Ever since Caesar rented a chariot to join his troops in Rome but first had to face off against the rental companies to find the cheapest price (and a chariot size to accommodate his swords), there has been no way for a "mere renter" to find cheapest car rental pricing without spending endless hours playing with dates, codes, etc., or utilize websites that "claim" to be able to accompish that magical feat. For example, "without reference to any discount codes, tell me what days in X month at LAS have the current lowest rates for a 2 day rental starting on a Tuesday with a pickup and dropoff time of 8am".

Looking forward to the availability of an AI agent that will make that task as easy as pie, and remove that magical advantage that rental car companies have possessed ever since Rome fell...

It sounds good in theory, but rentals don't price by "days" in that there isn't a specific price per day. For example, a 1-day rental on Feb 15th might be $40, but if you price it as a weekly rental, the cost drops to $25 per day. The AI agent could do what you are asking, but the rental duration would need to be an input parameter.

The other issue is that the AI agent would need access to a high-quality pricing source (i.e., an API). If the agent tried to screen scrape large amounts of data like this, it would get blocked very quickly by anti-bot measures implemented by most travel sites.

Lastly, pricing out the undiscounted price doesn't accurately reflect the final price with various discounts and coupon codes, as discounts can vary based on the situation. That requires an additional layer of logic that can exponentially increase the number of pricing requests.

Is any of this impossible? No, nothing is impossible, but AI is not magic. It still needs access to pricing data from the rental companies, and that will be the gating factor for the foreseeable future, no matter how incredible the models can code.

The rental car companies can do whatever they want with their data, I look forward to having AI agents do the searches that I already do...One way or another, the future that's not far away, using AI agents is goin' make searching for rental car pricing a lot easier... I'm under no illusion that AI is "magic", but also believe it's reasonable to expect that AI and use of agents is going to provide a handy tool I can use in the game that rental car companies choose to play...

Given what you've said, it sounds like the only restriction then is whether the AAA site will block the AI agent after X requests. You could always try to vibe-code something along these lines to try it. You might be surprised how far you can get with a little effort.

Looks like I'm not the only one thinking about how AI will and does impact car renting in the short and long term...and that includes emerging AI tools that customers are using to reserve cars and planning trips...interesting results of a recent survey...
Original link at auto rental news on the subject...

https://www.autorentalnews.com/10255...re-car-renters