United Airlines bans AI agents from booking flights on behalf of travelers
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
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.)
:^)
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.
Sure, the airline may not notice when it happens but it can cut those processes short when they have a full ban.
They should meet the customer where they are instead of being antagonistic to their customer by default
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.
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.
I guess the best option is, to use a good reseller/travel agency that provides an API/MCP for booking and managing flights.
For finding the cheapest deals agents can still be used. Just the booking itself is probably better done manually. It also eliminates the risk that the agent does something stupid.
edit: they might try to block agents, but this won't be possible with browser use. they can always throttle users by IP or fingerprint. Letting an agent book a flight might be risky, because they might cancel a booking or impose a fee if they somehow detect it.
But do these actually exist?
The usual issue of flight booking APIs is, that those flights are expensive. It's what travel agencies or travel departments in companies use.
I think this is only true now that the AI's can interpret the pages correctly. Failing to decern the correct information is, I believe, the more human response.
It seems like the upside down turtle again.
It's mostly a commodity, specially for economy class where price matters. After gas and grocery, its the most vicious, cut throat business where a customer will switch from United to Delta over $5.
It sounds counterproductive but personal AI agents cause a local optima while overall increasing cost for rest of the travelers.
For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate and not just by a few cents because the nominal cost of an economy seat is likely $250, not $50.
Now United isn't against offering a $50 flight to customers who they deem "worth it" - they just don't want it to be anyone who can run an MCP connector. They are just betting that the "worth it" will "make it up" in the long run vs. a customer who's just there for the $50 seat.
What happens if you say "screw it, I'll code my own custom MCP connector to United.com!"
Well, eventually they will try and block you and then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website.
if you're paying for flights you don't want to take, then I'm sure they're happy for the extra spending money of course. Why would you want to do that?
Contractual discounts--which corporations do have--are usually balanced by a guaranteed spend figure. For small and midsized companies, the spend is often paid in advance, to the benefit of the airline, which can carry the float and lock up a portion of market certainty.
My two cents: I have a deep amount of respect for United's tech stack. It is the best amongst US airlines and among the best in the world. However, this is the wrong move for them, and unless other airlines follow (doubtful, since United taking the lead here gives others competitive advantage,) United will have to backtrack in a year or two.
And? They offered a $50 ticket. Did they expect people not to buy it?
If I search manually and find the $50 flight I planned spending $200 on, I’m not going to decide it’s too cheap. MCP acts the same. For at least a decade there have been services that will alert you when a specific flight drops in price, letting a human basically do what the agents are doing.
If United doesn’t want to sell a ticket for $50, then they should, y’know, not sell tickets for $50.
If airlines didn’t want to play pricing games, they could stop playing pricing games. List a standard fare for a route if you want to sell fares at a standard rate. If you want to try and squeeze me for an extra $20 because I’m buying during work hours, or $100 because I visited your site 5 days ago and now you think I’m desperate then you don’t get to complain when I use underhanded tactics to get the best deal. They make the rules, they shouldn’t be surprised when their convoluted system gets exploited by people that know the rules.
They make the rules, and so they'll try to do that again.
Nicely put.
Just to be clear, your argument is that it's "counterproductive" and a "local optima" for people to have complete and accurate price information available for purchasing their tickets? And that making this information harder for them to find is better for them? Can you point to any real-world examples of an asymmetry in pricing information ending up saving the side with less information money rather than the side with more information to use that in a way that disadvantages the other side?
Accepting this is currently true, should we prefer this equilibrium?
Agentic access would give Alice the chance to cross-shop and buy the cheaper flight as well. But now, to net the same amount, the airline has to charge $75 per seat, excluding Bob from participating in this market.
Dynamic pricing is mostly a seasonal and timing game. And the actual money is made in higher classes of service.
This idea that Bob and Alice are shown drastically different pricing for the same seat because of insights into their specific purchasing behavior is just ludicrous.
Most people buy tickets from aggregators who have been already gutted the ability to do this anyway.
And you vastly overestimate the price discrimination that airlines have today for comparable classes of service.
They don't make their money on economy seats.
Why did airlines fly a 737 with full staff on board for just 3 economy grade passengers on a leg (like during times of COVID) ?
If I need to fill a seat last minute at a ridiculous low price, I'm glad an MCP client will fill it for me.
If the concern is that everyone will wait until last minute, that sounds like a problem that solves itself, last minute tickets will increase in price until the minimum price for air time is achieved.
Economics and all that...
This has nothing to do with AI. Any sale pricing cause the average non-sale price to go up! This is why many companies outright refuse to participate in sales outside of damaged / opened goods.
> Now United isn't against offering a $50 flight to customers who they deem "worth it" - they just don't want it to be anyone who can run an MCP connector.
I don't understand the premise you're painting here.
Airlines lower the price because they have unfilled seats that are not selling at the current price. The price is lowered as an intentional choice to reduce margins on that seat because making any margin over the fuel cost of that passenger's additional weight is worth more than getting nothing at all.
