I wondered that too.

I don't want to offend anyone, and have no idea how it was written, and I already know most of this stuff so am not the audience. But respectfully I feel like it had a lot of words for a fairly shallow overview, which feels AI-ish, plus the "delve" at the beginning got my radar up. This is sort of what I expect from Manus or one of those ersatz "research" LLMs. Anyway, it's got lots of upvotes, hopefully people are finding it useful.

(Edit to add: it's actually content marketing for some kind of [questionable, subscribe to access some hidden refund thing] travel company so I don't feel bad criticizing anymore)

that "They don't just _____ -- they ________" construction! It's definitely a "once you see it" thing that you start to see constantly in AI-generated content! I wonder why the model loves that so much

dashes

an explicit "conclusion" section at the end

I think the telltale for me that makes me count as heavily AI-assisted is the lack of inclusion of real, inline examples of actual fares & their restrictions. I know I've seen them broken down before in other content. But not once here was there a full readout of an actual fare bucket & its rules. I think a human writer would have been tempted to include even one of those as an artifact, but an AI as a topic reviewer/summarizer/collator won't unless explicitly instructed.

I have always booked corporate flights through an internal portal system. I assumed that this identified me as a belonging to X company, so my options would be priced by some standing agreement with the airline. Is this not true?

My biggest takeaway from this article is that I should go and see which of these systems have APIs I can query, because if I have a lot of flexibility I think it'd be easier to script it than clicking through a whole bunch of different options on google flights trying to find what the cheapest fare is. I want to be able to write a script that says "here are my dealbreakers, here are the range of dates I can leave on, here's the range for coming back, go and find the best deal"

I guess that's the type of service people typically build and charge for.

A friend of mine recently got a too-good-to-be-true fare from Europe to Asia on Qatar, and the ticket was promptly cancelled and refunded by the airline when they found the error.

I also had the misfortune to spend 6 hours in a BA lounge in Heathrow in 2022. Good lord. At least the gin was free.

Travelling ain't what it was.

¹Here in Australia there's no such thing as domestic First. We call that Business: if you want to travel First, you must go internationally.

One other one I ran into with the “dead last” strategy was I ended up waiting in line anyhow… on the jet bridge, which was worse than waiting in a queue in a nice airport terminal. So my purely practical brain says to go at the beginning of my group, get it over with, and then I can be settled with no worries rather than having to pay attention to the boarding sequence at all.

Boarding at the very beginning makes a huge difference.

It's a 30 minute chunk of time in which you get to relax. Once you're in your seat there really is nothing else to do. You can work, you can watch a movie, you can think, read a book.

No latent anxiety wondering when I should get up, no "I can't really focus on this book because I might have to get up any minute," etc.

For a relatively short flight (2 hours) it's a pretty meaningful % of time that becomes a lot more relaxing.

So yeah, it could work in this particular case, but still not sure it’s a good deal. They say they’re getting you some “credits”, while you could just rebook for the new price and refund the old one and get the difference in cash instead.