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?

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.

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.

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.

Your argument doesn't make any sense. Why is the flight even offered if it's such an issue for the airline?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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.