:^)
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.
They should meet the customer where they are instead of being antagonistic to their customer by default
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”?
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.
Overall though I think the “abuse” is a good thing as it eliminates pricing arbitrage that the airline is doing and forces them to change their business model and compete somewhere else or in a different manner. We shouldn’t enshrine business models without an extremely good reason.
People using AI agents to book travel are just lazy as hell.
AI is the technology that is going to fast forward our society into Wall-E.
Instead we’ll end up with AI agents that don’t actually find the most optimal anything because anyone who blocks bots and/or doesn’t get paid by 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.
Doorman fallacy strikes again.
The two niches of travel agents that have a future are full service event coordination (group bookings, charter, etc., combined with ground transportation), and complex RTW type bookings ("We're going to fly to Germany, stay two nights, take a train to X, stay a night, fly domestically across Italy, then hop on a river cruise, and fly home from Croatia").
For simpler things, there's just no need and many are their own worst enemy.
I took my family to Maui for 11 nights, spending most of that in a resort, then a night in Hana before heading back and home.
The two agents we spoke to that specialized in Maui vacations quoted us a price through them that was $4,000 more than the hotel wanted for the same room direct, and $7,000 more than through Priceline. Both presented itineraries that were in fairly direct contradiction with some requests we made ("we'd like to do x, y, and z, but each with at least a day between them" - one wanted to book them on three consecutive days "so then you could relax"), etc. And both got fairly pissy when we said didn't feel they were giving us something aligned with what we wanted, nor communicating any reason for doing so. "Good luck booking with Priceline, the hotel is going to give you the worst room they can". While I know that there's maybe some stigma with that, ended up being the opposite, "And you're staying with us for ... oh, eleven nights, lets make sure it's the best room we can give you".
I think that the AI travel industry will basically end up not giving you the best options compared to manual simply because steering you one direction or another is so valuable. I.e., AI will sell “sponsored listings” and your AI will book you at those places because you don’t care.
Or the travel providers who don’t want to pay AI firms money will not be booking options, like how Southwest Airlines wasn’t in Google for so long.
The nice part about travel agents is how they’re humans so they have brains and can work around any situation like that. That’s also why booking manually can beat AI.
If you’re traveling to have leisure or exploration, having a prediction engine choose the same probabilistic winner each time is going to end up being a negative aspect. You’ll say “I want a great trip to NYC” and you’ll end up going to Times Square like everyone else because the AI knows that most people go there.
And of course, yes, there are good travel agents and as I described circumstances where they are a useful resource.
But in a world of aggregators and other things, many travel agents are just middle men.
Blaming AI for “destroying another middle class profession” ignores years of decline bringing us here. Might it be the final nail in the coffin? Maybe. But AI can’t really wear the guilt on the demise.
In am not getting why this would be the name of such claim
maybe I am not elite and rich or infirm enough - but I do not get why I would pay extra for doorman or similar servants.
What a terrible take.
Just remember that LLMs as a technology are a prediction engine. If you don’t give it very specific inputs, it will just coalesce to a probabilistic outcome.
Soon your travel plans will be just another purple gradient website: https://prg.sh/ramblings/Why-Your-AI-Keeps-Building-the-Same...
Thats a DoT requirement all flights to, from or within the US.
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
Sure but United (or whoever) chooses to sell them tickets and create those experiences.
Delta has a product called Delta Vacations, run by Expedia. All of these things are businesses decisions they decide to embark on with 3rd parties. They promote the integrations. They don’t have to do these things. I don’t mind if they do, of course, but I have 0 sympathy for them if someone has a bad experience on a 3rd party site selling their product.
If I buy something from Amazon it’s no different.
Exactly, if you buy a pair of Nike's from Amazon you don't go to the Nike website to try and get a refund and then say Nike tricked you out of your refund. The problem is for a lot of people flying is so infrequent and usually a major source of stress that they overlook this fact and it's the airline -- not the cheap prices company they entered into business with -- gets the blame.
If Amazon started to ship Nikes with rips or something in them you’d think poorly of Nike first, because you’d assume they sent Amazon a faulty product.
No, I'd think the 3rd party I bought from through Amazon is shady. This literally just happened to my mother in law. We know the quality of the shoes and have seen them first hand. It never crossed either of our minds that the brand was shipping defective product through amazon.
