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Kiwi.com flight search MCP server
- judge123 1y agoMy last attempt at using an AI assistant ended with it trying to book me a hotel in Sydney, Australia instead of Sydney, Nova Scotia. I have trust issues now, lol.
- anthonypasq 1y agoThere is stuff in the MCP spec that will allow the MCP server to send a prompt back to the user if there is information or clarification needed. We will get there eventually.
- ebeavers 1y agoLooking forward to that day. None of the major MCP clients have implemented that part of the spec yet unfortunately. But as you say, we'll get there...
- Maxious 1y agoCursor https://cursor.com/changelog https://cursor.com/changelog and vscode https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/customization/mcp-servers#_use-mcp-elicitations https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/customization/mcp... support it
- maxwellg 1y agoIt cracks me up to no end how the dev tools are much better MCP clients than the web chatbots. Claude Code is so _so_ much better at MCP than Claude Web, which has issues with managing DCR client state, is comparatively terrible at surfacing debug information up, doesn't let regular users see under the hood at how tools are described or called, etc. Using Claude Code or your IDE of choice to book a hotel is a fun unintended side effect of this.
- weego 1y agoSearch and book flights directly from your favorite AI assistant! And book! That's a very exciting bit of tooling to add into an assistant, but there's lots of complexities... Each result includes a booking link directly to the flight chosen Oh well, we're not at the future we hoped for yet then, but it's progress.
- Eldodi 1y agoThe MCP clients are still missing some key features to get to a fully autonomous booking, but we are getting there: - With MCP Elicitations (https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/draft/client/elicitation https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/draft/client/e...) the server will be able to secure ask for complementary info like your name, passport and even your payments details. - With mcp-ui (https://github.com/idosal/mcp-ui https://github.com/idosal/mcp-ui), supporting MCP Clients could allow the server to re-create the same booking flow UI that you find today on an aggregator's website
- arbus5672 1y agoThe specification of Elicitations begins with > Servers MUST NOT use elicitation to request sensitive information For any LLM based flows to gain enough trust by the general public to handle flows that involve money, esp large sums of money, we need the equivalent of “pad lock on my browser means I’m secure” level of something easy to understand and teach everyone to see.
- frederic2507 1y agoNot sure I'd trust just yet an autonomous agent with my wallet to complete the booking part
- ciaranmca 1y agoWe need a benchmark to test this, give an agent access to a browser and card details and set it free.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
- lxe 1y agoThis reminds me of a time when 'API' has become a hot term. Every company would ship an API. I think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and I think even Google at some point had nice public APIs. This was the era of RSS and semantic web as well... until most realized there's no easy way to serve ads or control UX, making APIs great for customers but bad for business (unless the API is your product of course) Given this, I'm not sure what business purpose there is to ship an MCP API like this, aside from goodwill and exposure.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoDo you have experience with API? I have 10 years of professional experience with API.
- johnebgd 1y agoThis job requires candidates have a PhD and 75 years of API experience.
- frederic2507 1y agowaiting for somebody posting the first I have 10 years of experience with MCP...
- Eldodi 1y agoif you ask Claude Code nicely enough, you can certainly get it from him!
- nhod 1y agoYou are absolutely right!
- mgax 1y agoI have 10 years experience of MCP
- so_charlot 1y ago
- so_charlot 1y agoNice! I'll try to run it on a loop with an agent and see if I can get lower prices if I let it run for a while.
- 420official 1y agoWhat makes this a better option than just using an API with well formed output?
- so_charlot 1y agoIt's just easier to integrate and flight aggregator Apis are rarely public
- Nextgrid 1y agoHaving an API would mean people actually build useful things and potentially stop “engaging”. Having an MCP server allows them to jump on the AI bandwagon while being pretty useless and not a threat to any “engagement” some of their employees are measured on.
- bagels 1y ago"The Model Context Protocol is an open standard, open-source framework introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 to standardize the way artificial intelligence systems like large language models integrate and share data with external tools, systems, and data sources."
