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Are you kidding me? Booking an airline ticket is one of the easier parts of navigating today's internet.

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.

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You and me are using different Internets, then. Over in my reality, booking a flight is one of the more annoying experiences ever, due to amount of dark patterns, broken UX, and that's only when it's a direct flight near-term, where the choice boils down to "pay $$$ for minimally humane experience with Big Named Airline, or pay $ for cheap airline experience with the only one cheap airline that services this route".

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.

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Booking mid-market hotels is easy, just go to booking.com, filter to 8+ score, four stars, go to the map and pick the location, done.

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.

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I really find flight booking is fine, for the amount of money at stake.

By contrast I find ordering food to a table with a QR code enormously complicated and tedious for something that should be simple.

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