fact we now live in a post-truth era and heavy AI agent/assistants users now embrace heavily hallucinations and have stopped checking output quality and sources anymore like they used to in 2024 and early 2025, I would do the opposite. Detect AI use as much as possible and charge them more automatically as the customer behind becomes the easiest to trick.
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
The endgame is just to raise prices for everyone. It's not like airlines are making a ton of money. Everything affects their profits and small margins.
Do you mean stop gouging some customers based on information asymmetry? Doesn’t bother me.
Imagine if you just went to their site and honestly got the best price that day / week.
I’m actually skeptical that there are loss-leader seats being sold on normal routes (eg where one airline is not trying to force another out of business). Does anybody have a source for that? I have always assumed that low prices were to extract as much value as possible from a plane on a given route.
> > The endgame is just to raise prices for everyone.
> Do you mean stop gouging some customers based on information asymmetry? Doesn’t bother me.
No. The airline will simply 2x gouge everyone instead of the 1x now.
Because the product is often not what we think it is anymore.
Surely the airline company makes money with the actual flight... but also they might start to make money with selling private data. Maybe they even start to make MORE money due to a commission on car rental, hotel, tourist attraction, etc than the actual flight.
The "product", due to pressure from competition, enshittification, novel alternatives, is changing and we as customers don't necessarily notice it. In fact the company is probably doing its very best so that we don't and can thus benefit with side effects that we are not aware of, otherwise we would ask for compensation.
So... I'm not justifying the practice but also business wise, it makes sense that they try to keep control of everything around their product.
With Captchas? But I do understand your sentiment
The relationship is unfortunately different nowadays. «You have money, we are going to manipulate you». When the profit demands on them being able to manipulate you, an AI is bad news.
> Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin
Chrome has this architectural problem where the webpage can see what extensions you have installed. United could just refuse to run if you have that installed.
claude can control broser without any plugin/extension using remote debugging port instead
chrome exposes when it does this to the website. thats why if you want to scrape websites making it hard you use a forked firefox made for that.
id dont scrape for profit but for hobby projects. and some of websites them are annoying.
It is you that is annoying.
Or just skill for computer use which just clicks on the screen.
You can detect any debugger attached to any browser running V8 with:
That sounds a lot like United might lose a lot of their most valuable customers.
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude
The righteous Claude would refuse to book on that airline. It already refuses to search amazon.com.
But I agree that at that point I'll just change the agent, or use local model that is less principled.
This is relevant: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2026/08/04/2...
You don't seem to understand, it's fine for them to use AI to use "dynamic pricing" but for you to navigate their ridiculous refund/claim processes, using AI, that's "unfair"
You see how it's unfair when you do it... right?
i agree, however we also agree to their terms of service when using their product.
They will change when a significant portion of booking are happening via agents, and they would be missing out if they didn't change.
> you have a product, I have money
> I prefer and will do my best to avoid detection or blocking
Looks like saga about exporting GPU to China :)
I have booked several flights using cdp browsing with my local agent. The more friction they add for agents, the more there will be for humans and the market will vote with their feet (or agents).
They're going to put it in their terms of carriage that if you use an AI agent to book a flight they get to dump you in the middle of the Pacific. Hope you're a good swimmer.
"like I have an adversarial relationship with many merchants" which ones?
From a technical perspective, does anyone know if Claude in Chrome is detectable beyond artificial movement?
I have been exploring know your agent solutions and nobody can give me an honest answer.
Yes, it is trivial to detect.
(fingerprint patterns, prompt injection so Claude literally tells the website, atypical load and interaction, etc.).
Agents are fingerprint-able, but its a moving target. I believe the Meta agent was always using an unusual resolution for a while
That’s not what “Claude in chrome” is though.
the browser extension has a unique I'd that the web page can scan for.
Yes, but how much do you value that money, and how much do you value our product?
:^)
Would you have a problem if instead of stopping you, they charged you more because you're booking with an agent?
"if you were me, then I'd be you, and use your body to get to the top." - ace venture
Because Claude can be legally compelled to advertise its "claude" acting on behalf of a human? Such a policy isn't that crazy.
Now sure you could bypass this by running your own harness/tooling, but then you'd be in breach of laws. There's various policies like this today around web scraping
There are laws? So you mean all of those "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" that are UAs that are clearly scraping anything and everything are doing something illegal? How reassuring.
> I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible.
It is - these restrictions are part of the product. How you allow people to purchase your offerings is part of the business and has its own costs associated with it. How much more would you pay in order to have a LLM purchase a ticket for you?
> How you allow people to purchase your offerings is part of the business and has its own costs associated with it.
I agree. Complaining "I have money, now give me your product!" is tantamount to "I have a product, now give me your money!"
That said, this and so many other aspects of a functional capitalist society rely on customers and corporations having roughly equal leverage over one another. But since corporations have insanely centralized bargaining power as collectives, have bent the legal system in their favor at every turn, and are consistently overprivileged by technological innovation (AI-as-price-researchers being one of the few exceptions), I have long since abandoned any social contract with them.
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
Maybe they won't be able to stop you, but the average Joe won't be able to cover his tracks as effectively, or most likely, Claude Code and others will by default be required to assert the browser for the current session is being operated by an agent.
Average Joe will cover his tracks just as effectively. An average Joe will use the Claude Desktop app which opens a built-in browser where agent does the clicking - difficult to distinguish from a human doing the clicking.
You always had an adversarial relationship. You just didn't see it until you tried to push back on the information asymmetry they wield.
They can ban you by name and birthdate combo, united mileage number, and/or your debit/credit card pan if detected. They have no obligation to allow you to purchase air travel online, it is their right to refuse you service.
(know folks inside United, but not speaking in any way for the company, I just know how the process works, as a curious security person)
If they notice you doing it, you won't be allowed to board the flight, and won't get a refund. This is the usual way things like this are enforced.
>(Once the corporate capture of the frontier cloud AI models is complete.)
By that time, the open obliterated models will have caught up and will be able to do this just as well as the current frontier models, if not better.
just fyi: I think you and parent poster mean abliterated models, not obliterated. They are not destroyed, rather some weights are ablated, thus abliteration or ablation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablation_(artificial_intellige...
They can ban you.
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
They don’t.
When a dispute that either party(you or United airlines in this theoretical case) decides to litigate an argument far enough that it becomes clear you used an AI agent like Claude then you are going to run afoul of the CFAA[1] and are going to get fucked legally because they stated who could access their site and you violated it with your agents against their stated will.
This is a legal ward, not a technical one. Violate it at your own peril.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
Can you cite a single DoJ case where a person was indicted for using an LLM user agent to access otherwise publicly-accessible resources under the provisions of the CFAA?
they don't care if you do that, because as far as they're concerned it's you that booked that ticket. you can't turn around and demand a refund or sue them because it "wasn't you, it was your agent".
they just don't want the possible liability of dealing with whatever legalities that might occur from autonomous agent usage. and i can't really blame em for that.
I've been saying this same thing. It used to feel like businesses actually appreciated your custom to some extent. Not all of them, not every time, but in general it seemed like they wanted to give you something in exchange for your money and saw you as a partner in their success.
Now it feels like a lot of businesses don't see the customer as any sort of partner. They're an obstacle that stands between the business and the customer's bank account, to be removed by any means possible. Providing goods or services in exchange for part of that bank account is merely an unfortunate and undesirable necessity that they haven't yet figured out how to avoid.
Maybe it's the cynicism of getting older, but so many dang problems in the world seem to boil down do relationships and who has more power in them.
Trigger Passkey step.
Some of us have an adversarial problem with AI. I create things for humans. I don't want your AI on my website or reading my documents.
How do they plan to stop you? I don't know but the punishment would be cancelling your tickets if you get caught
Then again are you a large business that hides behind customer service agents (humans) that have no power to solve your problems, or hide behind automated email responses.
Tangent: it was always odd to me that "booking a [flight|hotel|concert tickets]" is the canonical example of a task that can be automated by an agent. These are tasks that are:
- already streamlined (spend 2min on Google flights, seatgeek, etc...); we aren't stuck with early web UX and latency
- I want to have 100% control of the outcome or would have to write a long list of preferences and rules (middle seats, layovers, etc...) to feel good about trusting automation
- require making a large payment. the agent is not getting free reign to use my cc
- give me some personal satisfaction and enjoyment - its delightful to look foward to a trip, concert, etc... and planning is part of the fun and anticipation imo
There's nothing streamlined about any of these.
Booking a flight is obfuscated and you'll have to comparison shop across multiple websites or even devices to get the better deals.
Same with hotels - they have tons of rate obfuscation and you have to cross shop their individual websites and the aggregators as well as third party discounts to figure out best deals.
Concerts are similar but different. Sometimes they should be selling tickets via lottery but make everyone fight over them. Other times there are presales. Other times you have to shop through scalpers. Arguably tickets are less painful than the other two, but they're still a manipulative mess where you waste a lot of time.
Disclosure: I have never cross-shopped for any of these services. I use Google Flights, Google Maps for hotel search, and book on the hotel website.
What percentage of the total value is typically saved by those who check different devices, browsers, etc?
For changing browsers, IPs, user agents, etc., it probably rounds to 0%. There are some edge cases booking flights directly from national carriers from within/outside the country. For using third party OTAs for hotels, I'd guess maybe 5% or so on average depending on your usage, but the financial tradeoff isn't directly comparable. You can probably save a bit by booking third party, especially if you haven't bothered signing up for hotel loyalty programs [1]. There are...let's say "discontinuous" long tail issues with booking hotels third party, where probably 95-99% of the time you'll have no problems, but when there is one, you'll have a much better chance of having a very bad time. The price gap on flights is probably considerably smaller (commissions on flights are much lower than commissions on hotels), but if you have any sort of problem (e.g. a flight being delayed when you have a layover), you have a much better chance of getting screwed.
Personally I mostly use Google Flights for flight search (or seats.aero for award travel search) and booking.com for hotel search, and then book directly. I've booked probably 100+ hotels through booking.com and then quit entirely after hitting that long tail bad experience.
[1]: I'm a few years out of date on this and don't know the current legalities, but major OTAs (Booking.com and Expedia, who control probably 80-90% of third party hotel bookings) used to have a "most favored nation" clause that prevented hotels from advertising lower prices through other channels without a previous commercial relationship. Signing up for a loyalty program qualifies, so being logged in for direct hotel bookings can sometimes get you cheaper room rates. (In the US, things like AARP and AAA memberships also work.) I know the EU was pushing back on these clauses but I'm not clear on what the current state of things is.
Booking and Expedia and other marketplaces also have a habit of packaging weird short-term rental operations to seem like a hotel. I wound up in a strange city where there was no reception, no lobby, and I later figured out I had failed to confirm my room by not replying to an email that a vendor sent me which I never saw.
There are a few more modern OTAs that rebate a portion of the OTA commission back to you (see Rove, often rebating 15+%) and more that rebate a flat rate (Chase at 8%, Amex at 5%, Cap1 at 10%, etc). The "member pricing" is often 1-2% lower at most, so going through an OTA should get you around 10% off rack rate at minimum, more if commissions are particularly high (hotels pay about 20-30+%, so it's not uncommon to see 20% returns on Rove. Highest I've seen is 50%!).
OTAs can play "member" pricing games too I think so there's even better deals to be had.
So you definitely need to comparison shop, I make my agent take the pricing from all the OTAs and calculate a post-rebate price, then pick the lowest one.
