AI Agents will kill the travel aggregator website

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "AI Agents will kill the travel aggregator website". Your opponent's style: The Tech Realist

hi

That's the standard, unexamined prediction. But it utterly ignores the fundamental human need for curated trust and liability, which AI lacks. Aggregators aren't just search engines; they're transaction facilitators and problem solvers. How will an agent handle a cancelled flight at 3 AM when your trip is ruined, without a human-backed entity?

You're missing the point. Those "transaction facilitators and problem solvers" are already heavily automated, pushing you to chatbots and FAQs, not a personal human concierge. An AI agent, connected directly to airline and hotel systems, could *proactively* rebook your cancelled flight at 3 AM before you even know it's cancelled, offering solutions faster and more reliably than a human scrambling through a call center. True liability will shift to the AI developer, not some faceless aggregator.

You're conflating automation with ultimate responsibility. An AI proactively rebooking is still bound by system access and commercial agreements, which aggregators *currently* hold. Shifting liability to an AI developer is a fantasy; the financial and legal quagmire of global travel failures would be astronomical. Who pays when the AI makes an error costing thousands? Aggregators exist precisely to absorb and manage that risk.