Book flight, dinner and train with an agent (failed)
Poster gave an agent a flight, a London dinner for two and a train ticket; it finished none, with OpenTable blocking robots.
Done with a custom-built or unnamed agent
- What they did
- The poster ran a repeatable test where an agent used a headless browser step by step, identified itself in its user agent, checked robots.txt before each page, solved no CAPTCHAs, and entered no personal details. It tried booking a Saturday 8pm London dinner and a King's Cross–Edinburgh train, but mostly hit robots.txt bans, bot checks, broken retailer handoffs, or forms that required a person to supply card, name, and phone details.
- How it went
- It completed none of the three errands. For dinner it checked nine places in under ten minutes and only one let it search availability; for trains, National Rail found ten options quickly but the purchase flow failed before checkout.
- Worth knowing
- The main catch was not model capability but access: approved APIs existed for some flights, while restaurant and train booking paths were effectively closed to a consumer agent.
Try it yourself with ChatGPT Agent
Help me plan a trip to [city] from [date] to [date]: find flights from [origin], a dinner for [number] on [date] near [area], and a train from [city] to [city]. Search for options and give me links, times and prices for each, and if a site blocks you, tell me which one and give me the direct link instead. Do not book or pay for anything; present your top choice for each so I can confirm before you take any action.
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Source: Reddit · Undated
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