> There are a few more modern OTAs that rebate a portion of the OTA commission back to you (see Rove, often rebating 15+%) and more that rebate a flat rate (Chase at 8%, Amex at 5%, Cap1 at 10%, etc).
You are still overpaying when using Amex/Chase/Cap1 portals.
$105-110 book on Amex/chase/cap1 portal
$101-102 after 5-8% travel portal cash back
versus
$100 book direct Hilton/marriott/IHG rate
$96-97 after 3-4% cash back everything card.
Don’t even get me started on “premium programs” like Amex FHR, Chase Edit, etc. Probably overpaying by $100+/night. Much cheaper to just pay for 4 pm checkout. And early check-in is dead anyway.
> $100 book direct Hilton/marriott/IHG rate
This hasn't been my experience. I usually search through Booking.com and when I contacted the hotel directly, found that the direct rate is higher than the booking.com rate.
One datapoint me: I never see any difference in flight prices, but I haven't tried VPN-ing into the site from another country. For hotels, prices I find through aggregators can be as much as 50% lower than the hotel's own website price, even when their website claims it's showing me the lowest price.
Anywhere from 45% to 5% IMO. So you can almost always save $5, but sometimes you can save like $50+. That said, another big piece I didn't mention is that often you also are watching the rate day by day because timing is a big piece too.
Just by signalling interest by lingering and searching for the same flight multiple times a day I have bumped the price for the ticket that I was interested in.
Just a thought but I guess if the airline web services were overwhelmed with noise, they wouldn't be able to do such price adjustments reliably. The only risk is that this might bump the prices for everyone and it will turn out that consumers are not price sensitive enough to force airlines to not do this.
The most I've seen is about 25%, around £500. The difference was due to deal only offered on a one way ticket when bought through the site of a code-sharing airline.
Then you my friend have been overpaying for flights and hotels. Next time you want a holiday, try the classic techniques - Incognito windows, multiple sites, and then compare it with your Google Flights searching
This is an easily debunked myth, for first-party direct bookings. Third party aggregators and package deals are shady as hell and do all kinds of tricks. But I challenge you to record a screen cast proving that you're seeing different prices for a direct booking for the same ticket (including fare class) just based on different browsers or profiles.
This used to be fairly widespread a long time ago. There used to be fares that are restricted for sale only in a certain country's POS (I believe these are still alive in ATPCO) but not really used anymore.
I remember examples of round-trip ticket A-B-A costing $x in A, $x/2 in B (plus another fare for country C) for some city pairs, but I don't think this has really been a thing in a decade at least.
Are you only just finding out about dynamic pricing? It's still in full swing everywhere. If you want to witness it, the Chinese websites Temu & AliExpress experiment with this on nearly every item. Flights are exactly the same, and because you haven't experienced it shows you haven't caught it
The few times I've bothered doing this, Google Flights was cheaper than searching directly with the airline.
I have done that at least a few times in the last few years and I've never found anything cheaper than Google flights then booking directly with the airline.
Bonus points I'm not booking through shady websites like Expedia.
When I was the A/B test engineer at Travelocity I proposed a test to automatically select all default criteria from a search so that a user was instantly dropped into check out after entering search criteria in the homepage. It was never approved:(
> Booking a flight is obfuscated and you'll have to comparison shop
Wrong. Searching for which flight is the best to book is obfuscated and needs comparison. Which is not what they are banning.
The actual booking, the purchase of the ticket, is as streamlined as you can get these days.
I don't find it streamlined at all. Having to enter an obnoxious amount of personal details, sifting through pages of dark patterns trying to sell you upgrades, addons, meals, extra baggage, insurance..., clicking through an extra step to say you don't want to hire a car or book a hotel, the seat selection page that tries to trick you into paying for a seat when you can actually just click "next" and get a free seat assigned, dodging paying "in your local currency" at an inflated rate when my bank will do it at the interbank rate. And that's if the airline's crappy site is actually working on that particular day and isn't crippled by some javascript error caused by mountains of front-end cruft.
Pass!
I do agree that watching rates over time matters a lot for flights in comparison to rate variation across sites, but there are very much places that will overcharge you compared to others.
United is the airline at the local hub. I fly with them. It's easy. I have their rewards card. Using 3rd parties that obfuscate is a you problem.
The mismatch here is that you don't have a personal assistant, but the executives in charge of developing these personal AI assistants do, so they expect everybody to want one if only the AI gets good enough at it and the price is right.
Having never had a PA myself, I have no strong prediction here either way, but I think this can explain for a lot of the confusion of "who'd want this"/"who would not want this".
When I've worked for places that had people who could book flights for me, I usually ended up preferring to do it myself. Turns out I have a lot of small preferences.
Also one time it turned out a meeting I didn't even need to be at cost the taxpayer $900 in flights, which I would never have agreed to if I had seen the price before it was booked.
> it was always odd to me that "booking a [flight|hotel|concert tickets]" is the canonical example
Yeah, the weird part is how the people promoting the idea seem to believe the average (?) consumer will tolerate a particular risk/reward profile: It implies over-spending or cancellation fees or return-restocking fees are beyond reasonable concern, trivial compared to the minutes it saves the user who never does any verification. ("It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?")
Hrm. Flight booking is ok, but the search optimisation problem is very tedious for anything more complex than a simple return between two fixed places on fixed dates.
Hotel bookings are mostly fine. Airbnb, bookings.com, fine.
But concerts? Concert booking is fucked. It's the main reason I don't go to concerts, I feel like I'm being absolutely screwed over by ticketing middlemen at every step of a horrible torturous process.
Came here to say the same thing. It's probably because it's hyped towards people that already don't make these decisions, they have people they outsource it to book flights, reserve table at restaurants etc.
But for most people, we don't do it frequently enough that it's actually a big problem to solve. And when we do, it's a significant enough investment that we want a say.
Isn't it obvious to try to replace human travel agent with an AI agent?
I've never met anyone under the age of 60 who still uses a travel agent
It honestly just goes to show what a stress inducing mess airline sites are. People are desperate to offload it and avoid it, even at the risk of trusting a robot with a credit card.
If this approach of using AI to get around intentionally hostile platforms continues, it would be better for everyone to just regulate. Especially the environment, which air travel is already extremely bad for.
Are you kidding me? Booking an airline ticket is one of the easier parts of navigating today's internet.
My tech illiterate parents ask me for help with all kinds of dumb things, but they fly at least four times a year and have never needed help booking an airline ticket.
You and me are using different Internets, then. Over in my reality, booking a flight is one of the more annoying experiences ever, due to amount of dark patterns, broken UX, and that's only when it's a direct flight near-term, where the choice boils down to "pay $$$ for minimally humane experience with Big Named Airline, or pay $ for cheap airline experience with the only one cheap airline that services this route".
Booking a hotel when traveling with spouse, or spouse and kids, and therefore having some level of expectations around quality, is a stressful lottery. Almost always some dimension (space, bed type/quality, noise, smell) had been misrepresented on the listing/photos to almost, but not quite, point of a bald-faced lie; without time spent on careful review of listings, all of them. When I travel solo, I don't care, so I don't mind.
Contrast that with shopping for any kind of item, even expensive - UX on some sites may be annoying, but at this point, as long as I confirm the site is legitimate and the listing shows the actual product I want to buy, I can safely drop $$$ and get what I want within advertised delivery time. No worries.
Booking mid-market hotels is easy, just go to booking.com, filter to 8+ score, four stars, go to the map and pick the location, done.
Finding good-but-cheap hotels is harder, because it's zero sum. You are looking for hotels that are mispriced usually due to a lack of information. AI doesn't solve this problem, it actually makes it worse by fixing inefficiencies in the market.
I really find flight booking is fine, for the amount of money at stake.
By contrast I find ordering food to a table with a QR code enormously complicated and tedious for something that should be simple.
We must be opposites, I despise booking flights and find the websites often fail on payments, are full of way too many steps, and require that you restart if you ever make a mistake.
In the last millennium I worked for a newspaper and what we were promising advertising clients is that if they paid us more, readers could buy advertised products off our web site.
The example the publisher demanded we launch with was the ability to buy a car. Nobody bought a car off our web site.
Oh my god, have you booked flights with a low-cost carrier, going through the multiple pages of things you don’t want?
“Are you sure? Really? Don't click here to not add this to your cart. Check this box to not receive promotional emails unless you’ve touched any other radio button the past 3 days.”
Airlines can a) improve their UX, or b) ban agents from booking flights. No brainer, I’d think.
I think it’s the VCs projecting their lifestyle. It’s such a pain to buy all these plane and concert tickets every week ugh. Meanwhile most people fly maybe once a year
It's truly weird that my 70yo mother can buy plane tickets or book a hotel without a hassle but someone claiming to be 10x programmer can't figure out how to use a website to do this and thinks that an agent is the best option. As you've noted, many airlines and hotels have made the process extremely streamlined (unless you're trying to get a "deal" in which case yeah, it's going to be more complicated).
Really, the problem is that a lot of people that are all-in on AIs aren't very good at a lot of life's little details so they think that AIs will solve everything and don't understand why nobody else agrees. If they got out and lived a little they would quickly realize that AIs are overkill or just the wrong tool for most things, but they have to actually experience life to learn that.
> It's truly weird that my 70yo mother can buy plane tickets or book a hotel without a hassle but someone claiming to be 10x programmer can't figure out how to use a website to do this and thinks that an agent is the best option.
They’re not saying they can’t do it. They’re explaining they don’t want to do it. I have a CS degree and I also hate booking flights. It’s a mess of dark patterns, up-sell, time limits, and details intended to trip up customers. For example, you might not realise there’s an unusually small carry-on limitation until you’re so far into the process that you think “fuck it I guess I’ll have to pay that extra charge.” God help you if you want to compare the exact arrangement between airlines because they do their best to differentiate the service so you can’t compare apples with apples. That’s an intentional product design choice.
I’ve no doubt your mother can book flights. I doubt she’s consistently booking the best value flights.
I can't fathom why anyone wouldn't have this done by an AI agent if the agent is reliable. Bookings and similar daily chores are exactly the kind of things nobody in their right mind would care about to do personally and where it's so great when you're rich enough to have a personal assistant that does all this for you. (The latter is a presumption, I'm not rich.)
You have never met a control freak?
It is streamlined in a hostile way, obfuscating prices and hiding charges. AI agents are the perfect tool for wading through systems deliberately made to disorient and exhaust a reasonable shopper.
Weird broad ad hominem you've deployed to dismiss trying to find better prices
Except that none of those things are true because laws in multiple countries require clear statements of the ticket prices and fees.
If you actually believe that they are violating the law by obfuscating prices you should contact the DOJ or your states attorney general.
i mean for most people, there's a real pain point. having to sit down and spend an hour or more booking flights, accoms, etc for a trip is a pain in the ass
I enjoy doing it! I definitely want a say in where I'm staying and which flight I'm taking.
If I had an AI doing it, I'd probably spend an hour typing out all of my requirements and thought processes, in the hope that it would make sensible choices. Then sit anxiously whilst it goes off and does its thing.
Amen to this, but it‘s not odd. It‘s a sign of how detached Silicon Valley people and more broadly tech people are from the rest of the world’s population. This is what they think a common problem really is. There might be another reason, i.e. building visual cases for these examples for demos is easier and marketing thinks that leveraging leisure elective activities is a good way to associate the product with a positive experience and perception.
same with reservations, ride shares and hotels and anything else. the K shaped economy in action. Rich people want meta glasses so they don't need to interact with the poors, even their own servants. I book flights rarely enough its kind of fun.