However United can (and will) ban problematic customers. This policy just gives them something to point to as to why the customer was banned.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/airlines-set-prices-artificial-...
This is a small world. The US has something like ten major airlines. Eight if you don't count subsidiaries. Someone at the first one made a decision to embrace an exploitative pricing model. And then, someone at the second airline looked at this and thought to themselves, "you know, we're not gonna organize a PR campaign to stigmatize it, we're gonna try the same".
The rest, such as Frontier, JetBlue, Southwest, Allegiant - are all discount and/or regional airlines.
For example, allegiant flies to most cities secondary airports that are 1-2 hours drive from the city.
If you're already on the east coast and aren't going to the west coast, then Alaska doesn't have a route. So I suppose they are "regional", where the region is about 70% of the country rather than all of it.
So yes, still a regional airline if your home base isn't exactly on the west coast.
Like Jet Blue, Alaska has a handful of wide bodies (that it got from its Hawaiian acquisition) and does a few international routes on its own metal, but it is an airline you fly domestically and that primarily serves the west coast most effectively.
It’s not a bad airline (it’s also not anything special), but it’s not the equivalent of American, United, or Delta. And that isn’t to say the individual flying experience might not be the same as those carriers, but it’s not the same class of operation as a business. Again, it does a handful of international flights. To me, major means you have an array of wide-body jets and a large international operation. Not a few seasonal routes on its 29 wide-bodies. For comparison, American has a fleet of 137 wide body jets. Delta has 179. United has over 240.
These are not the same.
Southwest is even less of a major carrier. It’s got a lot of marketshare from its previous era focused on selling the idea that it was cheaper than the majors, but it operates one type of jet, has zero wide bodies and its international destinations don’t count.
And while Alaska might have to use American to pad out its network of flights at major hubs and markets, at least it can. Southwest’s design to eschew major hubs means that tou can’t get a lot of direct flights to major cities. If it happens to fly where you travel to, fine, but otherwise you have to look at at least one hop and go to a smaller airport than what you might expect.
Jetblue doesn’t have widebody aircraft, but they still offer transatlantic connections.
why?
given "Airline tickets were more expensive"
I specifically mentioned the price as the one metric that has improved. And it's a pretty important metric! But not the only one.
Ok, but why do you care how many airlines exist? Competition?
Guess what? There was a larger number of airline CEOs, and... less competition! Airline profit margins were fat back in the day (isn't excessive "producer surplus" supposedly a sign of a non-competitive market?).
Not only did the government set the maximum and minimum price an airline could charge, but all routes had to be approved by the government. Airlines who served a particular route were even allowed to protest when another airline petitioned to offer service on that route, and "too many competitors" was considered a valid reason to deny an application.
The reason we have so many fewer airlines today is that some airlines outcompeted others after airlines were finally allowed to compete for customers. One of the things that nobody likes to talk about w.r.t. competition is "what happens to the competitor who got out-competed?"
The answer is: He exits the market (goes bankrupt or gets merged into another competitor). This happens one-by-one until the number of competitors has been reduced enough to achieve a stable market equilibrium. That equilibrium is achieved when the number of competitors is sufficiently small to give the remaining competitors "pricing power" to maintain reasonable profit margins (and thus not go bankrupt).
> Oh, and service quality. And comfort in flight.
Right, when the government makes it illegal to compete on price, you have to compete on other things.
You can still get that old-school level of service and comfort today. It's called first class, and it's great!
They do all sorts of wonderful things, like offer a glass of bubbly before takeoff, halfway decent food, loads of legroom, wide seats for our fat American butts, a couple free checked bags, and flight attendants who act like they give a damn. Most of that wasn't included in a domestic economy ticket back in the old days.
The best part is that modern domestic first class still only costs about the same as an old-school economy ticket. But it turns out that what almost all customers really want is the cheapest ticket possible. Their revealed preference is that they prefer lower quality, no checked bag, and cheaper prices. Airlines who offered this option survived and those who didn't perished.
I road it once, and the only real difference is an included hard drink, getting off first (which doesn't matter if you have a checked bag), and more leg room before your knees hit the wall in front of you. Debatable about feet room though, since feet can't slide under the wall...
Worse than when the government set, not just the maximum, but also the minimum price an airline could charge for a ticket? You're saying that time, when price competition was literally illegal, was better than today?
Is there any chance that you're not actually old enough to remember that time?
