"To be honest, I don't want to create another middleman." That was United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby, speaking at an event in Chicago according to the Wall Street Journal, after the airline rewrote its contract of carriage to stop AI agents buying its tickets.
The revision, dated 11 November, adds to its list of banned ticketing practices "The use of AI Agents to make, modify or service a Ticket, and/or to purchase any service or product". A separate rule lets United cancel reservations made, changed or serviced by an agent. The definition covers assistants working through a travel agency or other intermediary, and applies even when a person supervises or approves what the agent does.
United's stated reasons are privacy, unintended purchases and regulatory requirements. Kirby's remark points to a commercial one.
What United has not banned is just as telling. Agents can still search and display its flights and prices, and a customer can use AI to research options and then buy the ticket themselves. Expedia's ChatGPT app already works that way, showing options and sending the user to Expedia to book.
That is the affiliate bargain, restated for AI. The agent is welcome to influence the decision but not to own the transaction, the customer data or any fee that might later attach to it. A booking finished by a person on a supplier or travel agent site is also the kind of session existing tracking was built for. An agent completing checkout in the background is likely to be harder to attribute, which is an inference, not something United has said.
The same tension is showing up in UK retail by a different route. In September, the Shopify agency Blend Commerce sent an unbranded test agent to 200 UK and US retailers. It was refused at 29, including Tesco, Argos and Next, and Blend said 24 of those refusers' robots.txt files allowed the crawlers used by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude. Blend blames bot protection rather than policy, and its test did not use any named AI company's agent. Blend sells conversion audits, and none of the retailers commented.
For retailers that have told AI companies their agents are welcome, the useful check is whether their security software agrees. Hello Partner has recently covered agentic checkout in Google Shopping and the rise of bot traffic.
How United will enforce the rule is unclear. A booking record may show Expedia as the seller without showing that an AI made the purchase, and it is not yet clear how the rule will be applied to tickets bought by UK customers.
United has picked the old affiliate deal over a new one, with agents allowed to recommend but not to close. For travel affiliates whose income depends on a tracked click, that is the more comfortable outcome, for as long as suppliers rather than agents decide where the sale happens.