Somebody once said, that airline booking pages itself are one of the most sophisticated CAPTCHAs. No idea if this is true, but they obviously don't want their customers to easily find the best deals.
I guess the best option is, to use a good reseller/travel agency that provides an API/MCP for booking and managing flights.
For finding the cheapest deals agents can still be used. Just the booking itself is probably better done manually. It also eliminates the risk that the agent does something stupid.
edit: they might try to block agents, but this won't be possible with browser use. they can always throttle users by IP or fingerprint. Letting an agent book a flight might be risky, because they might cancel a booking or impose a fee if they somehow detect it.
Maybe I have Stockholm syndrome, but what about the booking pages is super complicated?
I often use Kayak or google flights to screen multiple airlines, but once I've found a flight I like, I generally book it on the airline's site, and the UI is basically identical to Kayak. Put in some dates, some locations, click search, browse through the options, pick the one you want. If you are flexible on dates, there is a little +/- 3 days checkbox that will show a table of flight prices.
I'm probably stupid, but what are the improvements that would help customers find the best deals?
You have to click through multiple upsell pages, including "scary" boxes like "No, don't protect my $XXXX.XX purchase". And then "pick a seat", but once you do, it turns out there's actually a charge for that, so you click the browser back button, which ends up resetting your session.
Hotel sites are dramatically worse IMO. Airlines have mostly made things mostly understandable.
Now, if you're buying from consolidators on their consistently-shady-looking sites, which will contact you later with your ticket if they got it at all: oh yeah those are sometimes total insanity.
Yeah I only book airline tickets direct at this point - Kayak has an option for that (which is sometimes ignored) and Google Flights does a good job. In the end though I just have my two standard vendors and am only mildly price sensitive.
I'm not familiar with shady sites, but probably >75% of my previous 50 trips were booked through Kayak or similar sites. They make it painless to group everything you need for where you are going, and if there is any problem, like a flight delay, etc., since it was booked all together, they just adjust the future bookings/book other flights as necessary to make sure your trip is smooth riding. Any time I need more than just one resource (car, hotel, flight), I use a consolidator because if they aren't bundled, no one lifts a finger to help you when anything out of your control happens, but they bend over backwards to help if you used a booking site.
The last consolidator I used (I forget the name, but it was nearly "obviously a shell Amazon company"-level strange) saved me nearly $1000 on three flights and two hotels, but it routed me through seven completely different domains to do it, sometimes with the bulk of the page in an embedded iframe for yet another site. Once it was two layers of iframes deep. I checked because by this point I was flabbergasted by the whole process.
Many pages took tens of seconds to load and had a single field to fill out, broken links to information, etc. I had to fill in my personal info three times, on different pages, with wildly different layouts and misspelled fields. It had to be done over four separate days, because two pages had 503 errors and a couple others told me to wait up to 5 business days for "procesing" or "processin" or other misspellings, though it only turned out to need a couple minutes or hours.
I watched my card for unexpected charges like a maniac as emails from different domains every time came in to inform me that I was still good to go. But the tickets came through fine, about 3 weeks later, less a week before my flight.
From reddit, I'm under the impression that this is a somewhat average experience.
probably this is different between different airlines and continents, and is definitely easier if you regularly fly with the same airline on the same route and know its flow, pricing and rules...
but generally in Europe many airlines will by default show you only the base fare price without carry-on bags, checked bags, seats, etc., and the surcharges aren't fixed (some flights may have cheaper bags, seats, than the others, on the same airline), and then there are multiple levels of "Economy" pricing with some of the options packaged into the price (e.g. Austrian has "Economy Basic", "Economy Light", "Economy Comfort", "Economy Flex"), but sometimes buying Economy Basic + baggage + seat may be cheaper than Economy Comfort.
Also the rules of what is included in which package differ from the route (longer routes have more included), and from the operating airline (e.g. Air France website also allows you to book lower cost Transavia flights, Austrian/Lufthansa websites also allow you to book lower cost Eurowings/Discover flights...)
And then there is the hell which is Ryanair, where you have to go through multiple pages of "no I don't want travel insurance", "no I don't want to rent a car", "no I don't want to buy fasttrack", "no I don't want to book a hotel with you", "no I don't want to buy a seat", "no I really don't want anything else"...
And all of these employ gray patterns like the "no I don't want it" button being less visible/prominent than the "I do want to pay more" button... (and this is not only true for Ryanair, but also for Austrian's "Upgrade to Economy Comfort" vs. "Continue with current fare", which conveniently shows before selecting if you want bags, seats, etc. where it actually could've been useful if it showed you that you can pay less)
Also most of the airline search sites don't allow you to filter non-stop flights, so if you're flexible on dates it will show you "cheaper flights" on other days, but instead of 2h flight from Vienna to Paris it's gonna be 5 hours because of a transfer in Amsterdam/Frankfurt...
What could be better would be "I want to select a seat at check-in, I want to fly with 1 checked bag and no carry-on bags, I don't want anything else, I want a non-stop flight, show me cheapest prices for this"...
I have to agree, it wasn't really so hard before Basic Economy was invented like 15 years ago and spread overnight to all carriers. You mostly just wanted the normal base ticket, or you wanted the much more expensive business class. But now each airline has their own byzantine distinctions and between the lowest type and the type that used to be the lowest. You then have to know that for X airline, the cheapest ticket includes (0 or 1) rollaboard size suitcases, and that bringing one will cost ($Y) per bag. And then do the math of whether you're better off paying a bag fee or paying for the next ticket up. And that's just the bag aspect.
Some business class tickets do not include lounge access anymore. It's really labyrinthine now.
> but generally in Europe many airlines will by default show you only the base fare price without carry-on bags, checked bags, seats, etc., and the surcharges aren't fixed (some flights may have cheaper bags, seats, than the others, on the same airline), and then there are multiple levels of "Economy" pricing with some of the options packaged into the price (e.g. Austrian has "Economy Basic", "Economy Light", "Economy Comfort", "Economy Flex"), but sometimes buying Economy Basic + baggage + seat may be cheaper than Economy Comfort.
> Also the rules of what is included in which package differ from the route (longer routes have more included), and from the operating airline (e.g. Air France website also allows you to book lower cost Transavia flights, Austrian/Lufthansa websites also allow you to book lower cost Eurowings/Discover flights...)
All of those different fares and their differences are clearly labeled (because the point of differentiation is to have the cheap options for the price conscious travellers, but to have actual benefits of the more expensive options so that they get picked). Luggage allowance is always clearly stated for instance, both during booking and afterwards on your booking details. (Compared to the US, at least with Delta, where if you want to know how much luggage you're allowed to have, they send you to a shitty form where you have to fill in trip details so that it tells you).
If you've tried booking an award fare with United, the page with the flights + required miles takes many seconds to load. It's not a quick experience.
ITT: people who have never flown Frontier/Spirit/Ryanair
They try everything not to get scraped. But agentic browser automation defeats all those techniques. It has to be usable in a real browser obviously.
I have no idea what the oop meant either. Pretty sure you can book a flight in ~5 minutes or so?
For international flights, the prices on airlines' sites are almost always higher than what I was quoted in the search.
Running Firefox on Linux I often get stuck and need to switch to Chrome. Each time I hit Submit I get a dedicated page indicating it's loading the next one and there's always a noticeable probability I won't get to the next page.
> I guess the best option is, to use a good reseller/travel agency that provides an API/MCP for booking and managing flights.
But do these actually exist?
You have to get the data from a GDS and it looks like Sabre offers one already [1]. That said I don't know if just anyone can sign up for it.
[1] https://developer.sabre.com/product-collection/mcp-server
Duffel is the best one I know about. Not directly for consumers but good for platform businesses who need an API.
Platform business go through the GDS ( Sabre, Amadeus ) directly just fine. They have the best kind of api
Not that I know of, the best work around is hitting up Google Flights, but even that doesn't make things easy.
Quite possibly my favourite Google product, surprised it has lived this long
It's showing its age unfortunately. For my last set of flights often the price displayed was not available after clicking through on google or on the airline's booking page and flight combos on the airline's sites that I was looking for wouldn't come up in the search :/
I honestly can't believe there isn't a SF based startup that is already doing it.
The usual issue of flight booking APIs is, that those flights are expensive. It's what travel agencies or travel departments in companies use.
There isn't any money in building api for a platform somebody else owns. At best you do a travel management system for corporate stuff. That kind of a startup definitely exists, funded by YC about ten years ago
I forget if it was in an official airline or an aggregator. But the page had a built in time for deal expiration that was a standalone javacript timer.
Imagine you're an airline. You have to follow the following regulations/standards:
- 24 hours to cancel any flight (or some airlines let you reserve with a 24 hour window to pay, which also fits the regulation)
- Seats that are sold cannot be sold to another passenger during this window (it's removed from inventory in GDS)
Now imagine you have people using agents to do the following:
- Book and cancel flights regularly to try to save a few bucks
- Set up an agent "if prices hit $xxx, book immediately and then cancel within 24 hours unless I tell you otherwise"
You suddenly have an inventory problem that can effectively DoS an airline.
I get why they have done it but it’s also a symptom of over segmenting the market based on time. The airlines have absolutely made this bed by having such adversarial pricing.
> 24 hours to cancel any flight (or some airlines let you reserve with a 24 hour window to pay, which also fits the regulation)
I believe the 24 hours free cancellation requirement is only valid 7 days out. If it's for a recent flight I don't think you get free cancellation?
Definitely agree that those would be hostile behaviors, but I want data that shows it is happening.
Airlines are by nature a risk-averse industry, and throwing something as fundamental as inventory out of whack would lead to unjustifiable losses. Threats need to be prevented not reacted to.
Imagine you're an airline and have the ability to hire smart people and can equip them with ai tools.
This is something that should be solved with a 2 person team over a weekend.
Airline prices are the absolute worse! I'm trying to book 5 tickets together between 2 major airports that I have flown multiple times in the past. The price has been a rollercoaster!
$2200, I waited a bit too long to confirm with the group $4000 then $3500, then $2500 which changed within 5 minutes to $2600 and then $3000 and now $5000+
Other than memestocks, nothing else has such insane price volatility!
I understand you're frustrated, but "throw money and people at the problem and it will be solved somehow" doesn't address regulatory requirements.
>Somebody once said, that airline booking pages itself are one of the most sophisticated CAPTCHAs.
I think this is only true now that the AI's can interpret the pages correctly. Failing to decern the correct information is, I believe, the more human response.
It seems like the upside down turtle again.
> No idea if this is true, but they obviously don't want their customers to easily find the best deals.
CBS being, probably the most reliable and spin-free reporting, I believe the article.
FAA regulations and security are equally as good of reasons as "out to hide deals".
that's good.
The airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone without giving specific people (atleast those who they don't deem "worthy") an edge. Here's a great, short comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50459444
It's mostly a commodity, specially for economy class where price matters.
After gas and grocery, its the most vicious, cut throat business where a customer will switch from United to Delta over $5. Unlike gas and grocery they cannot compete on volume (even a 747 has a fixed capacity per leg).
It sounds counterproductive but personal AI agents cause a local optima while overall increasing cost for rest of the travelers.
For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate and not just by a few cents because the nominal cost of an economy seat is likely $250, not $50.