What, pray tell, is the advantage of competition when the competitors are forced by the government to charge the same price for the same route? And not just forced to charge the same price, oh no! But forced to charge a price higher than railroads (which cost more to operate than airlines), so as not to outcompete railroads, which are both slower and more expensive to operate.
It's like getting mad at your cat for killing a bird - it's just what cats do.
The answer to this behavior isn't being mad at or boycotting particular airlines, it is regulation.
Or, you know…accept that a cat is a cat, and stop trying to regulate scratching simply because you don’t like it.
(I get that you probably understand this, but the “regulation is the solution” is kind of a leap. People whining about market pricing have always struck me as just fundamentally misunderstanding what capitalism is.)
I literally have heard "if you hate it, you should have asked the regulators to stop me from doing it" from a techie, and man. No. You have agency. You own this. If you need a regulator to stop you, you're not a good person, sorry.
It's a failure of customer protections laws. The same service legally should cost each customer the same. Sophisticated pricing schemes should be just plainly illegal.
You can't put an item in the store on the shelf and charge every customer what you like. You have to put up a price and adhere to that price regardless of who wants to buy. Anything else is illegal. Or at least should be.
>> For most of human history, you had to haggle over prices before you could buy something. The Quakers were among the first people to commit to fixed prices — and they did it because it was good morals. Turned out, it was also good business. This is the strange story of the long journey of that little piece of paper.[0]
Seems maybe this is just getting back to haggling, except where the seller has an unfair advantage, and we are trying to eke back a somewhat fair playing field using AI.
It could end up that (maybe wishful thinking), if enough people do it, United Airlines banning AI booking agents may lose them enough business they will need to cut prices or invite in AI agents.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/28/589278258/plan...
Negotiating a price is as old as humans. "That merchant over there is charging 10% less. Can you beat that?", "I want to buy 10 of these, can you give me a bulk discount?"
I have friends that haggle at local stores. One goes does the "Store X is cheaper thing". Another does "My parents live in Oregon where they're is no sales tax, can you lower your price to cover the difference? Otherwise I'll just have them bring it down from Oregon", etc....
It is nowhere close to example you gave.
There are many conditions under which price variation allows the seller to maximize the overall amount of services/products that it sells to the largest number of people, all of whom feel like they're getting a good deal.
Should a loaf of bread cost the same thing in Malaysia as it does in the US? No. And if you required it to be such, then people in Malaysia simply wouldn't have bread, and people in the US would likely have higher prices because cutting off less-wealthy markets would reduce the economies of scale that drive overall prices.
I definitely have increased the price of consulting for "annoying" customers doing stuff I don't want to do. Many moons ago, I was doing some contract training for a small airline here in town. I liked teaching but I didn't really want to do the training they wanted me to do - it was a pain in the ass, it took a week, and didn't really pay enough to justify the opportunity cost.
So I kept raising my price, and eventually, they stopped asking me to do the training. It was great because I didn't have to do the thing I didn't want to do anymore, and I made more money. You are allowed to charge different people different amounts of money - some people are just a pain in the butt and charging more pays for the lack of sanity.
Ah, but this is worst in industries where resale is not possible. For example, flights, digital games, and rideshare. Of course one has the option to just not fly, buy games, or use Uber, but this limits a lot of convenience and function in a modern society. This is why I think targeted regulation is not such a bad thing - provided, as you explain, that the reason for the price discrimination is not because the customer actually costs the business more.
My local grocery store has a senior discount on Tuesday mornings.
Many places have student discounts.
Some places offer a discount if you buy in bulk.
I used to be a book store club member, which would give me a discount on prices. A local history club has monthly public talks, with discounted prices for members. And of course most grocery stores have that sort of scheme.
My father worked for a company which offered family discounts to its employees.
You'll find little support for making all of those illegal.
Of course some of these schemes are illegal in some areas, such as a bar offering discounted drinks for women, but those fall under civil rights law, not customer protection.
And bulk discounts aren't market segmentation, but a way for the store to pass on reduced costs due to lower overheads to the customer. Again, they are also usually clearly disclosed because incentives are aligned.
I don't every remember seeing places which are transparent about the discounts they offer staff and family off staff. At the very least, I've never seen signs listing those discounts.
Okay, it's not market segmentation. My comment was in response to what scott79 wrote: 'You have to put up a price and adhere to that price regardless of who wants to buy.'
