United Airlines has written a ban on AI booking agents into its contract of carriage, and its chief executive has been unusually direct about the reason. "To be honest, I don't want to create another middleman," Scott Kirby said at an event in Chicago on Tuesday 10 November, according to The Wall Street Journal2. The next day United published a contract revision dated 11 November that adds AI agents to its list of prohibited ticketing practices4. Thrifty Traveler calls United the first US airline to block unauthorised third-party AI agents from booking7. For an industry that has fought for years over who owns the customer at the point of sale, the line has now been drawn for AI.

What the contract says

New Rule 6.J.6 prohibits "the use of AI Agents to make, modify or service a Ticket, and/or to purchase any service or product"4. The definition is wide. It covers software acting on behalf of a passenger whether or not the passenger supervises or approves its actions, and it reaches assistants that access United through a travel agency or another intermediary56. Rule 5.H adds reservations made, modified or serviced by AI agents to the bookings United may cancel without notice46. PPC Land notes that the revision states no separate effective date for the new provisions6.

Search is not banned. Agents can still show United flights, availability and prices, but the customer has to complete the purchase24. United says it is restricting access directly within its own digital platforms and indirectly via travel agencies and aggregators, with updates to its booking, ticketing and distribution policies9. That last word matters: the restriction is meant to travel down the distribution chain, not stop at united.com.

The stated case and the commercial one

United's public rationale is security and compliance. Sharing account credentials with a third-party assistant can expose sensitive information, and an agent can make unintended purchases, change bookings or spend MileagePlus miles23. The airline also argues that automated actions could breach FAA and DOT rules, citing check-in, where a person has to acknowledge that their bags contain no banned items such as explosives29.

Kirby's remark points to the commercial logic. Analyst Henry Harteveldt of Atmosphere Research Group told CBS News that United wants to keep control of the booking process and does not want another, potentially even more powerful, intermediary on top of Google search, metasearch sites and online travel agencies1. He added that searches by AI bots cost airlines money1. Thrifty Traveler argues that a further risk lies in rebooking: since United dropped most change fees in 2020, an agent could watch a fare around the clock and rebook every time the price falls7.

Volumes are small for now. United told The Wall Street Journal that it sees little booking activity from AI agents and that its back-end systems can tell whether a reservation came from a person, a traditional agency or an automated assistant2. Critics doubt how far that reaches. View from the Wing points out that when an agent completes a purchase on Expedia, United sees an Expedia booking, not how it was made, and that a contractual ban is not a technical one4.

A familiar distribution fight

The move fits a long pattern of airlines pulling sales back to channels they control. IATA describes its New Distribution Capability, backed by Resolution 787 of October 2012, as a data exchange format based on offer and order management through which airlines create and distribute their own offers10. Lufthansa Group put a price on the old route in September 2015 with a €16 Distribution Cost Charge on tickets issued through a GDS for Lufthansa, Austrian, Brussels Airlines and Swiss, while bookings on its own websites and counters stayed exempt11.

Pushing too hard has a cost. American Airlines withdrew many of its fares from the GDS in 2023 and made full content available only through NDC. In June 2024 chief executive Robert Isom acknowledged that "our approach has driven customers away from American" and retreated12.

Ryanair has fought scrapers in court on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2015 the Court of Justice of the EU, on a reference from the Dutch Supreme Court, ruled that the EU database directive does not stop the owner of an unprotected database from setting contractual limits on its use, in Ryanair's case against the comparison and booking site PR Aviation14. In July 2024 a jury in the US District Court for Delaware found that Booking.com had violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and had induced a third party to access parts of Ryanair's website without authorisation13. Europe also shows the limit of that strategy. In December 2025 the Italian competition authority AGCM fined Ryanair €255.76 million for abusing a dominant position between April 2023 and at least April 2025, citing facial recognition checks on agency bookings, blocked payments, deleted accounts and a campaign labelling non-signatory OTAs "pirate OTAs"15.

Where the rest of the industry stands

No other US airline has come out publicly against AI agents, according to The Wall Street Journal2. Delta Air Lines lets authenticated AI assistants complete bookings, with added safeguards for sensitive transactions such as trips for unaccompanied minors27. Southwest Airlines launched a ChatGPT plug-in earlier this year that lets customers browse its flights inside the chatbot28.

In Europe, neither KLM nor Transavia names AI agents in its terms. KLM's website terms of use, dated March 2025, bar extracting or monitoring site content for direct or indirect commercial use with screen scraping, robots, spiders or other automated means without written consent16. Transavia's access and distribution policy of December 2025 reserves its website and app for consumers and requires online travel agencies, aggregators, metasearch platforms and technology providers to use an API agreement or a contracted intermediary, including when tools act on their behalf17.

Demand for agent bookings remains thin across sectors. Engadget reports that Uber handled 320 million trips and deliveries in the week of Halloween, of which AI agents accounted for about 500 Uber Eats orders and four rides8. That makes this a cheap moment for United to close the door. The open question is what happens when a passenger's assistant can finish a sale on Delta but not on United. More on the carrier is on our United Airlines page.