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A comment on United Airlines bans AI agents from booking flights on behalf of travelers. Parent comment

Re:United Airlines bans AI agents from booking flights on be... by EGreg on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @05:39PM (#50459831)
Suppose you want to get people to a party, and offer $50 early bird tickets, and want eg a gender balance. But they just get scalped and resold for $300. Why should you care, you authoritarians? Scalpers have just as much right as anyone to purchase tickets…

Actually if I ran an airline I’d try to prevent everyone from being able to snipe the best seats with their agents as soon as they came out. Using lotteries, special manual two factor authentication etc.

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Re:United Airlines bans AI agents from booking flights on be... by dataflow on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @05:47PM (#50459939)
[delayed]
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Re:United Airlines bans AI agents from booking flights on be... by brewdad on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @06:13PM (#50460312)
Maybe a balance of loyal customers (to keep them loyal) and first time customers (to hopefully fill the pipeline of future loyalties).
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Re:United Airlines bans AI agents from booking flights on be... by dataflow on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @06:44PM (#50460667)
[delayed]
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Re:United Airlines bans AI agents from booking flights on be... by mitchdoogle on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @06:57PM (#50460826)
People already were going to great lengths to find airline ticket deals. If there was ever an edge in buying tickets as soon as they were available, that would already be heavily exploited by now. By the way, I'm fairly certain it's the opposite. Airline tickets are not typically a good deal when they are first made available.
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