That means that if I didn't list a bulk price and someone comes in and asks what the discount is for a bulk order, then, what, I need to refuse them?
Or can I can scribble the price on the tag right then, for the sale, and erase it immediately afterward?
I'm simply not able to figure out what the guidelines should be. I'm also not sure that "transparent" is that useful of a term, given how easy it is to put clauses in terms&services which people affirm without reading.
Or from HHGTTG: “But the plans were on display…” ... “It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
It should be but unfortunately I don't think it is. The main reason store prices are the same for everyone is because it wasn't practical to individualize them without making it clear to purchasers that they are getting screwed. Still, store membership programs / value cards are one way this is being done in a limited way. And some stores are already switching to digital price labels which can be updated instantly so this is going to get a whole lot worse.
No, the thing they're doing is still awful.
The basic problem is that they do actually have competitors and are offering a product which is basically fungible, so their margins are inherently going to suck, even if they do every slimy thing, because then their competitors will just do the same thing and they're back to having thin margins only now they've made everything more deceptive/inconvenient/confusing.
The ideal thing in a market like that is to have an efficient way for customers to cut through the BS and find the best price for a ticket that isn't screwing them in covert ways, because then the deceptive tactics don't work, which takes away the incentive to do them. They'll still have thin margins, only with less deception.
But an individual airline can't unilaterally allow that if their competitors have a way to block it or they'd be at a competitive disadvantage, so they're going to try to stop that from happening. It's in no one's interest -- not even theirs -- to let them. They just need you to not let their competitors get away with it either.
But anyhow, you see the problem.
Look up food deserts. I'm sure there are myriad issues you think exist only in North Korea.
They are saying the biggest problem with poor communities is the people living in them. That seems true statistically no? Or at least, there's more data that supports that than the idea that there's magic soil in the rich communities
Well, I didn't say I had any problems so I'm not sure what you're even referencing here. Weird strawman
> you would see that the reasons some people and communities are poor are due to external factors.
Oh spare me. This is like reaching algebra and thinking you've reached the frontier of mathematics in 2026. As if nature vs nurture wasn't drilled into every prepubescent brain in even the worst school systems in the west.
You cannot price your services however you want.
That has nothing to do with what we are talking about though, and was not the point in the first place.
Or perhaps it’s simply not a functioning competitive market in the first place, for a variety of reasons including obvious ones like large barriers to entry.
Unfortunately I expect this to get continually worse for the foreseeable future. We already have "we can use AI to crack things but you can't" pretty well in place and that is just the harbinger. Companies can use AIs to "nudge" is to their heart's content but we can't use AI to counter it is pretty obviously going to be something they push for.
If this was the intended point, it could be made in dozens of different ways from increasing baggage fees to decreasing legroom to the death of inflight meals. The specific example was obviously chosen because they can both be connected under the nebulous label of “AI” to make it seem more unfair.
They are using algorithms to extract the highest price from you.
You can use algorithms to extract the lowest price from them.
Capitalism is based on the premise that everyone will be as greedy as possible
some specific routes may have de facto monopoly but many, many are not
I don't want people to go out of their way to hurt the companies, purposefully buying tickets they don't want and then refunding them or something. I'm just saying that on the occasion that a mistake happens, you shouldn't feel bad about using whatever legal/procedural recourse available so that you don't have to just eat the cost.
I would go for alternative airlines if there were any. Alas.
some time ago I was thinking that "well, these dark patterns are there, but I am buying from Ryanair so what I expected"
and then I was buying from more upscale company and it had literally the same dark patterns trying to mislead and upsell you
If/when airlines figure out how to use GenAI to gouge folks they will. Airlines were so eager to enable GenAI and gut service to save money that they rolled out easily manipulated bots and lost money.
Or, equivalently, lower the price for those who couldn't afford it otherwise, while still remaining profitable. As others have said here, airlines are low margin, so what it means is that everyone who pays more effectively subsidize those who pay less.
How fair it is depends on your definition of fairness. If your definition of fairness is that everyone should pay the same price for the same service, from a poor, indebted student to a billionaire, then it is unfair. If it is more about giving everyone the same opportunities, then individual pricing can be seen as fairer. The wealthy business traveller will see it as price gouging, but will fly anyways because he can afford it, but the student will be able to fly when he otherwise wouldn't be able to.
