Booking a flight is a typical task some big wig will ask their company or secretary. I think that's why all these demo focus on it.

Hmm I definitely think having an ai agent find me a flight is something useful because it’s very difficult to compare flights, there’s intentionally a lot of friction. The way I’d use it is search for a flight myself and have it search independently. If I find a cheaper flight that suits my exact needs then ask it to beat it. Whoever finds the best flight, that’s the one I book. I’ll repeat that, that’s the one I book.

Unless you have money to throw away I can’t imagine not checking the details and comparing prices. Hell, even if you do have money to throw away you still want to double check everything just before the last purchase decision. Is it going to the right city? Is it at a reasonable hour? Is baggage included or purchased? Etc

Good points.. I mostly use google flights to search, but often book on either the airline site or on expedia. I think I usually see the same published prices and book in the place that is easy to book.

The most useful feature for me is google's price/date grid. For personal travel, I'm flexible with dates, so I always use that to just find when flights are cheap. For work, I try to find the best price, but I'm not super picky since the company is paying for it.

I feel like the travel site UIs do a good job of summarizing all the info and putting it in front of you.

Do you want the agent to book it for you? Or just find it?

I would like to be able to have an AI agent book my flight. Airline websites are often horrible to use and it's annoying having to fill out all the details. On more than one occasion I've had to book through a third party or choose a different flight because the airline's website was broken and I couldn't complete the transaction.

Google flights is great and I use it every time I want to fly, but it's very rare that you can purchase the actual flight on google flights too.

I definitely do. Astrophotography is a hobby of mine and I've been working on a kind of personal app to find me locations in the US that will yield good shots. The variables are moon phase (close to new as possible), weather, cloud cover, humidity, and plane ticket/car rental prices. All things considered, if it's all the same in nevada, new mexico, and utah for a given week, I want to find the cheapest flight to any airport in that area. It's a huge pain in the ass to trawl through all the different flights/airports/dates to minimize my spend.

From someone who's worked in the business travel industry - more than you think. Business travelers are a disproportionate amount of airline revenue (possibly over 50%+ of revenue while being around 10-20% of passengers). Those who are doing the same trip over and over again probably don't care, but salespeople who are doing different trips every week get some value out of this kind of thing. There have been piles of startups trying to solve this (and failing).

There's not a ton of money in skimming commissions off of flights (probably < 1%), but there is if you can attach a hotel booking to it (upwards of 10%), so if you can become the preferred vendor for a business traveler, there's money to be made.

At this point so much hot tech stuff is incredibly weird niche things to solve the rare problems of overscheduled Silicon Valley tech VPs. They're not real problems that regular people have.