Kiwi.com flight search MCP server

This is still better than me having to somehow encode:

"find a flight for me, wife, 2 kids aged blah blah, to <destination>, i have family in <layover cities> so at most 1 layover, always avoid United airlines or anything operated by them, because I'd rather sail on a wooden plank across the atlantic like Greta Thunberg than fly United again."

into a bunch of filters with 40 clicks.

The problem I've been finding lately is airlines, even via searches like Google Flights will fluctuate prices hourly to daily. And I mean price changes that are nearly double sometimes for economy flights at random times (looks at Lufthansa)

I can spend my time checking over a few days to see what the game is. The LLM Agent is gonna need a cron job system....

Otoh, LLMs booking flights? Airlines are going to exploit the ever loving shit out of that to jack rates for people not paying attention by detecting LLM queries which is completely legal.

The MCP clients are still missing some key features to get to a fully autonomous booking, but we are getting there:

- With MCP Elicitations (https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/draft/client/e...) the server will be able to secure ask for complementary info like your name, passport and even your payments details.

- With mcp-ui (https://github.com/idosal/mcp-ui), supporting MCP Clients could allow the server to re-create the same booking flow UI that you find today on an aggregator's website

Booking is basically a contract. How can the AI assistant accept the terms and conditions for you? Or maybe it could pop up a scrollable window with an Accept button? Not sure if such a thing exists yet.

https://duffel.com there are APIs to accomplish this FWIW, this isn't functionality path LLM/MCPs magically unlocked.

This usecase could work with an api as well. But booking engines are not interested in providing such an api. I don't think this is a technical problem, but one of legal complications and incentives.

Not sure I'd trust just yet an autonomous agent with my wallet to complete the booking part

Funny how annoying booking complex flights has become all while airlines (Ryanair) making it impossible to check in without full access to email (for 2fa) so you pay $40 per person at the airport. Kiwi kinda solved it but I’ve been cought out by this with other platforms.

There is stuff in the MCP spec that will allow the MCP server to send a prompt back to the user if there is information or clarification needed. We will get there eventually.

And just like the semantic web, they'll wall it up when they realise it's bad for business when they can't control it. Except walling off even the plain text is going to make the web really a hassle for everyone.

I thinks tools ids are prefixed with mcp server name when being injected in LLM context window to avoid cross-polination among tools from different scope (from different server) - should be fine here

Good point! We'll try to make the description of the tool and naming clearer to avoid unwanted tool invocation

This makes me so sad. At one point I built myself a simple Ruby CLI to browse Netflix. Their prediction of how much I'd like a show were extremely good and just getting shows ordered by that and filtering out things I had already seen was the best interface ever. The problem might have been that you relatively easily could come to the concision that there is nothing left right now that's really worth my time...

APIs were popular when technology was a tool to empower the user. But since then technology has mostly shifted to an ad delivery vehicle. APIs get in the way of that (by allowing its user to actually accomplish something besides “engaging”) so they got deprecated pretty quickly.

I see the same thing happening with these MCPs. Currently they’re built to ride the AI bandwagon, but when people start using them for something actually useful and engagement starts going down they’ll cripple its capabilities to restore the balance.

Do you have experience with API? I have 10 years of professional experience with API.

I was thinking the same thing. But after looking at their site, I think they make money when people book through them. They also seem to sell something that appears to be a form of travel insurance that gives a user a credit to book a different flight if theirs is cancelled or delayed.

If the MCP server supports booking flights then they can make money from this

My memory of the recent history of the web isn't as cynical. I am not denying the perverse incentives involved but at least for Facebook & Instagram(maybe) we had the Graph API which was accessible and provided a decent amount of functionality and access but was curtailed post public backlash from misuse like with Cambridge Analytica. Similar for twitter where it provided decent APIs which wouldn't exhaust easily for end consumers and even the year(or two) before the Musk purchase they even provided academia with API access equivalent to their enterprise offerings for free. But there too bots and all were at least used as the public justification for curtailing many features.

Now none of this is meant to excuse the behaviour of all these large platforms for all the terrible practices they engage in. But at the same time, we never figured out how to safely deal with the power exposed by these APIs.

I think MCPs that can provide monetized content (for example bankrates or insurance quotes), will provide business value, but, like APIs, there will be compliance requirements as to how information is displayed on the front end. Getting access or credentials to the MCP will require completing this approval process.

That said, this only makes sense if the data provided by the API is proprietary in some way. If its free or open source data, being the mcp provider likely won't provide much business value aside from the insight as to what the LLMs/users are searching for.

I think the MCP will take off because it can inject ads. Lets say a ecommerce store exposes an MCP so you can order your stuff with a prompt. The MCP can still rank and serve results based on paid ads. Now I am sure people will figure out a way to ignore paid results with prompts, but that is really no different than ad blockers today. It will just be an arms race of prompts filtering and MCP vendors figuring out how to get around it.

MCP servers can inject ads though. Think about this particular one for example. It can return flight options that companies paid to put on top. Also it can send you responses like "while you're waiting for your flight options, here is a fun list of things to do in London on your trip!", all paid promos of course.

It's a lot easier to inject ads into MCP than APIs.

Awesome! Thanks for getting this out

You're not wrong but I've had good luck booking with 3rd party travel sites in exchange for discounts. I'm going on the flight, won't need to change or cancel it. I always click no on the "would you like to spend $x to 'protect' your tickets" and have never regretted it. This feels morally the same. If one day I lose out and have to eat the cost of a flight I'm still way ahead.

What makes this a better option than just using an API with well formed output?

Strong stone soup vibes from this. AI's ability to process unstructured data may kickstart a new but different Semantic Web process, where businesses provide machine-compatible access to their services. A bit like how robust self driving cars that can drive anywhere are going to kickstart more investment into smart infrastructure, road monitoring, and real-time distributed traffic control and signaling, which will deemphasize the need for super-robust driving ability under messy unstructured conditions.