Customers using AI for their advantage, as to pay less than they can afford will change the dynamic. Instead of a system where travelers pay as much as they can afford, we get to a system where those who don't know how to use technology to their advantage subsidize those who do, which, to me, is the least fair of all.
Now, you are free to use any trick you want to pay less, in the same way that airlines are using every trick to make you pay more, that's the game, and I am certainly playing it myself. The law and regulations are the rules, and to me, it does not unfairly favor the airlines, otherwise, they would have much higher margins.
"They're not screwing you over, it's just Affirmative Action for ticket pricing."
> actions taken by these tools may result in unintended purchases, account changes, or use of MileagePlus miles
What could possibly go wrong, rejecting bookings from people busy enough to want help woth mundane stuff like this?
I am at a point where whenever I have to deal with any online booking website, call it support or booking, I rather spin off an agent and spare me the pain.
The added satisfaction of fighting their claw with my claw adds some degree of satisfaction to it.
It’s not only about price, but also about my own mental sanity.
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.
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.
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.
And I personally don't feel bad at all. These companies have optimized everything to the extreme with absolutely zero consideration for the customer. I've personally seen airlines:
* charge more depending on your browser/os * charge more if you buy multiple seats vs buying each ticket independently * advertise cheap tickets that you realistically can't buy for that price because they exclude carry ons or they won't let your family sit together * will try their absolute hardest to give you "airline credit" if the flight is canceled and you need to repeatedly badger them and decline the airline credit offers to get the refund you're legally entitled to * overbooking flights then kicking people off them the day of and there's nothing you can do about it * Frontier once charged me $25 to print the boarding pass once because my screen was cracked and it wouldn't scan
Now that I can have an agent map out their exploitative pricing system and get me the algorithmically cheapest ticket that they offer, suddenly it's a problem?
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.
Imagine if you just went to their site and honestly got the best price that day / week.
I’m actually skeptical that there are loss-leader seats being sold on normal routes (eg where one airline is not trying to force another out of business). Does anybody have a source for that? I have always assumed that low prices were to extract as much value as possible from a plane on a given route.
> Do you mean stop gouging some customers based on information asymmetry? Doesn’t bother me.
No. The airline will simply 2x gouge everyone instead of the 1x now.
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.
How do they plan to stop you? I don't know but the punishment would be cancelling your tickets if you get caught
I have been exploring know your agent solutions and nobody can give me an honest answer.
Namely Karens calling customer service after the agent booked a $20k ticket in first class across the world and demanding refunds.
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?
I agree. Complaining "I have money, now give me your product!" is tantamount to "I have a product, now give me your money!"
That said, this and so many other aspects of a functional capitalist society rely on customers and corporations having roughly equal leverage over one another. But since corporations have insanely centralized bargaining power as collectives, have bent the legal system in their favor at every turn, and are consistently overprivileged by technological innovation (AI-as-price-researchers being one of the few exceptions), I have long since abandoned any social contract with them.
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.
let cdp = false;
const orig = Error.prepareStackTrace;
Error.prepareStackTrace = function () {
cdp = true;
return orig;
};
console.log(new Error(''));
// cdp === true → a debugger/automation client has the Runtime domain enabled1) 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.
If HF did have any hard feelings about the event, they were likely settled with OpenAI out-of-court.
That's not settled law.
Which is why corporations like these don't want to run the risk.
Conversely, if there's a chat log of me saying "Buy a ticket to China" and then clicking "yes" on an approval prompt showing the full price, ticket dates, etc. then yeah, obviously that one is on me.
But apparently, it’s okay for that same Google to unleash bots to scrape entire websites...
No? None of these questions are difficult at all. Where do you think it's 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.
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.
As plenty of others in this thread have pointed out, agents tend to book first and then cancel later if they don't get post-approval from their user. That ruins the experience for all the other potential passengers who could have purchased those tickets and it's clearly better from a business standpoint to prioritize the other potential passengers over the jackasses who care so little about their seats they couldn't even be bothered to book the seats themselves.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablation_(artificial_intellige...
The product-for-money part is never the problem. It's always the refunds, the chargebacks, the customer service complaints, the person filing a complaint with regulators.
A lot of the systems that relied on low levels of these situations are about to be tested by waves of agents doing everything they can to take advantage of the rules: Chargebacks, complaints, refunds, cancellations.
