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This is why consumer laws should be really hard and executed very fast, it's the balance to big companies and "perfect" markets.




Why?

There are plenty of full service travel agencies that offer to book guaranteed price reservations in pretty much any locale in most countries. There are some that even offer extra guarantees like a last minute cancellation by the hotel being refunded at double the cost, to ensure you can get a room elsewhere.


Can you recommend an agency that offers that double refund option? I haven't been able to find one.

Amex I believe for most of the popular countries. They also offer all kinds of niche insurance options that are effectively even better, for corporate and high end clients.

> Why?

Because you live in an attention economy and the probability of using another service is pretty low. We can also develop our own travel agent with LLMs but that's an outlier of the market, and financially negligible. The problem is about power in the economy.


This doesn’t make sense, how is your preferred range of attention expenditure even relevant?

If a dozen different HN users expressed a dozen different preferred ranges… would there now have to be viable competitors at each possible step?


> This doesn’t make sense, how is your preferred range of attention expenditure even relevant?

This is an ironic statement, insofar as it's myopic.

The implication was clearly a monopoly by market availability (convenience), which is not a legal precept, but a sociological one. Comparing rates across all possible locales and vendors is impractical. This is part of what makes Amazon so successful. Sheer momentum.


And a dozen different HN users could also claim the same for their preferencez?



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