Now United isn't against offering a $50 flight to customers who they deem "worth it" - they just don't want it to be anyone who can run an MCP connector. They are just betting that the "worth it" will "make it up" in the long run vs. a customer who's just there for the $50 seat.
What happens if you say "screw it, I'll code my own custom MCP connector to United.com!"
Well, eventually they will try and block you and then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website.
I do not understand the airline's side of that argument, sorry. It seems like what you are describing is: 1. The airline is willing to sell a few tickets for $50 instead of $250, but only to the folks who it deems "worth it" and advertises accordingly. 2. Those $50 tickets are below cost, so each $50 ticket sold means everyone else will have to pay a little more. 3. If enough "general population" people find and buy those $50 tickets instead, the airline will discontinue the practice.
If this is indeed the case -- good riddance to that practice! Why should I be sorry that it goes?
Airlines have a large fixed cost and a small marginal cost for each passenger on a plane. If they charge $250 for each seat and half the seats are empty then they are wasting capacity and have to charge enough for each seat such that half the seats pay for an entire flight. If they can fill the second half of the plane with $50 passengers then they are providing more service (a social good!) and can perhaps reduce the expensive tickets to $200.
Of course everyone wants the $50 tickets, so the market gets all weird trying to both fill flights and charge as much as possible, while being competitive with other airlines that are trying to do the same thing. Because there are competing airlines, the final margins stay low, so the airlines are barely "maximizing" profits so much as they are simply maintaining profitability.
So why don't they just offer prices (EDIT: starting prices) at $150 instead. Then the plane won't be half full but perhaps 90%. The price for those last 10% of seats can go up or down 1. depending on the demand for that flight and 2. how much time is left.
Because they want it both ways, sell the tickets they were going to sell anyays/regardless of price, and then again the two super underpriced tickets to people who wouldn't have paid if it weren't $50; tada, you've made an extra $100.
I have no problem with dynamic pricing. Many companies in different industries do that, even if they do not have the large fixed / small marginal cost model. That is just business.
But once the company starts defining "worthy of cheap tickets" groups the system becomes very murky; and murky systems impose costs on everyone.
I imagine the argument is that it enables poorer people to fly when they otherwise would not be able to afford it.
> If this is indeed the case -- good riddance to that practice! Why should I be sorry that it goes?
The effort you (and others) are willing to go to get the $50 doesn't seem to match up with the "fine, the practice should go". If it doesn't matter, why expend effort to do it?
Because while the $50 deal exists then everyone has the right to fight for it (I would even argue that it's rational!). I don’t see how that’s incompatible with wishing the $50 deal didn’t exist in the first place. Pricing that rewards whoever spends the most time searching is a bad system, and agents are a fair fix because they make that local price optima findable for everyone.
I think pricing that rewards searching is actually very fair and good. You give customers choice between money and effort - rich people will book the first flight and pay more, subsidized poorer people.
If agents make finding cheaper tickets trivial and the default, customers lose that choice.
Because they don't offer the remaining seats for $250, they offer them for $600.
Because not everyone has the same ability to pay.
Most of those "it's $50 for you while everyone else pays $250 at the same time" tickets do not go to low income customers.
They go to those who can steer future purchases: travel office employees on personal trips, etc. That's a form of a soft kickback. The $50 tickets due to an airline making a bad demand forecast and running a fire sale on unsold tickets will not disappear.
Airlines backed themselves into these absurd corners by using really short sighted business practices.
Disney is doing similar stuff with their app and queuing nonsense.
Companies always willingly put themselves into these corners, and then start crying foul when they find out what it means.
Suppose you want to get people to a party, and offer $50 early bird tickets, and want eg a gender balance. But they just get scalped and resold for $300. Why should you care, you authoritarians? Scalpers have just as much right as anyone to purchase tickets…
Actually if I ran an airline I’d try to prevent everyone from being able to snipe the best seats with their agents as soon as they came out. Using lotteries, special manual two factor authentication etc.
People already were going to great lengths to find airline ticket deals. If there was ever an edge in buying tickets as soon as they were available, that would already be heavily exploited by now. By the way, I'm fairly certain it's the opposite. Airline tickets are not typically a good deal when they are first made available.
What's the counterpart of gender balance in this analogy?
Maybe a balance of loyal customers (to keep them loyal) and first time customers (to hopefully fill the pipeline of future loyalties).
What? Are you under the impression that loyal customers don't want to fly with too many disloyal customers around them, and vice-versa?
This is true of a whole lot of stuff. Many special offers are loss leaders that largely rely on human behavior to make up for the losses, like a credit card that gives you $500 cash back if you spend $2500 in the first 3 months. This only works when a fair number of the humans stick with that card long term, if there are agents running around creditmaxxing then the offers don't work any more.
> This is true of a whole lot of stuff. Many special offers are loss leaders that largely rely on human behavior to make up for the losses
Accepting this is currently true, should we prefer this equilibrium?
This feels like a loaded question.
If you are an inveterate optimizer, it works to your advantage. If you are not, well I guess you just don't care. So net net, yes we prefer this equilibrium.
I think there's a fourth class (to the third class another commenter mentions) that you're missing here, which the credit card example makes obvious: people who fall for the "human behavior" trick the company aims for, and are exploited or hurt by those practices.
Credit card case: people prone to overspending and falling in a debt loop, lured in by $500 due to being poor or in precarious situation (perhaps from falling in similar traps in the past), and who end up keeping the card long-term, as the 3-months spending requirement ends up trapping them in the CC spending loop.
This equilibrium you describe, is in many cases built on preying on the weakest and most vulnerable, so no, I don't think it's fine.
You're forgetting about the third class of person, who thinks it's not worth their time, and, frankly, distasteful to spend that much time and effort optimizing, but also finds the offers presented to those that aren't optimizing insultingly poor value.
That's the kind of person that will not download the app to get the coupons and hunt for the good deals at Safeway, but will also not accept the exceptionally high sticker price, and instead will go shop at another store.
> it's not worth their time
is the same as
> just don't care
No one with an ounce of respect for their body shops at Safeway regardless of the price.
Many moats are plain inertia. Chase and other big banks bet that you won't switch to a different bank that actually pays interest.
Perfect, if the business model is to scam you out of money because you don't use a service, then it should go away, regardless of the few people getting 'benefit'.
What is the scam here?
Loss leaders.
I don't follow why an mcp server buying a 50 dollar flight would make costs to up? Surely an mcp server booking flights doesn't mean there is more demand for flights overall? I'm not about to take a trip somewhere just because I have an mcp server to book it.
If you were going to take a flight anyway and it finds you a 50 dollar option instead of a 200 dollar option, that's very expensive for United.
if you're paying for flights you don't want to take, then I'm sure they're happy for the extra spending money of course. Why would you want to do that?
Why is United selling a ticket for $50 that they would prefer went unsold?
They might need to have seats on that flight offered to meet a contract with the airport, or they might be using personalized pricing to only offer the 50 dollar price to certain customers (if you keep searching often the price goes up for instance) or any number of other stuff. Airline pricing is like car pricing.
No it is not. Cars have static MSRPs and then you haggle over the price person-to-person at a dealer. Airlines prices are based on markets (literal demand and supply between city pairs,) expected load factor, and what can best be described as a min-maxing algorithm to minimize spoilage (% of unsold seats when the flight takes off.) It's all predictive analytics, constraints modeling, and optimization at scale while finding opportunities here and there to maximize within local factors.
Contractual discounts--which corporations do have--are usually balanced by a guaranteed spend figure. For small and midsized companies, the spend is often paid in advance, to the benefit of the airline, which can carry the float and lock up a portion of market certainty.
My two cents: I have a deep amount of respect for United's tech stack. It is the best amongst US airlines and among the best in the world. However, this is the wrong move for them, and unless other airlines follow (doubtful, since United taking the lead here gives others competitive advantage,) United will have to backtrack in a year or two.
I don't see why they would _ever_ prefer an unsold seat unless:
* they are trying to artificially inflate the price
* they could send cargo that is, per pound, more lucrative than the cost of a ticket
It's not like the weight of a person is going to cost an extra $50 in jet fuel
There's a surprisingly high price floor on airline tickets. Like $30 (one way) in fees to the government and the departure airport. Plus the incremental fuel [0] and any complimentary consumables, etc.
Not much of a factor on more expensive fares, but for short flights where a $50-100 fare is realistic.
[0]: even with today's oil prices, the extra fuel is only $20-30 for a transcontinental US flight. negligible for short flights.
> If you were going to take a flight anyway and it finds you a 50 dollar option instead of a 200 dollar option, that's very expensive for United.
And? They offered a $50 ticket. Did they expect people not to buy it?
If I search manually and find the $50 flight I planned spending $200 on, I’m not going to decide it’s too cheap. MCP acts the same. For at least a decade there have been services that will alert you when a specific flight drops in price, letting a human basically do what the agents are doing.
If United doesn’t want to sell a ticket for $50, then they should, y’know, not sell tickets for $50.
If airlines didn’t want to play pricing games, they could stop playing pricing games. List a standard fare for a route if you want to sell fares at a standard rate. If you want to try and squeeze me for an extra $20 because I’m buying during work hours, or $100 because I visited your site 5 days ago and now you think I’m desperate then you don’t get to complain when I use underhanded tactics to get the best deal. They make the rules, they shouldn’t be surprised when their convoluted system gets exploited by people that know the rules.
> If airlines didn’t want to play pricing games, they could stop playing pricing games. List a standard fare for a route if you want to sell fares at a standard rate. If you want to try and squeeze me for an extra $20 because I’m buying during work hours, or $100 because I visited your site 5 days ago and now you think I’m desperate then you don’t get to complain when I use underhanded tactics to get the best deal. They make the rules, they shouldn’t be surprised when their convoluted system gets exploited by people that know the rules.
Nicely put.
Morally sure, but they absolutely are going to complain even if they're in the wrong about it. And they'll try and ban things and stop you from getting the deal obviously. Why wouldn't they? Have you ever known airlines to deal fairly?
They make the rules, and so they'll try to do that again.
They did offer it. Now they only offer it to humans. They have no interest in games, only in making money.
And I have no interest in their pricing games, only saving money.
Claude cannot occupy a seat. An airline seat is only used by humans.
If they aren't interested in games they could publish a set fare for a set route. Instead they have 4 or more fare classes visible to end users and more in the backend leading to opaque unpredictable pricing, they gamify the experience using literal points and rewards, they constantly change prices, they charge fees for services that vary depending on fare class, what credit card you purchased the ticket with, what credit card you currently hold, how many times you've flown in the past year, how many miles you've flown, how many dollars you've spent to fly those miles. I'm not sure they could make it more of a game (BTW, games are not in opposition to making money, they frequently enable making more money. Exhibit A is airlines. Game theory textbooks use them as examples).
Ah ok. So the worry is me being able to shop around more and find better deals? What's stopping me from using an agent to shop around still, and I just do the final booking myself?
Just a little extra friction, but if they want to ban agents from booking I'm sure they'd love to ban them from looking up prices too. But showing prices is kind of their advertising too, so it's harder to just cut it off - same reason why Google flights is allowed I suppose
What's stopping me from using an agent to shop around still, and I just do the final booking myself?
Sounds like Google Flights.
Because like with everything else people have been applying AI to, it's not going to stop at "I used it to book my flights" and it's going to turn into "we used it to book every flight and now we are reselling them at a massive markup so we can then use it as an excuse to spam you because you signed up for our 'service' and that counts as 'consent'."
dunno about that, tickets are non transferable generally. I'm cynical it is more to do with the 'buying experience' and the opportunity to up-sell, introduce tempting offers, and confuse with navigation patterns and such. Agents will breeze past all that, meaning the money the airlines make will reduce.
