alt Hacker News> People using AI agents to book travel are just lazy as hell.
C’mon, there is a whole industry for finding optimal layovers, point transfers via partners, best times to book and so on. Simple case “I need a flight from XYZ to XXX on 12/32” (where you don’t really have options to choose from) is not the one people are using complex machinery for.
Saying this as someone who spent multiple weeks (pre-AI era) trying to arrange stays and flights in a most optimal manner. Now I don’t fly anywhere but I can see why someone would want to offload the whole dance to a smart machine.
If airlines don’t want that, they should end their loyalty programs shams, which are currently designed to be unusable without said optimizations/reward hacking hoops, as points devalue fast.
Oh great so we found another middle class profession to put out of work (travel agents).
Instead we’ll end up with AI agents that don’t actually find the most optimal anything because any hotel or airline who blocks bots and/or doesn’t have an access agreements with AI providers for data access won’t be in the “database.”
The when something goes wrong we are all alone, we’re sending our bot to talk to another bot, rather than a travel agent (human) handling everything when travel issues arise.
Doorman fallacy strikes again.