4 ms·

Booking a flight is the kind of thing I want to dedicate my full attention to. It's expensive, and the timing and details matter a lot. I'm happy for the voice

• etiam 7mo ago
  Booking a flight is the kind of thing I'd really want to avoid doing myself nowadays if possible though. Surveying the offers is usually such a snake pit of deceptive marketing and incomplete service conditions that I feel somewhat nauseous just at the prospect of having to look at it. I wouldn't remotely trust a software assistant to deal with all that misdirection autonomously, but I guess I'd be prepared to give it a chance collating options with tolerable time and cost, attempting to make the price include the stuff that has to be added to preserve health, sanity and a modicum of human dignity.
  • davidw 7mo ago
    Asking it to find the best deal? Sure, I could totally see that. But I want to double check that myself and actually buy it in order to make sure my flight to Denver from Portland doesn't have a layover in Anchorage or something.
  • joquarky 7mo ago
    Nearly everything targeting consumers is a snake pit now. Everything has one or more upsells. Dark patterns are now nominal practice. Quality has gone to shit.
• Ferret7446 7mo ago
  We will get to the point where you'll trust it to catch those issues. The latest models can already do it sometimes for code, like explain that it considered various options and the tradeoffs between them.
• ericd 7mo ago
  Apparently I'm the only one here who finds it to be one of the worst things I ever have to do, I hate managing the combinatorial tab explosion by hand. Compounded by the adversarial nature of the price-setting algorithms that jack up the price on you if you show too much interest by researching too intensively. Just booked a flight for our family in two parts, and booking for one set of us made the price for the second set of us with a slightly different itinerary massively more expensive, because it was "in demand". Can't wait for agents to handle all of it.
  • danpalmer 7mo ago
    Do you think an agent is going to do all of that and get you the best price/time/comfort combination for your exact preferences. Or do you think it's going to pick the first that looks reasonable? Or do you think it's going to sacrifice one dimension too much? We already have agents for this if you really want to avoid it, they're called travel agents. They're pretty good at complex travel booking and not very expensive.
    • ericd 7mo ago
      Maybe, I've never used a human travel agent. Based on my experiences with human agents in other industries (especially real estate), I think the LLM version will probably already know my preferences a good bit better than most human travel agents would bother to learn - they're infinitely patient, and not trying to maximize earnings by minimizing time spent per booking.
    • yencabulator 7mo ago
      Also, which one is easier to adversarially fool into bad decisions, an LLM or you?
  • jungturk 7mo ago
    I think we literally have those agents today, albeit implemented in meat rather than silicon. Any particular reason you elect not to use the free-to-you travel agent? Generally they are the same or less expensive and able to work in your best interests.
• viccis 7mo ago
  Exactly. When you're spending money, you want to be in the loop. It's why the Alexa Echo devices as media for Amazon purchases never really worked out. Amazon had two conflicting aims. They wanted to race to the bottom with their increasingly shady vendors which eroded trust, while also positioning themselves and their devices to be trusted agents of purchases. Of course no one wants to buy anything sight unseen through them.
• kelnos 7mo ago
  To be fair, you can cancel flight reservations for a full refund within 24 hours, so if the LLM gets it wrong, you're not on the hook for anything. But in general I do agree: flight bookings are something I want to do myself, because even I don't fully know my preferences when it comes to timing and price until I see what's available. And in general I don't find it all that difficult to do. A couple days ago I booked a multi-city travel itinerary with four different destinations, and it took me about a half hour? Sure, if an LLM can do that in under a minute, that would be cool, but in absolutely zero situations would I not need to check its work, and if it did get it wrong, I'd have to do it all myself anyway.
  • yencabulator 7mo ago
    Even worse, I will only know if the booking is "right" or "wrong" if I look at the alternatives, to see that it really is the best flight. The best value of "AI" there is making a shortlist of best alternatives, which is just a Google Flights UX improvement. It's not like your own little agent would have good enough access to the underlying data, gatekeeping that is worth money.
• takinola 7mo ago
  Booking a flight is the type of thing you think you want to dedicate your full attention to. Largely, the issue is one of trust that whatever is making the bookings will take into account the nuances of your schedule and preferences. Here's the typical flow for how my (human) assistant books my flights. I tell them I want to go to $LOCATION from $START to $END. They have my calendar, my travel preferences (airlines, hotels, etc) and the company travel policy. A couple hours later, they slack me a couple of options. If there is one I like, I tell them to book it. If not, I tell them why none of the options work. The process repeats until I see something I like or we run out of options and I have to choose the least bad option. There is nothing about this process that needs a human. It's all done on Slack and for all I know the person at the other end is actually an AI (they're not, but for arguments sake, they could be).