There's nothing streamlined about any of these.

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.

Disclosure: I have never cross-shopped for any of these services. I use Google Flights, Google Maps for hotel search, and book on the hotel website.

What percentage of the total value is typically saved by those who check different devices, browsers, etc?

One datapoint me: I never see any difference in flight prices, but I haven't tried VPN-ing into the site from another country. For hotels, prices I find through aggregators can be as much as 50% lower than the hotel's own website price, even when their website claims it's showing me the lowest price.

Then you my friend have been overpaying for flights and hotels. Next time you want a holiday, try the classic techniques - Incognito windows, multiple sites, and then compare it with your Google Flights searching

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This is an easily debunked myth, for first-party direct bookings. Third party aggregators and package deals are shady as hell and do all kinds of tricks. But I challenge you to record a screen cast proving that you're seeing different prices for a direct booking for the same ticket (including fare class) just based on different browsers or profiles.

This used to be fairly widespread a long time ago. There used to be fares that are restricted for sale only in a certain country's POS (I believe these are still alive in ATPCO) but not really used anymore.

I remember examples of round-trip ticket A-B-A costing $x in A, $x/2 in B (plus another fare for country C) for some city pairs, but I don't think this has really been a thing in a decade at least.

Are you only just finding out about dynamic pricing? It's still in full swing everywhere. If you want to witness it, the Chinese websites Temu & AliExpress experiment with this on nearly every item. Flights are exactly the same, and because you haven't experienced it shows you haven't caught it

For changing browsers, IPs, user agents, etc., it probably rounds to 0%. There are some edge cases booking flights directly from national carriers from within/outside the country. For using third party OTAs for hotels, I'd guess maybe 5% or so on average depending on your usage, but the financial tradeoff isn't directly comparable. You can probably save a bit by booking third party, especially if you haven't bothered signing up for hotel loyalty programs [1]. There are...let's say "discontinuous" long tail issues with booking hotels third party, where probably 95-99% of the time you'll have no problems, but when there is one, you'll have a much better chance of having a very bad time. The price gap on flights is probably considerably smaller (commissions on flights are much lower than commissions on hotels), but if you have any sort of problem (e.g. a flight being delayed when you have a layover), you have a much better chance of getting screwed.

Personally I mostly use Google Flights for flight search (or seats.aero for award travel search) and booking.com for hotel search, and then book directly. I've booked probably 100+ hotels through booking.com and then quit entirely after hitting that long tail bad experience.

[1]: I'm a few years out of date on this and don't know the current legalities, but major OTAs (Booking.com and Expedia, who control probably 80-90% of third party hotel bookings) used to have a "most favored nation" clause that prevented hotels from advertising lower prices through other channels without a previous commercial relationship. Signing up for a loyalty program qualifies, so being logged in for direct hotel bookings can sometimes get you cheaper room rates. (In the US, things like AARP and AAA memberships also work.) I know the EU was pushing back on these clauses but I'm not clear on what the current state of things is.

There are a few more modern OTAs that rebate a portion of the OTA commission back to you (see Rove, often rebating 15+%) and more that rebate a flat rate (Chase at 8%, Amex at 5%, Cap1 at 10%, etc). The "member pricing" is often 1-2% lower at most, so going through an OTA should get you around 10% off rack rate at minimum, more if commissions are particularly high (hotels pay about 20-30+%, so it's not uncommon to see 20% returns on Rove. Highest I've seen is 50%!).

OTAs can play "member" pricing games too I think so there's even better deals to be had.

So you definitely need to comparison shop, I make my agent take the pricing from all the OTAs and calculate a post-rebate price, then pick the lowest one.

> There are a few more modern OTAs that rebate a portion of the OTA commission back to you (see Rove, often rebating 15+%) and more that rebate a flat rate (Chase at 8%, Amex at 5%, Cap1 at 10%, etc).

Amex/Chase/Cap1 portals are still not worth it.

Even after the 5-10% cash back on hotels booked on their portal, you are still overpaying by 1-3% of the “book direct with hotel” rate.

Then once you take into account a 2-3% straight cash back card, the credit card travel portals tend to overcharge you by 5-8%. This is after taking into account all the points game nonsense. Do the math yourself.

> $100 book direct Hilton/marriott/IHG rate

This hasn't been my experience. I usually search through Booking.com and when I contacted the hotel directly, found that the direct rate is higher than the booking.com rate.

Anywhere from 45% to 5% IMO. So you can almost always save $5, but sometimes you can save like $50+.

Just by signalling interest by lingering and searching for the same flight multiple times a day I have bumped the price for the ticket that I was interested in.

Just a thought but I guess if the airline web services were overwhelmed with noise, they wouldn't be able to do such price adjustments reliably. The only risk is that this might bump the prices for everyone and it will turn out that consumers are not price sensitive enough to force airlines to not do this.

The most I've seen is about 25%, around £500. The difference was due to deal only offered on a one way ticket when bought through the site of a code-sharing airline.

> Booking a flight is obfuscated and you'll have to comparison shop

Wrong. Searching for which flight is the best to book is obfuscated and needs comparison. Which is not what they are banning.

The actual booking, the purchase of the ticket, is as streamlined as you can get these days.

