When a company like Delta is on record using AI to set each individual shopper's price as high as possible [1], there's no longer any illusion about having a fair exchange of value, or an idea about who's behaving badly or not.

[1] https://mashable.com/article/airlines-set-prices-artificial-...

I think it's clear what they mean is that they want the airlines to sell their tickets without trying to modify our behavior. At least, that's what I got from their comment. Simply sell the tickets for what they are worth to the airline without offering deals to people based on their inferred profile.

In California, you have 24 hours to cancel any booking. The fact that United makes it hard to do so is a choice they’ve made.

They should meet the customer where they are instead of being antagonistic to their customer by default

This ignores all the ridiculous games these companies have played, abusing the asymmetries between them and consumers every which way to extract as much as possible. And now they have the temerity to try to control what tools we use on our end to interact with their sites.

I seriously doubt that this is driven by any actual abuse, it seems much more likely that they’re unhappy that it’s harder to rely on limited user patience/attention/etc to make more money.

Yeah, it's not that. They don't want to have users automatically shop for the cheapest flight using LLM

Yeah I think this is mostly CYA for the airline so they can point at some sort of artifact during a dispute and say "Look, you used an agent and violated ToS. No refund, end of discussion, close ticket."

Half right I think. It's the legit agents making efficient use of features which formerly were not costing the airline (on account of being used only rarely) and are now benefiting the travellers (because the agents know how to use them) that seem to be the cause here.

Then just make it super easy to do refunds, ideally so that an agent can do it!

Sure, it’s just like banning EA’s from booking flights on behalf of executives. Those certainly have more cancellations and customer service headaches than infrequent fliers.

What could possibly go wrong, rejecting bookings from people busy enough to want help woth mundane stuff like this?

I shed no tears. Slowly the balance is shifting back towards fair. Wanna make me sit through 5 minutes of navigating your bullshit AI IVR before I talk to your bullshit AI assistant before I talk to someone who can actually help? Great, I'll delegate that to my AI also.

Ownership class using AI to get wealthier = good, anyone else using it to try and get fucked a little bit less in this shitshow we call capitalism = bad.

If they can automate the denials we can automate the requests

Not only that, getting through support it’s nearby impossible for a regular human being, and it costs a lot of time.

I am at a point where whenever I have to deal with any online booking website, call it support or booking, I rather spin off an agent and spare me the pain.

The added satisfaction of fighting their claw with my claw adds some degree of satisfaction to it.

It’s not only about price, but also about my own mental sanity.

I'd trust ShitClaw to make less mistakes than me at this point, especially on something fucked up as booking flights.

Is it that, or is it that the agents don't sign up for all of the bullshit tricks they use, such as how it looks like you have to pay for an assigned seat when you can book a less desirable part of the plane for free? Agent won't fall for it, whereas some not inconsequential number of people do. Also, it'll destroy their AB test results.

United is not claiming that the reason for the ban is an increase in refund requests. Nor would they have to provide a full refund in any event, unless the ticket permitted, in which case they have little cause for complaint.