I think the distinction is that it won’t just be typical customer service, where the customer speaks with a representative who can perform sophisticated actions

I think the distinction is that it won’t just be typical customer service, where the customer speaks with a representative who can perform sophisticated actions on a user’s account. It’ll be much more self-serve, so the set of actions a passenger can take is much larger and covers a larger set of circumstances. To me, that’s a pretty reasonable value proposition. Usually my flights are pretty low-hassle, but ~10% of the time there are problems/delays where I might want to make substantial changes, and ~1% of the time it’s an absolute nightmare that requires going through phone trees and talking with disinterested customer service reps at the airline counter. I wonder if those long-tail customer service interactions actually cost airlines a significant amount of money, I.e. paying people to be on-call and available all the time to deal with massively inconvenienced travelers.