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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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??
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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"...
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> "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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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..
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Ticketmaster wants you to think that you have to have a phone. But I somehow always manage to get in without a phone. And when I do, I complain, calmly, about how hostile, inaccessible, and miserable ticketmaster is. :)
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.)
Sure, the airline may not notice when it happens but it can cut those processes short when they have a full ban.
They should meet the customer where they are instead of being antagonistic to their customer by default
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
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.
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?
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 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.
So what matters most of all is getting good laws in place and not relying on company policies aligning naturally with the people.
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??
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.
Then it will be like the higher percent you pay for the Titanium Plus Card holders, and complaints will vanish.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s just statistics.
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?
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.
id dont scrape for profit but for hobby projects. and some of websites them are annoying.
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.
I have been exploring know your agent solutions and nobody can give me an honest answer.
(fingerprint patterns, prompt injection so Claude literally tells the website, atypical load and interaction, etc.).
:^)
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.
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.
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.
How do they plan to stop you? I don't know but the punishment would be cancelling your tickets if you get caught
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.
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?
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"...
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.
- 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.
But do these actually exist?
The usual issue of flight booking APIs is, that those flights are expensive. It's what travel agencies or travel departments in companies use.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
If this is indeed the case -- good riddance to that practice! Why should I be sorry that it goes?
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.
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?
Disney is doing similar stuff with their app and queuing nonsense.
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.
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.
Accepting this is currently true, should we prefer this equilibrium?
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 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
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.
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.
Nicely put.
They make the rules, and so they'll try to do that again.
Sounds like Google Flights.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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].
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.
My post was a response to ProblemExplorer's language, not yours.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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 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
Do “many”? The companies I’m familiar with who used to do this have largely abandoned the practice due to consumer expectations of sales.
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.
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...
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 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.
It made me think, an agent would be nice. Too bad.
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!
If they make me wait in a phone tree for hours, they should be able to talk to my AI to resolve some issues.
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.
How much can it cost? And if it's so expensive, wouldn't intermediaries who cache results actually be cheaper?
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.
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.
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).
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.
I'd argue that's the root of the problem here.
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.
But at the same time they should’ve just made it more accessible and just raised the prices anyway.
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?
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.
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.
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.
That kind of argument in bad faith is enough to tell they blocked it because it's detrimental to them and adventageous to customers.
That’s ridiculous.
They just want to keep their price list miserable to compare so they can overcharge people.
Probably many other things too. But it's an arms race.
Or at least a California state law.
Usually they are for selling more tickets
So the question is : what are they not telling us ??
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.
I'd rather have uniform pricing than have to hunt to not get fucked
What if the airlines instead focused on delivering great service at a competitive price?
"Nah, let's escalate this arms race instead."
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
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.
Unless there is some Claude AI safety concern of booking tickets.
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.
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.
And some banks are forcing the use of their insecure apps that rely on SMS 2FA.