I don't find it streamlined at all. Having to enter an obnoxious amount of personal details, sifting through pages of dark patterns trying to sell you upgrades, addons, meals, extra baggage, insurance..., clicking through an extra step to say you don't want to hire a car or book a hotel, the seat selection page that tries to trick you into paying for a seat when you can actually just click "next" and get a free seat assigned, dodging paying "in your local currency" at an inflated rate when my bank will do it at the interbank rate. And that's if the airline's crappy site is actually working on that particular day and isn't crippled by some javascript error caused by mountains of front-end cruft.

Pass!

I do agree that watching rates over time matters a lot for flights in comparison to rate variation across sites, but there are very much places that will overcharge you compared to others.

When I was the A/B test engineer at Travelocity I proposed a test to automatically select all default criteria from a search so that a user was instantly dropped into check out after entering search criteria in the homepage. It was never approved:(

United is the airline at the local hub. I fly with them. It's easy. I have their rewards card. Using 3rd parties that obfuscate is a you problem.

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.

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Are you kidding me? Booking an airline ticket is one of the easier parts of navigating today's internet.

My tech illiterate parents ask me for help with all kinds of dumb things, but they fly at least four times a year and have never needed help booking an airline ticket.

You and me are using different Internets, then. Over in my reality, booking a flight is one of the more annoying experiences ever, due to amount of dark patterns, broken UX, and that's only when it's a direct flight near-term, where the choice boils down to "pay $$$ for minimally humane experience with Big Named Airline, or pay $ for cheap airline experience with the only one cheap airline that services this route".

Booking a hotel when traveling with spouse, or spouse and kids, and therefore having some level of expectations around quality, is a stressful lottery. Almost always some dimension (space, bed type/quality, noise, smell) had been misrepresented on the listing/photos to almost, but not quite, point of a bald-faced lie; without time spent on careful review of listings, all of them. When I travel solo, I don't care, so I don't mind.

Contrast that with shopping for any kind of item, even expensive - UX on some sites may be annoying, but at this point, as long as I confirm the site is legitimate and the listing shows the actual product I want to buy, I can safely drop $$$ and get what I want within advertised delivery time. No worries.

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.

It's truly weird that my 70yo mother can buy plane tickets or book a hotel without a hassle but someone claiming to be 10x programmer can't figure out how to use a website to do this and thinks that an agent is the best option. As you've noted, many airlines and hotels have made the process extremely streamlined (unless you're trying to get a "deal" in which case yeah, it's going to be more complicated).

Really, the problem is that a lot of people that are all-in on AIs aren't very good at a lot of life's little details so they think that AIs will solve everything and don't understand why nobody else agrees. If they got out and lived a little they would quickly realize that AIs are overkill or just the wrong tool for most things, but they have to actually experience life to learn that.

It is streamlined in a hostile way, obfuscating prices and hiding charges. AI agents are the perfect tool for wading through systems deliberately made to disorient and exhaust a reasonable shopper.

Weird broad ad hominem you've deployed to dismiss trying to find better prices

Except that none of those things are true because laws in multiple countries require clear statements of the ticket prices and fees.

If you actually believe that they are violating the law by obfuscating prices you should contact the DOJ or your states attorney general.

> It's truly weird that my 70yo mother can buy plane tickets or book a hotel without a hassle but someone claiming to be 10x programmer can't figure out how to use a website to do this and thinks that an agent is the best option.

They’re not saying they can’t do it. They’re explaining they don’t want to do it. I have a CS degree and I also hate booking flights. It’s a mess of dark patterns, up-sell, time limits, and details intended to trip up customers. For example, you might not realise there’s an unusually small carry-on limitation until you’re so far into the process that you think “fuck it I guess I’ll have to pay that extra charge.” God help you if you want to compare the exact arrangement between airlines because they do their best to differentiate the service so you can’t compare apples with apples. That’s an intentional product design choice.

I’ve no doubt your mother can book flights. I doubt she’s consistently booking the best value flights.

I can't fathom why anyone wouldn't have this done by an AI agent if the agent is reliable. Bookings and similar daily chores are exactly the kind of things nobody in their right mind would care about to do personally and where it's so great when you're rich enough to have a personal assistant that does all this for you. (The latter is a presumption, I'm not rich.)

We must be opposites, I despise booking flights and find the websites often fail on payments, are full of way too many steps, and require that you restart if you ever make a mistake.

i mean for most people, there's a real pain point. having to sit down and spend an hour or more booking flights, accoms, etc for a trip is a pain in the ass

Seriously!? First world problems. Oh no I have to pick a hotel and a ride on a jet powered craft to take me half way around the world... Smh

I enjoy doing it! I definitely want a say in where I'm staying and which flight I'm taking.

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Amen to this, but it‘s not odd. It‘s a sign of how detached Silicon Valley people and more broadly tech people are from the rest of the world’s population. This is what they think a common problem really is. There might be another reason, i.e. building visual cases for these examples for demos is easier and marketing thinks that leveraging leisure elective activities is a good way to associate the product with a positive experience and perception.

The mismatch here is that you don't have a personal assistant, but the executives in charge of developing these personal AI assistants do, so they expect everybody to want one if only the AI gets good enough at it and the price is right.

Having never had a PA myself, I have no strong prediction here either way, but I think this can explain for a lot of the confusion of "who'd want this"/"who would not want this".