It not exactly unrealistic to imagine that people will ask LLMs about flights, hotels, restaurants or even insurance.
All that needs to happen is for LLMs to add a “buy now” button, and for the provider to take a 15% commission (still a lower take rate than Expedia FWIW).
The "dream" is that the LLM/AI does all the work for me and just magically gets me to "this is the perfect flight for you and here are the reasons" but I have to tell it the things I care about (price, time, etc.). A lot of the time it's not exactly clear, even to me, which of those parameters matter the most so as a consumer it's actually nice to see, for instance, the options with times/costs/stops/etc. and for me to be able to look those over and make a decision. The LLM could provide those options, but then what has it done that I wasn't able to do with Google Flights or another ota? Is it just using more natural language in the request? Or do most people really want to wholesale handoff the decision and just go with the "trustworthy" LLM/assistant without any of the rationale?
I suppose actual personal assistants do that type of thing all the time for wealthy people, but that doesn't seem like it would be applicable to the masses who want/need to comparison shop for the best deal that meets a bunch of criteria.
I say this as someone who gets major value out of LLMs already, but for buying things in particular I'm struggling to understand why you'd want to hand off the "browsing" and just fast forward to the "buying."
The first are power users, in the sense of people who have complex requests. Like those who’d ask for the cheapest flights from Manchester to Turkey during the summer school holidays for without layovers unless those layovers were in Paris, for a holiday to be roughly 10 days long, excluding very early morning flights. Such a request could be made with existing OTAs, but would be painfully time consuming.
The other type of user for whom LLMs might be useful are the opposite, those with very loose requirements. Think “get me a flight to a warm place tomorrow”.
Skyscanner etc would still have value for the people in the middle.