United Airlines Chatbot Fail

AI Agents hooked up directly to the customer over SMS text messaging are a disaster waiting to happen. 

A chatbot bug had real world consequences for a United Airlines customer last week - their booking got cancelled by mistake.

The United Airlines AI Agent gets it wrong over text message

The chatbot presented two options:

A) Yes, cancel & get a refund
B) No, not ready to cancel

Pretty simple you'd think, but when the customer replied B, it completely lost the context of the command and went ahead with A, the opposite option.

So the lesson here is don't trust a chatbot to know what its doing at all, and for anything important, just use the company's app or website directly. If its a complex issue, call them up and talk to an actual employee... it will probably save your time in the end.


The simple text based interface was used for many years before windows & mouse interfaces became dominant during the 1990s. Unfortunately some AI agents aren't capable of getting a basic text interface like this correct yet.

An old school text based menu interface

References:
https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/1qrrvfd/am_i_stupid_for_did_i_just_get_screwed_by_the_ai/
https://www.slalom.com/au/en/customer-stories/united-airlines-gen-ai
https://www.cio.com/article/3969476/united-airlines-ai-strategy-the-airline-that-makes-decisions-fastest-wins.html

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The "Bucket Bumping" problem of airline tickets, and how to minimise your fare

The problem

You're booking your next holiday and while checking prices you key in the search for one passenger. When it comes time to make the actual booking, you select the required four passengers for your family, but suddenly the price per ticket rises from $250 to $400! 

Why it happens

Airline booking systems (aka Global Distribution Systems / GDS) cannot split a single booking across "buckets" (fare classes). If there are two seats left at $250 and you need four, the system doesn't give you two at $250 and two at $400 (which would be common sense). It bumps the entire group into the higher bucket, which is $400 per ticket.

The UI rarely explains this. It just silently adjusts the price for everyone, hoping you'll just put it down to tickets selling out quickly right now, or some other cause like dynamic pricing.

The root cause

Its caused by a 50-year-old legacy backend design. Airlines use buckets, denoted by single letters (Y, B, M, K, L, etc.). The GDS treat a booking as an atomic unit, so if you search for a party of four, the system only tries to find four seats within the same fare bucket.

Example - when a booking engine sends a "Sell Request" to the backend, it sends a single message:

SELL 4 SEATS IN CLASS Q

The legacy backend that receives the request is pretty basic - it doesn't have the ability to apply the logic, "I only have 2 left in Q, so I'll give you those and put the remaining 2 in M." It instead just looks at the remaining seats in Class Q.

If Available < Requested, it returns:

ERROR CLASS UNAVAILABLE

The booking middleware is programmed to catch that error and retry the request for the next bucket letter, until it finds a bucket which has the required number of total seats available, which means the request succeeds.

How to minimise your group fare

Given this limitation, how can you ensure you always pay the minimum possible? Its a pretty simple method - the one-by-one search technique. Search for one passenger first. Keep incrementing the number of passengers you search for, until the price per ticket bumps up. Then you know how many seats remain in the cheapest bucket. So exhaust that cheapest bucket before going ahead with the the rest of your booking. 

Why don't Airlines fix it?

So why haven't they fixed this core issue - that's in fact a "group booking tax"? The answer is likely technical debt on a global scale combined with the lack of a financial incentive. To change it, you’d have to synchronize updates across tens of thousands of travel agencies, hundreds of airlines, and third-party aggregators. 

Rather than fixing the root issue, the industry just builds layers of shiny new wrapper APIs on top of the same legacy core. Another name for this is pig's lipstick code.

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Evil User Interface Design

Thanks to Harry Brignull from Dark Patterns for bringing up the interesting topic of evil user interfaces; UIs designed to trick you into spending more money, or buying a product you don't want. Here's the best example from their slidedeck - the Ryanair booking form. I've added some explanatory comments below each screenshot.

1. Ryanair home page.

Loads of sale fares for just £5, looks great ... lets buy a ticket ...

2. The booking form.

Looks straightforward so far, no issues yet.

3. Passenger details section.

Notice the default option for the insurance dropdown is "Please select a country of residence".
If you're not paying attention, you'll assume it is just an address question, and so you'll select your country of residence. In doing so, you are actually selecting to pay for travel insurance ... its designed to trick you into selecting it by mistake.

4. Travel insurance dropdown.

 If you don't want travel insurance, then you have to select the correct option, "No Travel Insurance",
which is listed between Latvia and Lithuania.

5. On error, the dropdown clears your selection.

If you make a mistake anywhere on the form, such as shown above, forgetting to select "Yes" or "No" for the priority boarding question, then when you try and submit it, the insurance dropdown will default back to its original option, which was "Please select a country of residence". They really want you to pay for travel insurance, and this is their last chance of getting an extra few percent of users to buy it.


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Hyperlink vs Button in Android

After installing the Google Play Music app, the first screen allows you to choose which Google account to associate with it.

Seems straightforward enough; but have a look at the screen - what you would press?



Looks like there's a choice of two commands, either Add account or Not now. But there's another command there ... the email address is a clickable hyperlink, but there's no indication that it is - no underline or radically different font. The Add account button actually prompts you to type in a new email address, i.e. not the one listed. One of the most confusing UI designs I've seen lately.

As discussed in this StackExchange.UX post, there's no strict rule about it, but buttons usually perform a command and hyperlinks usually take you somewhere new.

To improve it, maybe there should be a "Use" button to the right of each email address.

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