- SirMaster 1y agoWas REST and JSON not good enough? I thought LLMs were rather capable with JSON.
- yedpodtrzitko 1y agoIt is still JSON, it just defines how the JSON should be structured.
- wahnfrieden 1y agoBut to their point, yes MCPs are optional
- creatonez 1y agoYes, because that's what we need, for time-sensitive and highly nuanced information about flights to be filtered through a wildly hallucinating chatbot. Anyone who books their flights entirely through a chatbot deserves to have their plans screwed up, and whatever company sold the chatbot to them deserves to have these irate customers yelling at them.
- nisegami 1y agoWe already trust basically every adult with that information, which is a lot more dangerous than some LLMs.
- bonoboTP 1y agoPresumably it will give you the dates, price and airline first and you have to confirm before it pays.
- creatonez 1y agoAnd if the chatbot makes additional promises or stipulations that have nothing to do with the flight they are actually about to book? The user won't know what they are confirming.
- whalesalad 1y agoclose enough... welcome back XML-RPC!
- ascorbic 1y agoSnark aside, MCP uses JSON-RPC for messages
- 9cb14c1ec0 1y agoSo now I can use the MCP server as a defacto API in my non-AI related project. AI is finally good for something.
- encoderer 1y agoI cant trust a living, eating human to pick ripe produce on instacart. It will take an awful lot for me to trust an AI with an airline ticket.
- wahnfrieden 1y agoThis is for agentic search. You trust machines for search results on flights already even if you use a human concierge service
- jngiam1 1y agoThis server has two tools: feedback-to-devs and search-flight feedback-to-devs sends feedback to the Kiwi mcp server devs. That's an interesting way to collect feedback, but I also wonder if users of this will miss seeing that tool enabled and then inadvertently send other feedback or private data to the Kiwi devs too.
- Eldodi 1y agoGood point! We'll try to make the description of the tool and naming clearer to avoid unwanted tool invocation
- frederic2507 1y agoI thinks tools ids are prefixed with mcp server name when being injected in LLM context window to avoid cross-polination among tools from different scope (from different server) - should be fine here
- joshwarwick15 1y agoDeployed this to WhatsApp so you can book flights straight from your phone: https://wa.me/447403936097 https://wa.me/447403936097
- frederic2507 1y agoAwesome! Thanks for getting this out
- pierre-louis 1y agoPretty cool !
- nomilk 1y agoA Kiwi MCP server only needs one response "Don't book with Kiwi, go direct with the airline in case you need to modify/cancel your booking." The intersection of "informed enough to use an MCP server" and "unwise enough to purchase from Kiwi" is small.
- Spivak 1y agoYou're not wrong but I've had good luck booking with 3rd party travel sites in exchange for discounts. I'm going on the flight, won't need to change or cancel it. I always click no on the "would you like to spend $x to 'protect' your tickets" and have never regretted it. This feels morally the same. If one day I lose out and have to eat the cost of a flight I'm still way ahead.
- slederer 1y agoGreat example, MCP servers like that will be needed for every B2B as well as B2C service to give structured access to LLMs and agents. It’s what API’s have been for the past 20 years, but for AI users of those services
- bonoboTP 1y agoStrong stone soup vibes from this. AI's ability to process unstructured data may kickstart a new but different Semantic Web process, where businesses provide machine-compatible access to their services. A bit like how robust self driving cars that can drive anywhere are going to kickstart more investment into smart infrastructure, road monitoring, and real-time distributed traffic control and signaling, which will deemphasize the need for super-robust driving ability under messy unstructured conditions.
- anthonypasq 1y agovery interesting analogy.
