You have to click through multiple upsell pages, including "scary" boxes like "No, don't protect my $XXXX.XX purchase". And then "pick a seat", but once you do, it turns out there's actually a charge for that, so you click the browser back button, which ends up resetting your session.

Hotel sites are dramatically worse IMO. Airlines have mostly made things mostly understandable.

Now, if you're buying from consolidators on their consistently-shady-looking sites, which will contact you later with your ticket if they got it at all: oh yeah those are sometimes total insanity.

probably this is different between different airlines and continents, and is definitely easier if you regularly fly with the same airline on the same route and know its flow, pricing and rules...

but generally in Europe many airlines will by default show you only the base fare price without carry-on bags, checked bags, seats, etc., and the surcharges aren't fixed (some flights may have cheaper bags, seats, than the others, on the same airline), and then there are multiple levels of "Economy" pricing with some of the options packaged into the price (e.g. Austrian has "Economy Basic", "Economy Light", "Economy Comfort", "Economy Flex"), but sometimes buying Economy Basic + baggage + seat may be cheaper than Economy Comfort.

Also the rules of what is included in which package differ from the route (longer routes have more included), and from the operating airline (e.g. Air France website also allows you to book lower cost Transavia flights, Austrian/Lufthansa websites also allow you to book lower cost Eurowings/Discover flights...)

And then there is the hell which is Ryanair, where you have to go through multiple pages of "no I don't want travel insurance", "no I don't want to rent a car", "no I don't want to buy fasttrack", "no I don't want to book a hotel with you", "no I don't want to buy a seat", "no I really don't want anything else"...

And all of these employ gray patterns like the "no I don't want it" button being less visible/prominent than the "I do want to pay more" button... (and this is not only true for Ryanair, but also for Austrian's "Upgrade to Economy Comfort" vs. "Continue with current fare", which conveniently shows before selecting if you want bags, seats, etc. where it actually could've been useful if it showed you that you can pay less)

Also most of the airline search sites don't allow you to filter non-stop flights, so if you're flexible on dates it will show you "cheaper flights" on other days, but instead of 2h flight from Vienna to Paris it's gonna be 5 hours because of a transfer in Amsterdam/Frankfurt...

What could be better would be "I want to select a seat at check-in, I want to fly with 1 checked bag and no carry-on bags, I don't want anything else, I want a non-stop flight, show me cheapest prices for this"...

If you've tried booking an award fare with United, the page with the flights + required miles takes many seconds to load. It's not a quick experience.

ITT: people who have never flown Frontier/Spirit/Ryanair

They try everything not to get scraped. But agentic browser automation defeats all those techniques. It has to be usable in a real browser obviously.

I have no idea what the oop meant either. Pretty sure you can book a flight in ~5 minutes or so?

For international flights, the prices on airlines' sites are almost always higher than what I was quoted in the search.

Running Firefox on Linux I often get stuck and need to switch to Chrome. Each time I hit Submit I get a dedicated page indicating it's loading the next one and there's always a noticeable probability I won't get to the next page.