Booking a flight is obfuscated and you'll have to comparison shop across multiple websites or even devices to get the better deals.
Same with hotels - they have tons of rate obfuscation and you have to cross shop their individual websites and the aggregators as well as third party discounts to figure out best deals.
Concerts are similar but different. Sometimes they should be selling tickets via lottery but make everyone fight over them. Other times there are presales. Other times you have to shop through scalpers. Arguably tickets are less painful than the other two, but they're still a manipulative mess where you waste a lot of time.
What percentage of the total value is typically saved by those who check different devices, browsers, etc?
Personally I mostly use Google Flights for flight search (or seats.aero for award travel search) and booking.com for hotel search, and then book directly. I've booked probably 100+ hotels through booking.com and then quit entirely after hitting that long tail bad experience.
[1]: I'm a few years out of date on this and don't know the current legalities, but major OTAs (Booking.com and Expedia, who control probably 80-90% of third party hotel bookings) used to have a "most favored nation" clause that prevented hotels from advertising lower prices through other channels without a previous commercial relationship. Signing up for a loyalty program qualifies, so being logged in for direct hotel bookings can sometimes get you cheaper room rates. (In the US, things like AARP and AAA memberships also work.) I know the EU was pushing back on these clauses but I'm not clear on what the current state of things is.
OTAs can play "member" pricing games too I think so there's even better deals to be had.
So you definitely need to comparison shop, I make my agent take the pricing from all the OTAs and calculate a post-rebate price, then pick the lowest one.
You are still overpaying when using Amex/Chase/Cap1 portals.
$105-110 book on Amex/chase/cap1 portal
$101-102 after 5-8% travel portal cash back
versus
$100 book direct Hilton/marriott/IHG rate
$96-97 after 3-4% cash back everything card.
Don’t even get me started on “premium programs” like Amex FHR, Chase Edit, etc. Probably overpaying by $100+/night. Much cheaper to just pay for 4 pm checkout. And early check-in is dead anyway.
This hasn't been my experience. I usually search through Booking.com and when I contacted the hotel directly, found that the direct rate is higher than the booking.com rate.
Just a thought but I guess if the airline web services were overwhelmed with noise, they wouldn't be able to do such price adjustments reliably. The only risk is that this might bump the prices for everyone and it will turn out that consumers are not price sensitive enough to force airlines to not do this.
I remember examples of round-trip ticket A-B-A costing $x in A, $x/2 in B (plus another fare for country C) for some city pairs, but I don't think this has really been a thing in a decade at least.
Bonus points I'm not booking through shady websites like Expedia.
Wrong. Searching for which flight is the best to book is obfuscated and needs comparison. Which is not what they are banning.
The actual booking, the purchase of the ticket, is as streamlined as you can get these days.
Pass!
Having never had a PA myself, I have no strong prediction here either way, but I think this can explain for a lot of the confusion of "who'd want this"/"who would not want this".
Also one time it turned out a meeting I didn't even need to be at cost the taxpayer $900 in flights, which I would never have agreed to if I had seen the price before it was booked.
Yeah, the weird part is how the people promoting the idea seem to believe the average (?) consumer will tolerate a particular risk/reward profile: It implies over-spending or cancellation fees or return-restocking fees are beyond reasonable concern, trivial compared to the minutes it saves the user who never does any verification. ("It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?")
Hotel bookings are mostly fine. Airbnb, bookings.com, fine.
But concerts? Concert booking is fucked. It's the main reason I don't go to concerts, I feel like I'm being absolutely screwed over by ticketing middlemen at every step of a horrible torturous process.
But for most people, we don't do it frequently enough that it's actually a big problem to solve. And when we do, it's a significant enough investment that we want a say.
If this approach of using AI to get around intentionally hostile platforms continues, it would be better for everyone to just regulate. Especially the environment, which air travel is already extremely bad for.
My tech illiterate parents ask me for help with all kinds of dumb things, but they fly at least four times a year and have never needed help booking an airline ticket.
Booking a hotel when traveling with spouse, or spouse and kids, and therefore having some level of expectations around quality, is a stressful lottery. Almost always some dimension (space, bed type/quality, noise, smell) had been misrepresented on the listing/photos to almost, but not quite, point of a bald-faced lie; without time spent on careful review of listings, all of them. When I travel solo, I don't care, so I don't mind.
Contrast that with shopping for any kind of item, even expensive - UX on some sites may be annoying, but at this point, as long as I confirm the site is legitimate and the listing shows the actual product I want to buy, I can safely drop $$$ and get what I want within advertised delivery time. No worries.
Finding good-but-cheap hotels is harder, because it's zero sum. You are looking for hotels that are mispriced usually due to a lack of information. AI doesn't solve this problem, it actually makes it worse by fixing inefficiencies in the market.
By contrast I find ordering food to a table with a QR code enormously complicated and tedious for something that should be simple.
“Are you sure? Really? Don't click here to not add this to your cart. Check this box to not receive promotional emails unless you’ve touched any other radio button the past 3 days.”
Airlines can a) improve their UX, or b) ban agents from booking flights. No brainer, I’d think.
The example the publisher demanded we launch with was the ability to buy a car. Nobody bought a car off our web site.
Really, the problem is that a lot of people that are all-in on AIs aren't very good at a lot of life's little details so they think that AIs will solve everything and don't understand why nobody else agrees. If they got out and lived a little they would quickly realize that AIs are overkill or just the wrong tool for most things, but they have to actually experience life to learn that.
They’re not saying they can’t do it. They’re explaining they don’t want to do it. I have a CS degree and I also hate booking flights. It’s a mess of dark patterns, up-sell, time limits, and details intended to trip up customers. For example, you might not realise there’s an unusually small carry-on limitation until you’re so far into the process that you think “fuck it I guess I’ll have to pay that extra charge.” God help you if you want to compare the exact arrangement between airlines because they do their best to differentiate the service so you can’t compare apples with apples. That’s an intentional product design choice.
I’ve no doubt your mother can book flights. I doubt she’s consistently booking the best value flights.
Weird broad ad hominem you've deployed to dismiss trying to find better prices
If you actually believe that they are violating the law by obfuscating prices you should contact the DOJ or your states attorney general.
If I had an AI doing it, I'd probably spend an hour typing out all of my requirements and thought processes, in the hope that it would make sensible choices. Then sit anxiously whilst it goes off and does its thing.