Comment by mejutoco
1 day ago
My point is that the underlying incentives are exactly the same. I dont think the rules have changed at all. If you are expedia you could always give an api to search forhotels, but why commoditize yourself? Same with agents.
Ryanair recently had a court case with some meta travel website because they were selling their flights. Ryanair wants to sell you the insurance and extras, and they can only do so controlling the experience.
My prediction is, like apis, there will be some years of extra access for agents, followed by locking moats for their own experience.
Okay yeah I agree with this. I think there's going to be a whole new subindustry called "Agent eXperience" in the near future that specializes in making workflows like searching, ranking, buying flights straight from airlines easy for agents to do independently on behalf of human preferences, and figuring out how to market add-ons etc to agents as well.
I hadn't thought about the legal aspect, but yeah, eventually some kind of legal moats will probably be dug as well. Just because an agent figures out some workaround to get free flights doesn't mean it has to be honored, I guess.