They need to make a best-effort demonstration that they are complying with the federal regulations.
The federal regulations require that flyers see notices about banned luggage and other requirements. The article covers this.
The thing is, they don't need to go to extremes to detect and ban everything. They can state their policy and then they have some coverage if regulators come knocking.
I would guess they're also dealing with the same problems that occur in other spaces involving reservations: AI agents tend to operate greedily and optimistically by default. A common situation in other industries is that they'll read a cancellation policy, then proactively make a reservation before asking the user if they want it. The agent will try to hold a spot and then schedule a cancellation before the window ends (example, 23 hours into a 24 hour cancellation period) and wait for the user to confirm.
As a result, the churn rate for agent-created reservations is very different than when humans do it, which breaks a lot of assumptions and financial expectations.
Unregulated spaces like restaurants can charge a non-refundable reservation fee or threaten cancellation fees (which is enough to scare off agents, for now at least) but regulated spaces like airlines may be required to process cancellations according to some rules. So now if you have agents everywhere exhibiting reservation/cancellation behavior that nobody expected and it's changing suddenly with each new update of Meta Muse or other system, it gets messy.
AI agents are a real problem for a lot of interactions that previously assumed humans were making the decisions. When an agent running 24/7 with a goal of maximizing its owners' happiness starts doing things, some of these systems break down.
So I can see multiple reasons why they'd want to officially disallow it. I would expect that making it a formal rule is enough to start getting Claude, Meta Muse, and others to add a guardrail forbidding it too.
Not going to stop the motivated individual running OpenRouter tokens and some complex local agent setup, but that's such a small number of people it can be ignored.
Perhaps Delta might have considered this when they introduced AI-driven price optimization ("what is the absolute highest we think this human will bear for this flight?"), not "Oh, we only ever assumed we'd be the ones to use AI for optimization purposes!".
Now sure you could bypass this by running your own harness/tooling, but then you'd be in breach of laws. There's various policies like this today around web scraping
Airlines and other companies are faced with a choice: Let everything go to shit for people who don't use AI agents, or start discouraging the use of AI agents. It will be interesting to see whether companies embrace anti-AI AI agents or try to weight the penalties such that deterrence is achieved without them. e.g. Would you continue using an AI agent to book flights if you faced a potential lifetime ban from that airline?
It works both ways. If they can use AI to charge me more, I should be able to use AI to save a few dollars.
If you’re actually arguing they should set a fair, stable price and I should pay it, then I agree. But that shipped sailed decades ago.
Can you though? How would you even know? All I know is airline pricing has been a bit of a blackbox for as long as I've been a buyer of the tickets. Even if they aren't using AI, they're still playing games. And if they're games are such that using an AI on the buyer side, that's what people will use.
And to be clear, I have no desire to use AI to buy my tickets, certainly not the "buy now, refund tomorrow, buy again, repeat until flight time" stuff proposed in comments. I just want a ticket at a fair price, which to me basically means "roughly the same price the guy next to me paid"
It's because you've decided you don't want to live a small life with modest local merchants and want to work directly with dispersed national and international firms that have more employees than there are people in your neighborhood and more customers than there are people in your country.
They're running their business on algorithms and trendy business school theories, completely abstracted from you as an individual human being. They're squeezing lemons for the most microscopic drops of juice so that they can show a diagram on a chart pointing in a certain direction on a chart in a quarterly presentation to a pension fund so that their top executives hit a performance target that gets them the biggest bonus and so that their managers catch a bit of the drippings.
AI agents are going to change the details of how that works, but not in your favor because the root problem is sociological not technological. They'll just rework their schemes around agents, perhaps leaning on legislators to make it easier, and still not do what you want when you want.
You've lost all the leverage long ago and AI agents are going to save you.
If you just want to buy a product with some money, and you can still even have the option, go look for a phone number of a human that sells it. For flights, that opportunity's probably just gone forever now. If you want to hope for it not getting worse, using your own political participation to stymie their lobbyists in this time of flux and restructuring might help. But I wouldn't be optimistic.
(know folks inside United, but not speaking in any way for the company, I just know how the process works)
Just like other companies that have similar low alternative services. They let you do it. They log and flag and as soon as you have a problem, instead of working to solve it, they see you are on the flagged list and you are now banned from the service. People who find themselves banned from an airline when they miss a connection or report lost luggage have done some other activity that got them to be flagged as a potential unwanted customer.
they just don't want the possible liability of dealing with whatever legalities that might occur from autonomous agent usage. and i can't really blame em for that.