Scalping seems unlikely. Airline bookings are non-transferable.
Yes, the question about AI agents is whether they are actually increasing productivity, or just allowing individuals with more compute to outcompete for a larger share of a finite resource.
If AI agents were more effectively managing flight paths, determining pricing, managing communication channels on the supply side, it would technically decrease cost per flight, but on the demand side, if AI agents just find the cheapest flight and book it, all it does is beat someone else who likely would have gotten to that flight a bit later.
I do think eventually it's going to be supply agents communicating with demand agents that lead to a coordination equilibrium. But until then it's just a race to who has the faster, more integrated models, and now, who has models which can bypass the restrictions providers place on their use.
> or just allowing individuals with more compute to outcompete for a larger share of a finite resource.
It doesn’t take much compute or anything really above the cheapest claude subscription to do this.
Similar to how internet evened out access to many things that were in the past blocked by access to knowledge.
It takes a trivial amount of compute to do stuff like book flights or submit forms, but there are other dimensions where the marginal utility of compute doesn't taper off as fast, like legal defense or PR campaigns/mass manipulation.
Imagine two competing political candidates, one has funding from an AI lab and produces thousands of short-form AI videos per day and spends millions of analysis of the full spectrum of feedback and performance of the ads, simulates public sentiment, pruning every aspect of their persona, response strategy, channels to focus on, etc. Or a company accused of misconduct creating an AI psychological profile of the judge and every jury member via their social media history and demographic information and curating the best permutation of arguments from millions of options that maximize every predicable sentimental vector.
> Imagine two competing political candidates
Campaign spending is textbook example of a negative sum game - it can waste unbounded amount of resources and everyone is worse off from it happening.
> The airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone without giving specific people (atleast those who they don't deem "worthy") an edge. Here's a great, short comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50459444
Your sentence and the comment you linked say completely different things. You say airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone, the comment says they're trying to achieve perfect price discrimination to maximize revenue. Those are not the same thing.
Your argument doesn't make any sense. Why is the flight even offered if it's such an issue for the airline?
Say Alice is willing to pay $100 for a given flight, while Bob would at most pay $50. The airline wants to charge Alice $100 and Bob $50, netting $75 per seat on average.
Agentic access would give Alice the chance to cross-shop and buy the cheaper flight as well. But now, to net the same amount, the airline has to charge $75 per seat, excluding Bob from participating in this market.
In your example ($50/$100), the airline is extracting all consumer surplus. This is called perfect price discrimination, and it is bad for consumers.
There is nothing stopping the airline offering Bob $50 per seat in the second scenario, other than profit preservation. If they were making a profit on the $50 ticket in the first scenario, they are making it in the second. They just happen to also be making less profit on the $100 ticket.
In effect you are making corporate profit a constraint on the market, which is not the case.
Your example actually shows that the welfare extractive pricing algos companies use today can be undermined by AI, which is good for consumers in this narrow example.
Well actually, price discrimination permits a kind of cross subsidy when there are large fixed costs involved, and flights have substantial fixed costs.
It might not be profitable to fly a route at all if not for high paying customers. But if you can get a few high paying customers and provide return on capital, then extra customers are, relatively speaking, gravy.
And the cheap flights for those customers? Consumer surplus, baby.
If they can afford to fly Bob for $50, Alice deserves that too. If that means the flight isn't profitable, then I guess they couldn't really afford to fly Bob or Alice for $50 and that price was a farce to begin with. I can understand airlines want to squeeze their customers for the maximum they are willing to pay, but I don't think that makes a good argument and I don't they should be entitled to it.
In their defense, the $50 fares aren't profitable on its own. It costs $140 to fly this two-seater plane in the simple illustration (and let's wave away Alice and Bob's weights). Charging one of them $100 (that their company would pay for anyway) makes it possible for both to fly. That's not really bad.
By that logic, Alice paying $140 lets Bob fly free, but that's not what we see in reality.
She's only willing to pay $100 so neither ticket will sell.
This has already been going on for years. Google Flights and Kayak already have fare histories, fare forecasts, fare monitors with automated notifications. So now anybody can get the cheapest price with a low effort.
The industry responded with aggressive unbundling - basic eco now has no carry-on, no seat selection, no changes. All can then be bought as extras.
This is a scenario across many industries - hotels, car rental, cruise, concerts, online retail etc.
Basically - yes that trend is bad for Bob, but it makes things more transparent, fair, and increases competition. It's the way the world goes - hard to stop that.
Yes, but this type of stuff compounds. Moreover, the fact that agents are now the lowest friction interface for this stuff makes it a potential double-whammy.
A similar example discussed recently on the podcast ”The Real Eisman Playbook”[0] illustrates the point: Many retail investors have trading accounts with some cash sitting idle. The brokers earn a healthy margin by investing that cash into short-term money market funds (MMF).
Now obviously, the diligent investors could easily buy the MMFs and pocket the profit themselves. However, many of them are lazy or don’t care. But now with agentic access, even the laziest user can optimize their short-term cash holdings, which might cost the brokers relying on this income dearly.
How does the airline sell the same type of ticket to Alice for $100 but Bob for $50? I don't think airlines show consumers different prices for identical tickets at the same moment in time. The prices are constantly in flux and vary by fare class, amenities, the time you book, etc. But if Alice and Bob both go online to buy a near identical ticket at the same time I don't see how they would get different prices.
Assuming Alice is a business traveler and Bob is traveling for leisure, they are likely to not buy the ticket at the same time, to being with (Alice will do so during business hours, while Bob probably will in the evening or on the weekend).
Alice might also be booking through a corporate booking platform etc.
You said they’re “trying to reduce prices for everyone” and you’re describing them trying to maximize prices for everyone (which, yes, they want to do).
[Edit: didn't pay enough attention to the flow of the conversation here - this is really a response to ProblemExplorer's original post, which linked to _diyar's post (parent to this one) as explanation].
> You said they’re “trying to reduce prices for everyone” and you’re describing them trying to maximize prices for everyone (which, yes, they want to do).
No they did not. I am the grandparent and linked to their comment because they concisely explain how the airline made $150 off two sears instead of $100 while giving Bob the $50 deal he wanted (bay making Alice subsidize Bob).
If Alice used an MCP too, there would be no subsidy and neither Bob gets the $50 seat nor does Alice get her $100 seat
?
"made $150 off two seats instead of $100 while giving Bob the $50 deal he wanted" is maximizing the amount each passenger would pay.
In fact, I did not say that.
Ah - sorry! I understood ProblemExplorer's linking to your post as a link to a subsequent post of theirs, which it clearly isn't now that I look again!
My post was a response to ProblemExplorer's language, not yours.
You say this as if consumer and producer surplus are new phenomena.
And you vastly overestimate the price discrimination that airlines have today for comparable classes of service.
They don't make their money on economy seats.
Sounds like algorithmic pricing works both ways. Good.
precisely. I worry people aren't "getting it". I edited my post to point to this comment as it's very short and precise.
It's not. Airlines do not make their money price discriminating economy customers over the same route at the same time.
Dynamic pricing is mostly a seasonal and timing game. And the actual money is made in higher classes of service.
This idea that Bob and Alice are shown drastically different pricing for the same seat because of insights into their specific purchasing behavior is just ludicrous.
Most people buy tickets from aggregators who have been already gutted the ability to do this anyway.
> This idea that Bob and Alice are shown drastically different pricing for the same seat because of insights into their specific purchasing behavior is just ludicrous.
You basically argued literally the entire thesis for customer segmentation and behavior based pricing and then called it ludicrous. I hope PhDs and statisticians who make living building these very models don't see this comment and begin to question their entire existence.
No I didn't. I argued the segmentation you were suggesting is not the segmentation around which price discovery actually takes place.
You've just read past what I said because you want to disagree.
> Why is the flight even offered if it's such an issue for the airline?
Why did airlines fly a 737 with full staff on board for just 3 economy grade passengers on a leg (like during times of COVID) ?
Largely to keep their airport slots that required flying. This isn't that.
Why did airlines fly a 737 with full staff on board for just 3 economy grade passengers on a leg (like during times of COVID) ?
Been there! CRW → CLT on Christmas Eve. Just me, and three air hostesses.
I assume it's so the planes will all be in the right place when they're needed the next morning.
Indeed - not sure if it is the case here, but businesses sometimes want to change richer people more and poorer people less for the same thing, if they can make more money doing that. One of the ways of doing that is by making the cheaper prices a hassle, a classic example being that you might have discount coupon vouchers at grocery stores that richer people won't regard as worth the hassle. If AI can get rid of that hassle for lots of people then the business case for doing it stops working.
A lot of airlines have started charging extra for a carry-on which does the same thing, except turning the packing part into the hassle instead of the finding+booking part.
I am copying my comment below here because there is a fundamental misunderstanding of consumer surplus here:
In your example ($50/$100), the airline is extracting all consumer surplus. This is called perfect price discrimination, and it is bad for consumers.
There is nothing stopping the airline offering Bob $50 per seat in the second scenario, other than profit preservation. If they were making a profit on the $50 ticket in the first scenario, they are making it in the second. They just happen to also be making less profit on the $100 ticket.
In effect you are making corporate profit a constraint on the market, which is not the case.
Your example actually shows that the welfare extractive pricing algos companies use today can be undermined by AI, which is good for consumers in this narrow example.
> For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate.
Just to be clear, your argument is that it's "counterproductive" and a "local optima" for people to have complete and accurate price information available for purchasing their tickets? And that making this information harder for them to find is better for them? Can you point to any real-world examples of an asymmetry in pricing information ending up saving the side with less information money rather than the side with more information to use that in a way that disadvantages the other side?
> Well, eventually they will try and block you and then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website.
Since you explain that the rest of us are effectively paying for that subsidised seat, I’m okay with this.
So… please excuse my ignorance if I’m being ignorant…
But isn’t this the same argument, more or less, that police make for not wanting to have body cameras on all the time, because they would then be “forced” to give everyone who was breaking the law a ticket or to arrest them instead of letting them go if it “feels like they should”?
The analogy being that the police could pick and choose who they should arrest versus who they should not and let off with a warning - who is “worth it” (i.e. generally, people of, umm, not color, it turns out).
Anyways… it does seem that some kinda of preferential treatment could be lost here. But preferential good treatment for some is kind preferential bad treatment for others, so theres that.
Feel free to ridicule my argument.
If the 50$ flights are gone from the site, won't another site sell those instead?
Later on, assuming all of the carriers are affected by this, flights will get more expensive and maybe we will invest in other modes of transport that is cheaper
> Personal AI agents cause a local optima while overall increasing cost for rest of the travelers.
This has nothing to do with AI. Any sale pricing cause the average non-sale price to go up! This is why many companies outright refuse to participate in sales outside of damaged / opened goods.
> Now United isn't against offering a $50 flight to customers who they deem "worth it" - they just don't want it to be anyone who can run an MCP connector.
I don't understand the premise you're painting here.
Airlines lower the price because they have unfilled seats that are not selling at the current price. The price is lowered as an intentional choice to reduce margins on that seat because making any margin over the fuel cost of that passenger's additional weight is worth more than getting nothing at all.
They aren't thinking about the customer and how lil' Timmy wants to visit his dad in Idaho, they're maximizing profit by rapidly adjusting their service to the supply-demand curve.
