There's nothing streamlined about any of these.

Booking a flight is obfuscated and you'll have to comparison shop across multiple websites or even devices to get the better deals.

Same with hotels - they have tons of rate obfuscation and you have to cross shop their individual websites and the aggregators as well as third party discounts to figure out best deals.

Concerts are similar but different. Sometimes they should be selling tickets via lottery but make everyone fight over them. Other times there are presales. Other times you have to shop through scalpers. Arguably tickets are less painful than the other two, but they're still a manipulative mess where you waste a lot of time.

The mismatch here is that you don't have a personal assistant, but the executives in charge of developing these personal AI assistants do, so they expect everybody to want one if only the AI gets good enough at it and the price is right.

Having never had a PA myself, I have no strong prediction here either way, but I think this can explain for a lot of the confusion of "who'd want this"/"who would not want this".

> it was always odd to me that "booking a [flight|hotel|concert tickets]" is the canonical example

Yeah, the weird part is how the people promoting the idea seem to believe the average (?) consumer will tolerate a particular risk/reward profile: It implies over-spending or cancellation fees or return-restocking fees are beyond reasonable concern, trivial compared to the minutes it saves the user who never does any verification. ("It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?")

Hrm. Flight booking is ok, but the search optimisation problem is very tedious for anything more complex than a simple return between two fixed places on fixed dates.

Hotel bookings are mostly fine. Airbnb, bookings.com, fine.

But concerts? Concert booking is fucked. It's the main reason I don't go to concerts, I feel like I'm being absolutely screwed over by ticketing middlemen at every step of a horrible torturous process.

Isn't it obvious to try to replace human travel agent with an AI agent?

Came here to say the same thing. It's probably because it's hyped towards people that already don't make these decisions, they have people they outsource it to book flights, reserve table at restaurants etc.

But for most people, we don't do it frequently enough that it's actually a big problem to solve. And when we do, it's a significant enough investment that we want a say.

It honestly just goes to show what a stress inducing mess airline sites are. People are desperate to offload it and avoid it, even at the risk of trusting a robot with a credit card.

If this approach of using AI to get around intentionally hostile platforms continues, it would be better for everyone to just regulate. Especially the environment, which air travel is already extremely bad for.

In the last millennium I worked for a newspaper and what we were promising advertising clients is that if they paid us more, readers could buy advertised products off our web site.

The example the publisher demanded we launch with was the ability to buy a car. Nobody bought a car off our web site.

We must be opposites, I despise booking flights and find the websites often fail on payments, are full of way too many steps, and require that you restart if you ever make a mistake.

It's truly weird that my 70yo mother can buy plane tickets or book a hotel without a hassle but someone claiming to be 10x programmer can't figure out how to use a website to do this and thinks that an agent is the best option. As you've noted, many airlines and hotels have made the process extremely streamlined (unless you're trying to get a "deal" in which case yeah, it's going to be more complicated).

Really, the problem is that a lot of people that are all-in on AIs aren't very good at a lot of life's little details so they think that AIs will solve everything and don't understand why nobody else agrees. If they got out and lived a little they would quickly realize that AIs are overkill or just the wrong tool for most things, but they have to actually experience life to learn that.

Amen to this, but it‘s not odd. It‘s a sign of how detached Silicon Valley people and more broadly tech people are from the rest of the world’s population. This is what they think a common problem really is. There might be another reason, i.e. building visual cases for these examples for demos is easier and marketing thinks that leveraging leisure elective activities is a good way to associate the product with a positive experience and perception.

i mean for most people, there's a real pain point. having to sit down and spend an hour or more booking flights, accoms, etc for a trip is a pain in the ass

same with reservations, ride shares and hotels and anything else. the K shaped economy in action. Rich people want meta glasses so they don't need to interact with the poors, even their own servants. I book flights rarely enough its kind of fun.