United Airlines bans AI agents from booking flights on behalf of travelers

bigwheels

> "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies" What if the airlines instead focused on delivering great service at a competitive price? "Nah, let's escalate this arms race instead."

ChrisArchitect

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50456474

solyin

Their suit against Skiplagged should tell you everything you need to know about their attitude.

pavel_lishin

> "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies," he told CBS News. "Flight searches cost airlines money, and undoubtedly United wants to avoid the expense associated with the surge of AI bot flight searches." How much can it cost? And if it's so expensive, wouldn't intermediaries who cache results actually be cheaper?

paxy

Can't risk customers finding good deals

Esophagus4

But it’s ok when WE do it… 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.

ranger_danger

I'm surprised they haven't started restricting sales by third parties entirely yet (yes I know that's not related to AI agents). 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.

Throwaway123129

yet when they strand me 1000miles from my destination I cant get through to a human due to an LLM. Yeh no. fuck them. This airline is trash

rykam

I wonder what pushed them to do it? Did something serious go wrong with some cases of agents booking flights, or is it more motivated from a fear of Big Tech AI gaming the dynamic pricing system that they control and potentially making them lose profits because the Agents will get much more optimal/cheap flights than mere mortals?

satvikpendem

I mean, they can try. AI agents have computer use now so no website will actually be able to disambiguate between humans and AI anymore, so I can indeed tell my agent to book me a ticket.

ProblemExplorer

The airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone without giving specific people (atleast those who they don't deem "worthy") an edge. Here's a great, short comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50459444 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. Unlike gas and grocery they cannot compete on volume (even a 747 has a fixed capacity per leg). 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.

interestica

Only if they also ban them from chatting with me when there's a problem.

jms703

We should ban hacking while we're at it. /s

ClassAndBurn

What on earth are they going to demo at new model releases now.

siliconc0w

I already built my own AI agent browser use proxy service when Amazon was blocked. Seems like this will become a standard upgrade.

whalesalad

Meanwhile my ChatGPT dot is doing all kinds of crazy stuff with Delta on my behalf. Really convenient tbh. My chat bot talking to a Delta chat bot.

andix

Somebody once said, that airline booking pages itself are one of the most sophisticated CAPTCHAs. No idea if this is true, but they obviously don't want their customers to easily find the best deals. 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.

olouv

Not sure how they can detect an agent driving a regular browser, I have built Cupertino to more efficiently let Claude drive my mac ( https://cupertino.mgcrea.io ) and it can drive a regular Safari exactly like I would.

aucisson_masque

> The carrier also said that using an AI agent to, for example, check in for a flight could violate federal regulations, including rules requiring travelers to verify in person that their luggage does not contain banned substances. That’s ridiculous. They just want to keep their price list miserable to compare so they can overcharge people.

doctoboggan

How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent? 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.)