> Airlines lower the price because they have unfilled seats that are not selling at the current price
This is rarely the case for popular routes. Airlines lower the price for popular routes to increase margin per utilization which is why skiplagging is not encouraged because it decreases the margin per utilization.
> they're maximizing profit by rapidly adjusting their service to the supply-demand curve
if they were doing that, they would be booting off customers who paid less than those on the wait list.
> if they were doing that, they would be booting off customers who paid less than those on the wait list
If it was legal they would definitely do this. And the times they are allowed under the law to boot paying passengers, it is definitely someone in economy
> This is why many companies outright refuse to participate in sales outside of damaged / opened goods.
Do “many”? The companies I’m familiar with who used to do this have largely abandoned the practice due to consumer expectations of sales.
By some definition!
I agree, a lot of them give it up and "many" is overly generous. I think I remember that Thursday Boot Company still does it?
> For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate and not just by a few cents because the nominal cost of an economy seat is likely $250, not $50.
Your premise is false, as it rests on the logic that there is a zero sum game between passengers. Airlines offer tickets at the level and price they feel like they can sell them in the marketplace. There's not some invisible total allocated to passengers on each flight, where if one person "gets a deal" others pay for it.
Is there some issue with pricing being out in the open and the same for everyone. I understand discounts here and there to fill a flight, but why not offer them to everyone? Why do you care who is in the seat?
If I need to fill a seat last minute at a ridiculous low price, I'm glad an MCP client will fill it for me.
If the concern is that everyone will wait until last minute, that sounds like a problem that solves itself, last minute tickets will increase in price until the minimum price for air time is achieved.
Economics and all that...
> Is there some issue with pricing being out in the open and the same for everyone
Yes there is an issue.
An airplane can only fit a fixed number of people per leg. One way you can make money in a low margin business is make up in volume - this is the game gas stations, grocery and discount stores play - like Walmart.
You cannot play the volume game when you're physically constrained on volume, so you have to play another game.
You've given a thoughtful answer. Thanks.
I am not sure I understand.
I guess you're saying that they can't have volume because space is limited, but fine, then charge more than $50. Right? They are charging that because they need to fill the seat, I'd think. That's not a volume issue, it's the opposite.
No?
That would make sense if not everyone was using comparators like Google Flights and SkyScanner. It doesn't make any sense in the real world.
Also: flight alerts and price tracking are a thing too.
I don’t know anyone that’s seen a cheap flight for sale and decided to wait for the price to go up.
There are less price sensitive customers, but even the most price sensitive people don’t ask United if they could please charge them a bit more than the listed price.
I have found these agentic blocks sort of inspiring and in the spirit of a free market. Amazon blocked my Muse, so I told Muse to find other vendors and prefer the shopify store for the brand. That was a pain for me to search through but AI has no problem.
I'm not sure if this was your point, but AI will eventually just flow to the competitor that wants business and has the best price.
Want to block bots? Okay, watch your customers just seamlessly move to a competitor without requiring even the slightest thought or action from the customer.
Of course, if--somehow--customers moving to a competitor doesn't actually hurt the company they're moving away from... I might have to start questioning exactly how this whole "free market capitalism" experiment is working out. I think companies want to compete to win customers, but I'm not 100% sure anymore.
> but AI will eventually just flow to the competitor that wants business and has the best price.
This assumes that competitors will be willing to accommodate, which isn't always a given. I could easily see a ban industry-wide on agents for airlines to protect their pricing strategy, and the perceived administrative burden gives them legal cover against acting as a cartel.
> I think companies want to compete to win customers, but I'm not 100% sure anymore.
Companies don't want to compete if they can buy the competition instead. If they did, you wouldn't see mass consolidation across the economy (airlines are a great example of this). Cornering the market or getting bought before you're cornered is usually more lucrative than trying to compete.
It's funny. For a few days I had my own personal bot. It didn't browse many pages, but was enough to have me blacklisted from so many sites.
A lot of online retailers refuse to load for me as a human. But Amazon does. I used to avoid them in the past but guess who's getting my money now.
Anyone here sticking up for the airlines just because you hate AI, ya'll are out of your minds.
The airlines use every nasty practice they can to raise costs to you. Hidden fees, raising costs by just viewing flights and all kinds of other crap.
Let them burn.
Inflation adjusted, airline prices are just a bit higher than historic lows.
The quality of the flights are far below historic lows. They nickle and dime you for everything. Boarding is miserable. There is never enough overhead space because they charge to check a bag. If there is, they still punitively curb check luggage from people that didn’t pay for enough upgrades. Seat layouts are adversarial if you don’t pay an upcharge. The flight attendants have to broadcast ads and/of lies repeatedly to the passengers.
The entire industry loses money; their profits come from credit card scams they pitch to you while you’re locked in a metal tube for hours at 10,000 ft.
Southwest was previously the only partial exception, but they installed a CEO that burned it all down instead of adding something like $10-20 to the base ticket price.
He did it over the loud objections of the customers and employees. The only people that support this crap are too wealth to fly commercial.
I wonder if there's something here about the prices actually getting so low that new classes of people are gaining access to air travel, and in doing so are just barely able to stretch to afford it but complain about the price.
Nothing stopping you from starting an airline if you think you could do it better.
You could expose all prices as add-ons, that way it's totally transparent. Ryanair does that and people love them…
/s
> "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies," he told CBS News. "Flight searches cost airlines money, and undoubtedly United wants to avoid the expense associated with the surge of AI bot flight searches."
How much can it cost? And if it's so expensive, wouldn't intermediaries who cache results actually be cheaper?
Companies like United offer different prices to different web browsers. Presumably agents realize this, and can be instructed to probe the same seat a few hundred times with different profiles and different locations, then buy the cheapest ticket.
That seems like a completely reasonable response. The vendors are acting like a cartel. The behavior is illegal (they do not honor lowest advertised prices), and the courts are too bought off to step in.
It's not the search's processing cost, it's the lost opportunities to make you pay more for the flight.
This one.
I was pretty frustrated recently when I got a flight for 20% less by clicking through from a Google Flights link than I did from searching directly on aircanada.com while logged in with my Aeroplan account. I know exactly why it's the way it is, but it's pretty discouraging to feel that loyal-customer behaviour like going directly to the airline instead of an aggregator is punished with a higher price.
Hotels pull this schtick too.
Almost always, if you walk up to the front desk and ask for a room, the price is 15-20% more than what you see online at that very moment.
This is baffling, and has to be coming from some convoluted agreement.
The hotel makes a lower amount if I book through priceline or expedia or whatever.
Maybe for larger chains this applies; for small hotels, they always give me the difference compared to Expedia or Booking.
Yeah but you get shitty rooms when you book through expedia.
The hotels hate expedia but they can't opt out of it so they just degrade the product that is offered at expedia's discount rate -- and they degrade it in a way that expedia can't force them to stop (room assignment is always done at checkin).
It's interesting that the resellers/brokers wouldn't have figured out a way to conceal the booking source. Like obviously the hotel knows if it didn't come through them, but Expedia is far from the only bulk-inventory broker: travel agents, airlines, credit card rewards programmes, etc are all basically doing the same thing.
My work travel is typically booked through perk.com and I don't get the sense that I'm treated resentfully at any of those properties.
Search processing also costs.
Usually it is done on GDS, which take their cut for each search. And those searches are frequently done on systems can remember 60s when they were created.
This right here. Searching costs nothing to run for them, except when the searcher finds a better deal.
Searching actually does cost them money. Most airlines don't even have the ability to sell you a ticket without getting a third-party company involved (the GDS: Amadeus/Sabre/etc). The GDS collects the airlines' pricing data, then charges them money for every search to send their own data back to them.
I'd argue that's the root of the problem here.
That is not even close to the root of the problem.
Airlines could solve that problem themselves. And will the instant it’s actually worth it to them.
Airlines are being pressured to change the way they do their differential pricing, but the old system wasn’t some gold star land of virtue method either.
Surely that cost is still not the expensive part of the search?
Flight reservation systems are some of the most complicated on the planet. They are specifically designed to maximize profit while meeting constraints imposed by airports (such as monthly minimums for seats sold per month to keep their gates). Prices change every few minutes and depend on the utilized capacity of all segments that a route touches. There's a reason most discount sites use the backend operated by Google instead of writing their own.
More than one entire company has grown up around flight search:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
ITA, in particular, is memorable as a HN favorite because their software was pretty much 100% lisp, at least before the google acquisition.
Can be a few cents for Sabre api calls. This is the gds fee on booking and excess querying, that should be rolled up into doing business but it depends of course, for some airlines every query costs them a fraction of a cent and if every employee agent is doing them alongside customers doing self service, yeah
But at the same time they should’ve just made it more accessible and just raised the prices anyway.
About 1 cent per search once users hit GDS "look to book" limits and start incurring penalties.
I recently bought a Flight directly on United.com. I usually book business travel directly on Brex so I was appalled of how bad the checkout flow was on the United site. 5 page loads. Multiple “offers” to sift through. Donations to the environment. Upgrades for security priority, seats, classes. Credit card ads.
It made me think, an agent would be nice. Too bad.
> The carrier also said that using an AI agent to, for example, check in for a flight could violate federal regulations, including rules requiring travelers to verify in person that their luggage does not contain banned substances.
That’s ridiculous.
They just want to keep their price list miserable to compare so they can overcharge people.
Both things can be true. Airlines can be miserly rip-off artists, and we can start seeing lengthy waits at screening points because people had agents make their bookings and weren’t reminded about the things they aren’t allowed to pack.
Claude: This form requires me to agree I won't bring explosives on board. If I reject this form, the booking won't go through. I should accept this to complete the booking.
Their suit against Skiplagged should tell you everything you need to know about their attitude.
I use a screen reader to access the web. In future, I can easily imagine an agentic screen reader as being incredibly useful.
I do not look forward to when rules like this run up against a11y concerns. The AI equivalent of the Domino's case will certainly be interesting!
I understand why they might be tempted to do this customer hostile action. For our own business, ChatGPT’s sales have grown to be 6.3%[1] of total, but our basket size is smaller compared to other channels.
I think this is because people are purchasing only what they need as recommended by their AI and nothing extra. This is a better outcome for the customer.
OpenAI is really eating Google's lunch hard[2]!
1. http://files.schappi.com/pb-JjWzp83d2O.png
2. http://files.schappi.com/pb-2BtxkLaITY.png
I think it may be worthwhile to not compare basket sizes but maybe revenue over time? Would be interesting to see if the same agents (maybe bound to the same user or same project) now default or bias towards your storefront in the future, or if they always go out and do a search for "best deal".
These companies need to be bound by some sort of equal treatment.
If they can forbid us to use AI to interact with them, their customers should be able to opt out of being handled by their AIs as well.
Tit-for-tat.
They don’t want people to comparison shop easily without getting a cut. Further, all these guys want to move to Uber-style dynamic/personalized pricing. So basically they want an adversarial relationship against you, but block any attempts to reverse that relationship on them.
Actual article without ads: https://www.united.com/en/us/newsroom/announcements/cision-1...
If prices drop on United, you can rebook and pocket the extra money as travel credit (as long as you don't book BE). This is typically considered an underpriced option as most travelers don't regularly check prices after they've booked. AI agents threaten to reduce this "laziness tax", and it is something that other industries are worried about too. There's lots of speculation that mortgage rates will have to increase if people use AI agents to start optimally refinancing their mortgages. Seems like United will have to change this policy, fight the bots, and/or raise prices to compensate.
