Thats a DoT requirement all flights to, from or within the US. (7 or more days before departure)
Cancelling a United flight is one of the easiest cancellations I've dealt with, their app is one of the best but its just as simple from the website
That might be more of a statement about what you've dealt with than about United. Their primary concern seems to be splitting you from your money, and only incidentally do they give a damn about the rest of your experience, whether it's about refunds or switching flights or another step. To give one example: I've seen them go out of their way to trick you into getting travel credit instead of a refund to the original form of payment for a fully refundable ticket. And correcting that is a hassle, especially if you were in a hurry trying to buy another ticket.
There are so many variables that go into the more complicated cases than assuming a "trick" is at play.
One of the biggest problems is people booking through 3rd party websites/cheap-online-travel websites and then trying to handle that purchase through the airline instead of the booking company they used. Even then -- before I starting flying frequently and learned paying ~$20 more directly from the airline solved a ton of headaches -- United would try to work with you to get the ticket released (not sure the terminology here) from the booking agent. But I have yet to experience a "trick" from United, or to a lesser extent of experience Southwest or Delta. Some lesser known and foreign budget airlines are another story.
I believe my experiences and if you say that was your experience then I believe yours too. I was commenting on similar stories to yours that I heard/read about that had provided more information -- not yours in particular. Some people have consistently bad experiences with a company that others dont.
Sure but United (or whoever) chooses to sell them tickets and create those experiences.
Delta has a product called Delta Vacations, run by Expedia. All of these things are businesses decisions they decide to embark on with 3rd parties. They promote the integrations. They don’t have to do these things. I don’t mind if they do, of course, but I have 0 sympathy for them if someone has a bad experience on a 3rd party site selling their product.
If I buy something from Amazon it’s no different.
Exactly, if you buy a pair of Nike's from Amazon you don't go to the Nike website to try and get a refund and then say Nike tricked you out of your refund. The problem is for a lot of people flying is so infrequent and usually a major source of stress that they overlook this fact and it's the airline -- not the cheap prices company they entered into business with -- gets the blame.
If Amazon started to ship Nikes with rips or something in them you’d think poorly of Nike first, because you’d assume they sent Amazon a faulty product.
No, I'd think the 3rd party I bought from through Amazon is shady. This literally just happened to my mother in law. We know the quality of the shoes and have seen them first hand. It never crossed either of our minds that the brand was shipping defective product through amazon.
However United can (and will) ban problematic customers. This policy just gives them something to point to as to why the customer was banned.
HN has a policy of not posting AI generated slop on here. Why aren’t you lamenting how they should just let you be “you”? Why can’t LinkedIn just let “me” send 10,000 messages per day using my trusty bot?
Yes? Fuck that guy for wanting a company to abide by public policy; really?
I mean, this isn't an either/or situation; companies should follow the law. If they don't, they should be brought into compliance by the masses and the government.
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As an aside, companies should want me to do business with them and they should make it as easy as fucking possible for me to spend my money. That includes potentially allowing me to use an agent to do so.
They do care if you “abuse” the return/support features.
Walmart accepts returns basically without question; if 89% of their orders were agents and eventually returned they’d change something.
Overall though I think the “abuse” is a good thing as it eliminates pricing arbitrage that the airline is doing and forces them to change their business model and compete somewhere else or in a different manner. We shouldn’t enshrine business models without an extremely good reason.
So what matters most of all is getting good laws in place and not relying on company policies aligning naturally with the people.
People using AI agents to book travel are just lazy as hell.
C’mon, there is a whole industry for finding optimal layovers, point transfers via partners, best times to book and so on. Simple case “I need a flight from XYZ to XXX on 12/32” (where you don’t really have options to choose from) is not the one people are using complex machinery for.
Saying this as someone who spent multiple weeks (pre-AI era) trying to arrange stays and flights in a most optimal manner. Now I don’t fly anywhere but I can see why someone would want to offload the whole dance to a smart machine.
If airlines don’t want that, they should end their loyalty programs shams, which are currently designed to be unusable without said optimizations/reward hacking hoops, as points devalue fast.
Instead we’ll end up with AI agents that don’t actually find the most optimal anything because any hotel or airline who blocks bots and/or doesn’t have an access agreements with AI providers for data access won’t be in the “database.”
The when something goes wrong we are all alone, we’re sending our bot to talk to another bot, rather than a travel agent (human) handling everything when travel issues arise.
Doorman fallacy strikes again.
The two niches of travel agents that have a future are full service event coordination (group bookings, charter, etc., combined with ground transportation), and complex RTW type bookings ("We're going to fly to Germany, stay two nights, take a train to X, stay a night, fly domestically across Italy, then hop on a river cruise, and fly home from Croatia").
For simpler things, there's just no need and many are their own worst enemy.
I took my family to Maui for 11 nights, spending most of that in a resort, then a night in Hana before heading back and home.
The two agents we spoke to that specialized in Maui vacations quoted us a price through them that was $4,000 more than the hotel wanted for the same room direct, and $7,000 more than through Priceline. Both presented itineraries that were in fairly direct contradiction with some requests we made ("we'd like to do x, y, and z, but each with at least a day between them" - one wanted to book them on three consecutive days "so then you could relax"), etc. And both got fairly pissy when we said didn't feel they were giving us something aligned with what we wanted, nor communicating any reason for doing so. "Good luck booking with Priceline, the hotel is going to give you the worst room they can". While I know that there's maybe some stigma with that, ended up being the opposite, "And you're staying with us for ... oh, eleven nights, lets make sure it's the best room we can give you".
I think that the AI travel industry will basically end up not giving you the best options compared to manual simply because steering you one direction or another is so valuable. I.e., AI will sell “sponsored listings” and your AI will book you at those places because you don’t care.
Or the travel providers who don’t want to pay AI firms money will not be booking options, like how Southwest Airlines wasn’t in Google for so long.
The nice part about travel agents is how they’re humans so they have brains and can work around any situation like that. That’s also why booking manually can beat AI.
If you’re traveling to have leisure or exploration, having a prediction engine choose the same probabilistic winner each time is going to end up being a negative aspect. You’ll say “I want a great trip to NYC” and you’ll end up going to Times Square like everyone else because the AI knows that most people go there.
And of course, yes, there are good travel agents and as I described circumstances where they are a useful resource.
But in a world of aggregators and other things, many travel agents are just middle men.
Blaming AI for “destroying another middle class profession” ignores years of decline bringing us here. Might it be the final nail in the coffin? Maybe. But AI can’t really wear the guilt on the demise.
In am not getting why this would be the name of such claim
maybe I am not elite and rich or infirm enough - but I do not get why I would pay extra for doorman or similar servants.
What a terrible take.
Just remember that LLMs as a technology are a prediction engine. If you don’t give it very specific inputs, it will just coalesce to a probabilistic outcome.
Soon your travel plans will be just another purple gradient website: https://prg.sh/ramblings/Why-Your-AI-Keeps-Building-the-Same...
AI is the technology that is going to fast forward our society into Wall-E.