They aren't thinking about the customer and how lil' Timmy wants to visit his dad in Idaho, they're maximizing profit by rapidly adjusting their service to the supply-demand curve.
Do “many”? The companies I’m familiar with who used to do this have largely abandoned the practice due to consumer expectations of sales.
This is rarely the case for popular routes. Airlines lower the price for popular routes to increase margin per utilization which is why skiplagging is not encouraged because it decreases the margin per utilization.
> they're maximizing profit by rapidly adjusting their service to the supply-demand curve
if they were doing that, they would be booting off customers who paid less than those on the wait list.
If AI agents were more effectively managing flight paths, determining pricing, managing communication channels on the supply side, it would technically decrease cost per flight, but on the demand side, if AI agents just find the cheapest flight and book it, all it does is beat someone else who likely would have gotten to that flight a bit later.
I do think eventually it's going to be supply agents communicating with demand agents that lead to a coordination equilibrium. But until then it's just a race to who has the faster, more integrated models, and now, who has models which can bypass the restrictions providers place on their use.
It doesn’t take much compute or anything really above the cheapest claude subscription to do this.
Similar to how internet evened out access to many things that were in the past blocked by access to knowledge.
Imagine two competing political candidates, one has funding from an AI lab and produces thousands of short-form AI videos per day and spends millions of analysis of the full spectrum of feedback and performance of the ads, simulates public sentiment, pruning every aspect of their persona, response strategy, channels to focus on, etc. Or a company accused of misconduct creating an AI psychological profile of the judge and every jury member via their social media history and demographic information and curating the best permutation of arguments from millions of options that maximize every predicable sentimental vector.
I don’t know anyone that’s seen a cheap flight for sale and decided to wait for the price to go up.
There are less price sensitive customers, but even the most price sensitive people don’t ask United if they could please charge them a bit more than the listed price.
Later on, assuming all of the carriers are affected by this, flights will get more expensive and maybe we will invest in other modes of transport that is cheaper
If this is indeed the case -- good riddance to that practice! Why should I be sorry that it goes?
Your premise is false, as it rests on the logic that there is a zero sum game between passengers. Airlines offer tickets at the level and price they feel like they can sell them in the marketplace. There's not some invisible total allocated to passengers on each flight, where if one person "gets a deal" others pay for it.
- already streamlined (spend 2min on Google flights, seatgeek, etc...); we aren't stuck with early web UX and latency - I want to have 100% control of the outcome or would have to write a long list of preferences and rules (middle seats, layovers, etc...) to feel good about trusting automation - require making a large payment. the agent is not getting free reign to use my cc - give me some personal satisfaction and enjoyment - its delightful to look foward to a trip, concert, etc... and planning is part of the fun and anticipation imo
It made me think, an agent would be nice. Too bad.
How much can it cost? And if it's so expensive, wouldn't intermediaries who cache results actually be cheaper?
I was pretty frustrated recently when I got a flight for 20% less by clicking through from a Google Flights link than I did from searching directly on aircanada.com while logged in with my Aeroplan account. I know exactly why it's the way it is, but it's pretty discouraging to feel that loyal-customer behaviour like going directly to the airline instead of an aggregator is punished with a higher price.
Almost always, if you walk up to the front desk and ask for a room, the price is 15-20% more than what you see online at that very moment.
This is baffling, and has to be coming from some convoluted agreement.
The hotel makes a lower amount if I book through priceline or expedia or whatever.
The hotels hate expedia but they can't opt out of it so they just degrade the product that is offered at expedia's discount rate -- and they degrade it in a way that expedia can't force them to stop (room assignment is always done at checkin).
I'd argue that's the root of the problem here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
ITA, in particular, is memorable as a HN favorite because their software was pretty much 100% lisp, at least before the google acquisition.
But at the same time they should’ve just made it more accessible and just raised the prices anyway.
Probably many other things too. But it's an arms race.
It arguably makes it fairer. An option to trade effort => value.
If they would give the best price to everyone right away,the lowest price would be higher.
I'd rather have uniform pricing than have to hunt to not get fucked
Usually they are for selling more tickets
So the question is : what are they not telling us ??
That’s ridiculous.
They just want to keep their price list miserable to compare so they can overcharge people.
What if the airlines instead focused on delivering great service at a competitive price?
"Nah, let's escalate this arms race instead."
Unless there is some Claude AI safety concern of booking tickets.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/economy/delta-united-jetblue...
It’s an industry AI vs consumer AI arms race, and industry sure doesn’t want the consumer to win.
Some of the points they raise, I do think are cause for concern as it relates to potential legal liabilities... but I don't see how they could possibly restrict AI usage meaningfully, besides just getting the big popular groups to assist in limiting their own services somehow, which doesn't solve the issue entirely of course, especially with local LLM usage on the rise.