AI agents: Less capability, more reliability, please

Booking a flight is actually task I cannot outsource to a human assistant, let alone AI. Maybe it's a third-world problem or just me being cheap, but there are heuristics involved when booking flights for a family trip or even just for myself.

Check the official website, compare pricing with aggregator, check other dates, check people's availability on cheap dates. Sometimes I only do the first step if the official price is reasonable (I travel 1-2x a month, so I have expectation "how much it should cost").

Don't get me started if I also consider which credit card to use for the points rewards.

Completely agree! Especially considering that flights for most people are still a large expense, people, especially those in the credit card points game, like to go to great lengths to score the cheapest possible flights.

For example, this person[0] could have simply booked a United flight from the United site for 15k points. Instead the person batch emailed Turkish Airlines booking offices, found the Thai office that was willing to make that booking but required bank transfers in Thai baht to pay taxes, made two more phone calls to Turkish Airlines to pay taxes with a credit card, and in the end only spent 7.5k points for the same trip on United.

This may be an extreme example, but it shows the amount of familiarity with the points system, the customer service phone tree and the actual rules to get cheap flights.

If AI can do all of that, it'd be useful. Otherwise I'll stick to manual booking.

[0]: https://frequentmiler.com/yes-you-can-still-book-united-flig...

Now THAT's the workflow I'd like to see AI agent automate, streamline and democratize for everybody.

If it were available to everybody, it would disappear. This is a market inefficiency that a "trader" with deep knowledge of the structure of this market was able to exploit. But if everyone started doing this, United/Turkish Airlines would see they were losing money and eliminate it. Similar to how airlines have tried to stop people exploiting "hidden cities."