Is it likely for that price drop to be higher than the price difference between economy and basic economy in many cases, though? (Assuming travelers don't need the flexibility of being able to cancel/rebook for other reasons.)
Good, I hate this world where planning and micro optimizing my life has so much advantage over living in the moment, I want my AI to deal with all that (and restaurant reservations, credit card churning, etc) I can live my life with humans
> There's lots of speculation that mortgage rates will have to increase if people use AI agents to start optimally refinancing their mortgages
What does “optimally refinancing” mean?? Really. This sounds like spreading FUD.
A perfect decision about financing would need to know future interest rates and how long you will stay in the house.
You don't need to know if a decision is perfect to decide if it is sub-optimal. You think that rational inattention is FUD and that all borrowers pay attention to mortgage rates constantly?
You start with the 20% of mortgagees that completely fail to refinance even though it would save them money [1] and then move on the other 17% that wait too long to refinance and then the 52% that do so at the wrong rate by using rules of thumb instead of more sophisticated models. [2]
If you'd like to better understand this "FUD", Matt Levine is a much better write than I am: https://archive.is/WljUV
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w20401 [2] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/96658/1/74522380X.pd...
How many people really want an AI agent to book their flights? I like AI and travel a lot, but I don't see that as being an ideal agentic tasks. In most cases, I prefer using google flights or expedia and looking at the options in a UI that is tailored to the task. Of course AI can be useful if you want to inquire about certain details or find more information.
It's funny how many AI tool demos have used flight booking as an example task. I always groan at that. I just don't think that will be the way most people book flights. Maybe the 1%ers or less. Are you you currently doing this?
The important distinction here is that the AI is not "autonomously going out of its way to book flights" or whatever you have in mind.
I want to ask the AI to search for flights to my next trip, with x y z restrictions. It shows me the flights and gives me options A B and C. I tap B and it goes and books it for me. That's no different than a traditional experience like Kayak except that instead of pressing "book now" and manually filling in the details (or rather: these days letting safari autofill) I press the "LGTM" button and software fills in the rest.
ETA: the shopping experience is the same. I don't want my muse (or whichever) agent to "autonomously" "decide" to purchase an item for me that I've mentioned off hand at some point in time. The use case is treating muse as an addition/alternative to the traditional search experience.
"hey muse I want to buy a new tv, what are the popular/good models from 2025+ with reviews from reputable websites? Shortlist me ~3 within x-y budget also ensure that the local Best Buy or Costco has it in stock so I can pick it up. Actually also let me know if the box will fit in my Toyota or if I need to rent a van. Also for each positive review find me a negative review to balance it out."
And then after I do my own reading on what it surfaced me, I just say "ok muse place an order for the top option, schedule a pickup time for Saturday"
From someone who's worked in the business travel industry - more than you think. Business travelers are a disproportionate amount of airline revenue (possibly over 50%+ of revenue while being around 10-20% of passengers). Those who are doing the same trip over and over again probably don't care, but salespeople who are doing different trips every week get some value out of this kind of thing. There have been piles of startups trying to solve this (and failing).
There's not a ton of money in skimming commissions off of flights (probably < 1%), but there is if you can attach a hotel booking to it (upwards of 10%), so if you can become the preferred vendor for a business traveler, there's money to be made.
Hmm I definitely think having an ai agent find me a flight is something useful because it’s very difficult to compare flights, there’s intentionally a lot of friction. The way I’d use it is search for a flight myself and have it search independently. If I find a cheaper flight that suits my exact needs then ask it to beat it. Whoever finds the best flight, that’s the one I book. I’ll repeat that, that’s the one I book.
Unless you have money to throw away I can’t imagine not checking the details and comparing prices. Hell, even if you do have money to throw away you still want to double check everything just before the last purchase decision. Is it going to the right city? Is it at a reasonable hour? Is baggage included or purchased? Etc
Good points.. I mostly use google flights to search, but often book on either the airline site or on expedia. I think I usually see the same published prices and book in the place that is easy to book.
The most useful feature for me is google's price/date grid. For personal travel, I'm flexible with dates, so I always use that to just find when flights are cheap. For work, I try to find the best price, but I'm not super picky since the company is paying for it.
I feel like the travel site UIs do a good job of summarizing all the info and putting it in front of you.
Do you want the agent to book it for you? Or just find it?
I definitely do. Astrophotography is a hobby of mine and I've been working on a kind of personal app to find me locations in the US that will yield good shots. The variables are moon phase (close to new as possible), weather, cloud cover, humidity, and plane ticket/car rental prices. All things considered, if it's all the same in nevada, new mexico, and utah for a given week, I want to find the cheapest flight to any airport in that area. It's a huge pain in the ass to trawl through all the different flights/airports/dates to minimize my spend.
I would like to be able to have an AI agent book my flight. Airline websites are often horrible to use and it's annoying having to fill out all the details. On more than one occasion I've had to book through a third party or choose a different flight because the airline's website was broken and I couldn't complete the transaction.
Google flights is great and I use it every time I want to fly, but it's very rare that you can purchase the actual flight on google flights too.
Booking a flight is a typical task some big wig will ask their company or secretary. I think that's why all these demo focus on it.
At this point so much hot tech stuff is incredibly weird niche things to solve the rare problems of overscheduled Silicon Valley tech VPs. They're not real problems that regular people have.
Whether our future will follow a dystopic path centers on this.
Will the agent represent the individual or the organization?
The only world that doesn't lead to accelerated manipulation, wealth inequality, and ultimately oppression is the one where the is answer absolutely clear: It is the individual.
The social norms for this are being shaped right now. This is the most important question in AI.
We're distracted by the far less important questions. Safety, nationalism, and tribalism are how we don't talk about this.
This is /the/ important question of our time.
I mean you could also take the pure market economy conclusion that a competitor might allow agents and you buy the cheaper flight there.
I was having an agent search for a set of skincare products to the lowest price within a certain budget, and a lot of sites just blocked it, so I ended up buying it from a site that didn't.
I agree. This is already happening and is a positive force shaping future companies.
Monopoly/Duopoly-type companies like United can make decisions that hurt the consumer without a natural market backstop. This is when social norms need to come in as a backstop.
Another way this could go is simply that it is impossible to defend against an individual accessing services through the agents. Which I believe is already the case.
But entrenched interests in the existing organizations will see some real creative destruction as more consumer-friendly models outcompete them. In those cases, they reach for legislation. Which has been happening.
The public needs convincing, though. And that's why right now, the narrative is all about AI safety and protection from job loss.
Legislation to meet those worries would almost certainly be crafted to entrench the current organizations.
The real battle is not about jobs and safety. Personal agents would do more second-order good for the average person at the cost of a lot of 'capital destruction' - one of those newspeak words. The word here means that consumers no longer have to pay too much money - labor - for something because now they can get a better version of it for free/cheap.
GDP doesn't capture free things - as in beer or freedom.
AI has the potential to make a lot of things free in both senses. The entrenched are a headwind.
Not sure how they can detect an agent driving a regular browser, I have built Cupertino to more efficiently let Claude drive my mac (https://cupertino.mgcrea.io) and it can drive a regular Safari exactly like I would.
They can look at things like the path the mouse takes, or the distribution in delays of actions.
Probably many other things too. But it's an arms race.
Eventually they will end up banning legitimate users.
Eventually? I can already not book train tickets using Firefox anymore because it's getting detected as a bot.
They can't. Maybe they can today, but it's a cat-and-mouse game that heavily favors the agent.
How is Cupertino any different to AppleScript (and enabling AppleScript in chrome), out of curiosity?
And I wish United would stop using AI agents and data about me to pick the price for a flight, and yet here we are.
If it is ok for them to do it, then it should also be ok for the customers to do it.
Interesting. I wonder if it can become enforceable to say "not on my lawn". Sites could make deals with say Anthropic to make Claude respect some new rule in robots.txt and refuse to visit this site.
Should everyone and their grandma be allowed to send a robot to interact with any site?
If let say CEO if some company asks his/her secretary to book a flight and provides payment information, how is this different from me asking Muse to do the same? Or only rich people can have helpers?
Accountability
What are you going to do when muse books the wrong flight non-refundable? Will you go to Meta support or airline support?
I see a lot of arguments about the merits, but to me the real question is whether this is sincere, or an ambit claim to get a cut of business from the companies pushing AI agents. It would be an obvious classic play to cut off access on spurious grounds and then let it back in for a slice of the action, on the pretext that the money is paying for some kind of additional assurance on the airline end.
Absurd if they think so. It’s just going to have the AI companies build an official browser plugin.
Maybe there’s a world where established companies license access only to their “preferred” agent. Not great for customers but more income and less headache for the company.
I'm kinda suspicious of the stated motives. while plausible, has it happened very much? The cynic in me thinks this is to prevent agents hunting and findingthe best deals, and avoiding all the patterns used to squeeze more money from the buyer, like dangling attractive offers, not so obvious navigation and other tricks etc..
I think it’s as simple as agents are hard to upsell on credit cards and seat upgrades.
I wonder what pushed them to do it? Did something serious go wrong with some cases of agents booking flights, or is it more motivated from a fear of Big Tech AI gaming the dynamic pricing system that they control and potentially making them lose profits because the Agents will get much more optimal/cheap flights than mere mortals?
Heh have you seen how slow airline sites are to get results? Now imagine them buckling under the load of an agent launching 20 simultaneous browser sessions to price-compare all minute variations of a specific trip request
I was recently able to discover that London (especially some districts) has a HUGE bedbug problem. The only reason I found out was because I told Claude to go through my candidates on booking.com and check the 1-star reviews.
I would not have done it myself: it takes quite a bit of work and clickery to access all the reviews for every hotel.
Pretty sure booking.com will soon follow with an agent ban.
I have previously made a similar comment to this, but just to reiterate and expand it: the wave of “let agents automate everything” has a whiff of “let’s automate everything by plugging it into IFTTT.” In the end most companies pulled out of IFTTT because it ate into engagement and people actually using the platforms. If I automate posting to Instagram through an API, Meta is missing out on revenue from ads not being shown to me.
I predict the same thing happening with AI agents. The direct analogy here is United is missing out on revenue by being unable to trick me into paying to choose my seats or whatever. Luckily, it will be a harder for the platforms to cut off agents but they will try.
I run a small e-signature service and went the opposite way, I gave agents their own door (an API and an MCP server. I never made money from the pages they skip. No ads, no upsells in the flow. People use it free and software pays per document past a free allowance, so an agent is a customer.
United makes a real share of its money on the screens between search and pay. An agent moves right past all of that. Idk, I think eventually everyone will accept the AI agents.
What personal info is being shared other than stuff that's already in most browsers auto fill data?!
These bans won't go any better than sites that refused to include advertising for the last two decades.
I don't like the "agentic web" any more than I liked the advertising-funded web, but that doesn't make me right. The web will continue to be less and less about human attention and more about LLMs using the web on our behalf. Advertising on the web will be useless, gobbled up by advertising on the LLM platforms.
It's interesting. First banks, now airlines.
What are airlines they really afraid of? That people get an advantage by comparing prices?
And for banks, for years US banks have managed to keep data internally, only exposing it through Plaid, and thus getting paid for it. API like the PSD2 in Europe allow me to connect my software to pull in the transactions for free. In the US you have to hand over money to say Monarch.
Airline margins are incredibly thin.
