6 tweets · June 2023 · 16 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
help! I'm trying to buy some cheap-ish international flights and wow is it hard to figure out what's going on - google flights says this two-hop flight = $520 -airline site doesn't show it (tho can buy each for $$$$) -booking.com says "sure" but then booking mysteriously fails
I want a... system for searching all possible flights... that is like... open-source and DAO-owned or some shit so that it's somehow *verifiably* finding the exact answer to "what's the cheapest flight that meets my criteria?"
or something. my guess is that part of what's going on here is that these sites are incentivized to show you cheap options that don't quite exist, because then like a casino you'll be like "ooh" and drawn towards them and end up buying some other option from them
because like at the first phase you might look on 3 different aggregator sites, and any that don't show cheap options the others do is gonna look bad (even if those options don't exist or become WAY more pricy with baggage)
but if you had a different way to trust that if this site isn't showing you an option it's because that option isn't gettable... then you could just go to that one and really not worry about the rest
AI is gonna make this pretty interesting. like right now SW airlines doesn't show up on many aggregators, maybe because their loyalty strategy involves getting people to search direct with them so they don't want to be on the aggregators? but an AI agent could still book it