Did you know you can use AI to help find and book flights? It's what I've been doing for the last few days as I've tried to find a reasonable flight and fare to Melbourne from London. It's a good example of how AI can be useful - and of course replace the jobs of travel agents, both on and offline.

Whether or not this is a good thing is dependent on whether you're the travel agency losing your job, I guess. However, I've lost count of the number of times an online agent has completely failed me because they don't really want to go the extra effort into doing a little more research into getting me the best deal.

It seems there's a little tension between me appreciating and wanting to use AI, and wanting to banish it from existance because there's so many things wrong with the tech that we've let out of the box it's not even funny.

^{Yes, this is an AI image I generated in Midjourney a long time ago before I decided it was a terrible idea. No, it's not real. Yes, an artist died when I made it.}

It's crazy, isn't it? AI is still in it's infancy but it's growing exponentially. A lot of it is rubbish, and doesn't even make life easier despite claiming it will. Some is marginally convenient. Some is morally questionable. Some of it appears super cool on the surface but is evil on the inside.

Anyway, back to Mindtrip. Because, procrastinating booking flights. This start up cost 7 million and has 12 cofounders, who have worked in various tech start ups before.

So all one has to do is write in the box, sending the AI a message, instead of selecting all those option you would normally, such as flight duration and so on. I can change the parameters any time I like, such as departure times and so on. It'll still give you the best flight itineray regardless what you ask for, which can be useful if you hadn't thought of that option.

You can start the search again with a new question, or start a fresh chat.

As far as I can understand, for some flight selections, you can book through Mindtrip, but for others, you can't - you'd have to go and add those details into the selected airline site. I think this is because the airline can then get you to select other options, such as Flexplus for Emirates, which gives you a decent seat for an extra thousand pounds instead of torturing you in a sardine can arrangement.

Whilst it's kinda been useful, it's been just as easy for me to open up various tabs for the airlines I want to fly with and look that way, or look at a more traditional site like Kayak or Edreams.

And in many ways, I'd almost want to pay a personal assistant to do it all for me, because I'm finding the whole process a headf**k entirely.

In short, cool name, cool idea, but I ended up booking my flights via Quantas website in the end anyway.

So yeah. I'm going home.

With Love,

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