You see how it's unfair when you do it... right?
They will change when a significant portion of booking are happening via agents, and they would be missing out if they didn't change.
The righteous Claude would refuse to book on that airline. It already refuses to search amazon.com.
But I agree that at that point I'll just change the agent, or use local model that is less principled.
They don’t.
When a dispute that either party(you or United airlines in this theoretical case) decides to litigate an argument far enough that it becomes clear you used an AI agent like Claude then you are going to run afoul of the CFAA[1] and are going to get fucked legally because they stated who could access their site and you violated it with your agents against their stated will.
This is a legal ward, not a technical one. Violate it at your own peril.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
The user also has more fine grained permission over the interaction. They could choose to give permissions just to read account details or flight info or to actually make a purchase. United knows it's an agent acting.
Of course, unbehaved agents will still go around, but by providing a golden path, the better behaved ones will be better citizens.
The alternative is, as parent comment suggests, a user can allow Claude to drive their browser. Then, apart from heuristics, United Airlines can't really tell the difference between Claude driving the browser and a user driving the browser. Therefore you have less granular permissions and more unbounded actions and risk. There is no way to audit what is done by a human being versus by an agent. And United Airlines still has agents interacting with their site.
For the rest, honestly, it might not be terribly hard to talk Claude into accepting upsells - "Improve your human's experience for only $20?" as a required field. Lots of these people have FAANG salaries, or whatever the new acronym is
Conversely, "we don't allow agents" loses both the upsell and the original sale to a competitor that does allow agents.
Eh, I'd give it a standing instruction to upgrade my cabin if the price makes sense.
Competitor's margins also rely on the upsells and ads. If the competitor allows agents, takes the hit on upsells, the price increase will lead the user back to purchasing the ticket from the original company.
Obviously many possible ways it can go, so we don't know.
but is it load-bearing?
Isn't that was ITA Matrix [1] is?
As the cat and mouse game advances and you're found to be repeatedly in violation, the solution for services like this is pretty simple:
Deny further business with your identity.
I'm not sharing a position on whether or not this is right. But at least for airlines, doing business under an assumed identity is a bigger challenge than with most other industries.
They don't have to. The policy itself allows them to take consequential actions to address various issues in this regard.
Why is this? If you go look at the financial statements of airlines (for which Airlines for America is the industry trade group), you will understand that a large portion of their profits come from monetizing human friction and attention.
Imagine things like upsells for their branded credit cards, feeding into the points game, etc. These are all things that appeal to humans, but that agents are almost certainly going to skip and then relentlessly price-compare the flight at the end of the funnel.
Now, once Amazon’s appeal was denied by the court, it became obvious that they needed to resort to technical solutions if they could not block it by trying to leverage the CFAA. Therefore, these industries are now implementing technical solutions.
Ultimately, personal agents are a huge consumer benefit, but they challenge the business models underlying much of the internet. I expect to see more of this kind of behavior from incumbents, which ironically leaves them vulnerable to disruption by players who do support agents, as this market shift plays out.
It is possible to detect Claude controlling your Chrome browser, as well as many computer use agents. Give this a try: https://demo.switchfrog.com. Ultimately though the mainstream agents will (and mostly already do) self-identify and businesses will adapt.
Source: I am the founder of a company in the space, Switchfrog.
> I prefer and will do my best to avoid detection or blocking
Looks like saga about exporting GPU to China :)
Ideally the wish to not have your service accessed by automation should also be legally enforceable. And we need clear precident that users and operators of automation are 100% liable for the damages they cause.
Surely the airline company makes money with the actual flight... but also they might start to make money with selling private data. Maybe they even start to make MORE money due to a commission on car rental, hotel, tourist attraction, etc than the actual flight.
The "product", due to pressure from competition, enshittification, novel alternatives, is changing and we as customers don't necessarily notice it. In fact the company is probably doing its very best so that we don't and can thus benefit with side effects that we are not aware of, otherwise we would ask for compensation.
So... I'm not justifying the practice but also business wise, it makes sense that they try to keep control of everything around their product.
Must see by Wendover Productions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUduBmvQ_4
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.)