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 assistant to add stuff to my grocery list, though. The consequences are not serious if it screws up a letter or something.

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kelnos 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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ericd 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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danpalmer 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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kelnos 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it depends on your priorities and needs.

I just booked a round trip for myself, plus two more flights for quicker hops while I'm away, and I didn't spend much time on it at all. I just looked at Google flights, picked the flights I wanted, and then ended up buying them through Chase with points. Chase's travel website is among the worst I've ever used, but it wasn't hard. Then I went to the airline's website and changed my seats (Chase doesn't know I have status and couldn't directly book the seats I wanted) and did an upgrade for one of the legs using miles I had at the airline. Half hour of work, maybe?

The price-setting algorithms are garbage, but an LLM isn't going to fix that.

Agree with the other sibling posters that if this annoys you so much, you should just call up a human travel agent. I haven't used one in many years, but when I did (mostly for business travel), it was always pleasant, and the agent knew my preferences and took care of things if there were any snags or changes needed. At the time, they usually got me flights cheaper than if I were to book them myself, even with their fee on top.

But I do wonder what the profession is like now. I can imagine some sort of website where you often don't even deal with the same person, who won't get to know your preferences and will be sort of like a customer service agent, just trying to close as many cases as fast as they can. But hopefully there are still smaller shops around, where you can talk to the same person (either phone or email) every time. Dunno.

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thenthenthen 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Booking flights/tickets is terrible. And then the dark patterns… wonder if OpenClaw can navigate these? Anyway, it is nothing compared to sourcing electronic components, there are literally thousands and thousands of different manufacturers, lead times, moq’s … for the same component, leading to super hard to search and filter database/websites that are slow as molasses.

	▲	ericd 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Seriously. Have you tried Octopart? One of the very early YC companies, dedicated to electronics part search (I haven't used them recently, so no idea if they're good these days, just remember them from like a decade and a half ago).

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jungturk 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	ericd 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Are their incentives totally aligned? I'd assume they'd want to get through bookings as quickly as possible to maximize earnings?
	▲	thenthenthen 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Travel agents duh. Reminds me of the classic silicon valley startup trope that most tech bro’s are basically trying to pitch a product that replaces their mother.

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etiam 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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Ferret7446 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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viccis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.