alt Hacker News> "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?
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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.
About 1 cent per search once users hit GDS "look to book" limits and start incurring penalties.
It's not the search's processing cost, it's the lost opportunities to make you pay more for the flight.