- theptip 1y agoI feel there are a lot of workflows that are actually quite suited to Claude Code - for example here, running the MCP tool to iterate on a flight plan, and updating a .md file (bonus points - auto sync’s to your iCloud Drive and thence into Obsidian), this gives you a nice durable artifact that you can then share. It’s equivalent to the in-browser Artifact workflow but that’s kinda annoying to work with, I usually want to export those outside of the chat client at some point.
- mips_avatar 1y agoThis would be 100x more compelling if they exposed something closer to Google Flights Explore through MCP. The real value to agents isn’t “user already knows the exact date and route, now just book it.” It’s “user is loosely considering Tokyo, doesn’t know when, so let me scan the next 3 months and surface the cheapest windows.” Agents should excel at processing more data than the user can hold in their head and then framing the best options. Releasing an MCP server is cool, but this still feels like a limited slice of what agents could actually do.
- delfinom 1y agoThe problem I've been finding lately is airlines, even via searches like Google Flights will fluctuate prices hourly to daily. And I mean price changes that are nearly double sometimes for economy flights at random times (looks at Lufthansa) I can spend my time checking over a few days to see what the game is. The LLM Agent is gonna need a cron job system.... Otoh, LLMs booking flights? Airlines are going to exploit the ever loving shit out of that to jack rates for people not paying attention by detecting LLM queries which is completely legal.
- mips_avatar 1y agoI don't think the airlines win in a battle against agents. Look at what happened when Air Canada tried to keep seats.aero from scraping award prices to find saver fares, they lost technologically and legally. seats.aero is run by a solo developer and won. I think if more airlines try and do AI dynamic pricing like Delta did this year they're going to find AI agents are extremely good at adversarial booking. I think a really innovative airline booking provider would capitalize on this new dynamic by facilitating this lubrication of supply and demand. AI agents understand that a given consumer is just as interested in hiking the Dolomites as Patagonia. So they should be willing to surface something like what their best price is for Venice and Buenos Aires to fill the seats.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoMy issue with google flights is heavy cache on smaller routes. My country needs 2 layovers to get to NZ which massively increases search space. Pretty much every result is “oops we can’t find this price anymore, it’s now 10x”. It’s still ok for finding some routes or ideas, but far from best for cheapest (ie it cant find cheapest country to book from like skyscanner). And don’t even get me started on business flight search - that’s basically conspiracy from airlines for you never to find deals.
- chintan 1y agoKinda funny - agentic flight booking was the poster use case for Semantic Web Services [1] 2001-2005. The whole thing collapsed because no one could agree on inputs/outputs (RDF/XML, ontologies). Now LLMs just wing it from plain text. 1. http://ksl.stanford.edu/people/sam/ieee01.pdf http://ksl.stanford.edu/people/sam/ieee01.pdf
- grues-dinner 1y agoAnd just like the semantic web, they'll wall it up when they realise it's bad for business when they can't control it. Except walling off even the plain text is going to make the web really a hassle for everyone.
- xnx 1y agoNot sure if it's been covered on HN already, but Google Flights added an AI-powered deals tool: https://blog.google/products/search/google-flights-ai-flight-deals/ https://blog.google/products/search/google-flights-ai-flight...
- pierre-louis 1y agoI don't feel this new product add much value. They should probably play a bit more with MCP - Their AI can't figure out your departing city from the prompt, you have to enter it manually. - Shows you only ONE deal and no other options. - Dumps you into a pre-filtered Google Flights link that adds literally no value beyond normal search.
- ascorbic 1y agoI like that the server includes a feedback_to_devs tool. I tried the flights tool with Claude and it was pretty buggy and limited in what it could do. I asked Claude to give feedback to the devs and it gave a decent bug report and feedback on the API (seriously, why doesn't it include the airlines??)
- Eldodi 1y agoFeedback well received, we will work on it!
- Cef111 1y agoIt's interesting to think about what the post-MCP monetization era might evolve into. How would the MCP client or LLM handle sponsored results? How do companies get into the "good graces" of LLMs so that they are referenced by them? Is this process be more or less gameable than SEO?