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by sithadmin 599 days ago
The airline booking + awards redemption use case is a mostly solved problem. Harcore milage redemption enthusiasts use paid tools like ExpertFlyer that present a UI and API for peeking into airline reservation backends. It has a steep learning curve, for sure.

ThePointsGuy blog tried to implement something that directly tied into airline accounts to track milage/points and redemption options, but I believe they got slapped down by several airlines for unauthorized scraping. Airlines do NOT like third parties having access to frequent flier accounts.
2 comments
acrooks 599 days ago
While the strategy to find good deals / award space is a solved problem, the search tools to do so aren't. Tools like ExpertFlyer are super inefficient: it permits you to search for maximum one origin + one destination + one airline per search. What if you're happy to go to anywhere in Western Europe? Or if you want to check several different airlines? Then all of a sudden your one EF search might turn into dozens. And as you say, pretty much all of the aggregator tools are getting slapped down by airlines so they increasingly have more limited availability and some are shutting down completely.

And then add the complexity that you might be willing to pay cash if the price is right ... so then you add dozens more searches to that on potentially many websites.

All of this is "easy" and a solved problem but it's incredibly monotonous. And almost none of these services offer an API, so it's difficult to automate without a browser-based approach. And a travel agent won't work this hard for you. So how amazing would it be instead to tell an AI agent what you want, have it pretend to be you for a few minutes, and get a CSV file in your inbox at the end.

Whether this could be commercialised is a different question but I'm certainly going to continue building out my prototype to save myself some time (I mean, to be fair, it will probably take more time to build something to do this on my behalf but I think it's time well spent).

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steveBK123 599 days ago
Yes I think this points to the need for adaptiveness which remains humans edge.

We don't need PBs of training data, millions of compute, and hours upon hours of training.

You could sit down a moderately intelligent intern as a mechanical turk to perform this workflow with only a few minutes of instruction and get a reasonably good result.

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jaggs 599 days ago
Ah, but I think you're overlooking one major factor. Convenience. A lot of the spontaneous stuff we do ("hey why don't we pop down to x tomorrow?", or "do you fancy a quick curry?") are things you're not going to book with a Turk. BUT you definitely would fire up a quick agent on your way to the shower and have it do all the work for you while you're waxing your armpits. :) Agentic work is starting super slow, but once the wrinkles are worked out, we'll see a world where they're doing a huge amount of heavy lifting for the drudge stuff. For an example see Her - sorry! :)
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pinko 599 days ago
Underrated comment.
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steveBK123 599 days ago
Yes, that seems to be the larger challenge. The search tools I have used will work for a while until they don't. Real cat & mouse game.

Hence the "adaptive" part of my comment.

It really needs to be a client side agent.

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