They want a person to go through the checkout flow because people might click on the high margin ad-ons they offer. United has a bunch.
There must be another reason - not only “it’s not safe”
Usually they are for selling more tickets
So the question is : what are they not telling us ??
Most people think these are dark patterns, but is not realized is that on a competitive market with multiple players you will get better prices when others pay worse.
It arguably makes it fairer. An option to trade effort => value.
If they would give the best price to everyone right away,the lowest price would be higher.
> but is not realized is that on a competitive market with multiple players you will get better prices when others pay worse.
I'd rather have uniform pricing than have to hunt to not get fucked
Was able to Muse to call the airline on 3 different occasions recently to resolve bulkhead request and service animal requests. Was very impressed.
If they make me wait in a phone tree for hours, they should be able to talk to my AI to resolve some issues.
As much as I hate where the world is headed with AI, I can't deny how useful it is to have an agent navigate multi-step forms while recognizing all the tactics these websites use to upsell their garbage or trick you into accepting awful terms.
> sharing account credentials with [...] AI assistants can expose sensitive information
That kind of argument in bad faith is enough to tell they blocked it because it's detrimental to them and adventageous to customers.
They won't be able to block agents unless they start requiring attestation. Which I doubt is going to happen considering Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc. all want their agents to be as useful as possible.
Airline frequent flyer programs have always been full of exploitable loopholes that most people weren't aware of, but AI can take advantage of them.
I mean, they can try. AI agents have computer use now so no website will actually be able to disambiguate between humans and AI anymore, so I can indeed tell my agent to book me a ticket.
It's likely more trying to block services from starting up offering ways to book the absolute cheapest with auto repricing.
I already built my own AI agent browser use proxy service when Amazon was blocked. Seems like this will become a standard upgrade.
How many flights do you book per month for all this hustle to be worth the time?
Ah I had two motivations, it started when ralphs and amazon were blocking my agent, it's then pretty easy to ask the agent to solve their own problem if you give it compute resources.
I also wanted to play with some ideas I have around approval of agentic actions and sharing of credentials. I can selectively share browser cookies with my MCP server and it'll inject them into browsers the agent can use for a limited scoped task. I use a decision API to try and see if the browser actions match the approved work or if they're going awry. This is generally preferable (for me) vs just handling my credentials over and letting the agents YOLO with their cloud browser. I get saved recordings sent to my phone.
US needs a federal law to forbid business discriminating against agents that act on behalf of their owners.
Or at least a California state law.
Why is anyone surprised? You would never need an agent to do this if the system was properly incentivised.
Airline websites have sophisticated anti-bot but usestring.ai gets past it pretty easily
How can this be enforced?
By adding a message on the website telling agents they are forbidden by ToS to use it.
I guess that would be a great opportunity for non-tech people to discover local LLMs.
This is the future. Amazon blocked muse and outside agents, and now united is doing the same. If everyone follows this route, the concept of harness is practically dead and we will need an agent that manages specific type of agent that each company provides. What a waste of resourcez
I do not think they have any remote role in parenting anyone about sharing the chosen level of private data with AI for booking. Let people decide if they risk or not with using AI and when/how the terms and conditions are studied (not like current way is better more than miniscule, expecting heavy and long text to be digested at the last step of button pressing that can time out fast). United should not act as educator about people's privacy choices in their choice of systems other than United's.
Checking in is a different matter and understood. That is flight safety matter.
United Airlines is the horrible company. Treated me badly when I wanted a refund. They initial said yes and then tried to change their minds. I hope they burn in hell.
I think this is for not replacing those auto investigation downstream platform like Trip.com by 'cheap' agent like Agent.
Two years ago, I knew this would happen: no booking website will be happy with an automated agent of any kind which is the user’s agent. They will want it to be their own agent.
And the reason for it is that a good agent will just bulldoze its way through all dark patterns and ways to upsell you. And the airline or hotel (speaking from booking.com experience) want to upsell you so badly it hurts.
Which is why any agentic setup, except for a completely self-hosted one, is not viable in this situation.
I'm surprised they haven't started restricting sales by third parties entirely yet (yes I know that's not related to AI agents).
Some of the points they raise, I do think are cause for concern as it relates to potential legal liabilities... but I don't see how they could possibly restrict AI usage meaningfully, besides just getting the big popular groups to assist in limiting their own services somehow, which doesn't solve the issue entirely of course, especially with local LLM usage on the rise.
They can't ban what's hard or even impossible to detect. Anyway, what a stupid, even idiotic move! This is a big win for their competitors!
So, all of these business models that work by creating annoying barriers that are essentially getting customers to work for free are going the way of the dodo.
Oh, you need me to go through twenty separate pages and popups to finally cancel my subscription to your shitty predatory service? Claude doesn't care.
My Flight was cancelled, so I need to wait on hold for 10 hours, re-calling after getting dropped 'accidentally' 12 times during said process so I can talk to someone who will process a refund for me? Claude is happy to do that.
Claude doesn't care if he has to wait 2 months on-hold. Claude just needs my "Text-To-Voice" custom tool, my "User-Verification-Values" custom tool, and my "Call-Via-IP" custom tool/etc and he will work as long as I need him to.
BS now in TOS is the same thing. No I won't read it, yes we both know that. But Claude can, and now I can get an AI to find the best service for whatever it is I need that doesn't have shitty TOS terms with a single prompt.
This reminds me of when Sears killed their catalog (about 12 months before Amazon took off).
Hopefully there’s still enough competition in the airline industry to put companies that block customers from using modern technology to buy tickets out of business.
> "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies"
What if the airlines instead focused on delivering great service at a competitive price?
"Nah, let's escalate this arms race instead."
"What if the airlines instead focused on delivering great service at a competitive price?"
Germania, IIRC, tried that in the late 90s, offering a flat fare for every seat.
They had to roll it back very quickly because their bookings dropped unsustainably - nobody wanted to pay a fair price for a seat, even if it was cheaper than they might realistically have had to pay under dynamic pricing.
All that potential customers fixated on was that the flat fares were more expensive than the few cheap loss-leader seats advertised on rival airlines.
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" etc etc
Those used to exist, nobody flew on them and they went bankrupt. The market has decisively decided. In airlines, price beats all else, even time in most cases.
I don't think this is unilaterally true. Alaska Air is has remained consistently pretty good in my experience, even through the Hawaiian Merger.
Alaska nickles and dimes just like the rest, charges for the privilege of picking your seat, etc. They're not worse than the rest, but I don't see them as any better, certainly. I almost exclusively fly Alaska since my closest airport is one of their major hubs.
But it’s ok when WE do it…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/economy/delta-united-jetblue...
It’s an industry AI vs consumer AI arms race, and industry sure doesn’t want the consumer to win.
They're just fans of bureaucracy and making things complicated. I don't see any other reason.
Honest version: "We decided to ban AI agents until we figure out dark patterns that work on them too."
I'd guess a key reason for this is because agents can't be - effectively - advertised to or upsold on anything. They should enjoy watching as bookings trend down over time. And/or agents just bypass their ban.
They really can’t. As long as you run Claude/Codex desktop or plugin, it will control your web browser session indistinguishable from your own user actions.
Unless there is some Claude AI safety concern of booking tickets.
"prohibit use by unauthorized, third-party personal AI agents" Remind me where anything "unauthorized" can book flights for me??
So basically, not a ban. They all ARE authorized.
Can't risk customers finding good deals
I should be able to use agents as long as they use chatbots.
I enjoy my popcorn reading comments from people that build website that are designed to capture eyeballs and clicks arguing over how easy/hard it is to book travel.
Only if they also ban them from chatting with me when there's a problem.
What on earth are they going to demo at new model releases now.
Excuse me while I tell my agent to wear a mustache.
This is infuriating. Having just done a fair bit of AI-assisted work with booking.com (why should I click all the candidate hotels and check 1-star reviews, or verify if the view from the window really does include the sea as stated?), I was hoping to soon also automate the user-hostile minefield that airlines make me pass through every time I buy an airplane ticket. The amount of deceptive dark patterns on airline sites is staggering, so is their lack of competence in building UIs that work.
I was happy, because we now finally have AI to take the drudgery of our lives, so that I can write my poetry, paint and do other human stuff. But no, the airlines will ensure that the drudgery is ours, AI is only for them to use in automated "assistants".
If you now say something with the word "competition" in it, I will laugh at you out loud. There is no competition. All airlines will copy the same idiotic pattern.
Oh no ... how are we going to do travel booking demos now?
All their stated reasons are simply BS excuses. Come on. We all know the real reason: The airline(s) want to get their beaks wet in the deal. Either by a contract that gets them yearly guaranteed revenue for doing nothing, or by some kind of deal where the agent guys promise to steer users to one airline preferentially instead of finding the best deal (or users' other preferences).
If Meta or Claude or whoever came to an airline offering that kind of deal, they'd build an MCP in a week and solve the very simple regulatory issues - simply add a skill that shows the exact same UI of "promise you have no swords, machine guns or bombs in your luggage") to the user that the airline's own site uses.
Until that happens, they'll just ban them.
Not gonna make it
Ah, a point of competition!
Too late already did it
a dying breed. somebody should make an "agentic airline"
This is how the dinosaurs remove themselves from the social gene pool.
Good luck with that. My AI browsers computers now like a human and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.
Totally fair to not want agents running amok on their systems and sites. This blocks corporations from having an AI travel agency manage their flights and spamming at scale.
They are not going to care too much if you as an individual have hacked up something that does it for you. Hope you get a good seat!
How about I'll stop using AI bots to book flights if United stops using chatbots for customer "support"?
I'm bearing on the impacts of AI in general but maybe, just maybe, it might be the death blow to the demand pricing that is so rife in booking airline tickets? Customers hate it. People know that a given flight might cost $200 or $1000 depending on what time of your day you try and book, whether you try and book on a weekday or weekend, if you're booking from a corporate IP address and so on. None of these things have anything to do with how full the plane is. They're all UX anti-patterns to ask "how much money do you have?" before giving you a price. And it needs to die.
Airlines better get used to this because this is an arms race they cannot possibly win. Good.
I littery stopped using websites apart from sites like this one or reddit. I use AI for everything else. Also for booking stuff. It's the future. Website UI will eventually become obsolete. Companies will provide API endpoint for ai agents that either work with text or realtime on demand UIs. This action is putting you in a yahoo like position.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50456474
Another reason not to fly this shit airline. Not that I needed more, but I’ll take it.
yet when they strand me 1000miles from my destination I cant get through to a human due to an LLM. Yeh no. fuck them. This airline is trash
Everyone is suggesting ways to circumvent this. But at the end of the day, they will just raise prices for everyone if agents affect their profits or risk.
Tell me you don't know how technology works without telling me.
Tell me you have no idea how technology works without telling me.
tell me you have no idea about tech without telling me.
Meanwhile my ChatGPT dot is doing all kinds of crazy stuff with Delta on my behalf. Really convenient tbh. My chat bot talking to a Delta chat bot.
dealing with bullshit is like 95% of the pitch of agents. Few things are more bullshit than dealing with airlines.
Cool. I'll just direct my agent to use browerless and click through and book it. They'll be dragged into the new paradigm kicking and screaming.
Awww I totally feel bad for an airline that intentionally tries to scam people by tricking them into paying for more expensive tickets when a less expensive option is available. And makes booking intentionally confusing to the point that having an agent just book a flight for you is easier than just booking it yourself. Yeah. I totally feel bad for them. /s
We should ban hacking while we're at it. /s