My last attempt at using an AI assistant ended with it trying to book me a hotel in Sydney, Australia instead of Sydney, Nova Scotia. I have trust issues now, lol.
This reminds me of a time when 'API' has become a hot term. Every company would ship an API. I think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and I think even Google at some point had nice public APIs. This was the era of RSS and semantic web as well... until most realized there's no easy way to serve ads or control UX, making APIs great for customers but bad for business (unless the API is your product of course)
Given this, I'm not sure what business purpose there is to ship an MCP API like this, aside from goodwill and exposure.
"The Model Context Protocol is an open standard, open-source framework introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 to standardize the way artificial intelligence systems like large language models integrate and share data with external tools, systems, and data sources."
Yes, because that's what we need, for time-sensitive and highly nuanced information about flights to be filtered through a wildly hallucinating chatbot.
Anyone who books their flights entirely through a chatbot deserves to have their plans screwed up, and whatever company sold the chatbot to them deserves to have these irate customers yelling at them.
This server has two tools: feedback-to-devs and search-flight
feedback-to-devs sends feedback to the Kiwi mcp server devs.
That's an interesting way to collect feedback, but I also wonder if users of this will miss seeing that tool enabled and then inadvertently send other feedback or private data to the Kiwi devs too.
Great example, MCP servers like that will be needed for every B2B as well as B2C service to give structured access to LLMs and agents. It’s what API’s have been for the past 20 years, but for AI users of those services
I feel there are a lot of workflows that are actually quite suited to Claude Code - for example here, running the MCP tool to iterate on a flight plan, and updating a .md file (bonus points - auto sync’s to your iCloud Drive and thence into Obsidian), this gives you a nice durable artifact that you can then share.
It’s equivalent to the in-browser Artifact workflow but that’s kinda annoying to work with, I usually want to export those outside of the chat client at some point.
This would be 100x more compelling if they exposed something closer to Google Flights Explore through MCP. The real value to agents isn’t “user already knows the exact date and route, now just book it.” It’s “user is loosely considering Tokyo, doesn’t know when, so let me scan the next 3 months and surface the cheapest windows.” Agents should excel at processing more data than the user can hold in their head and then framing the best options. Releasing an MCP server is cool, but this still feels like a limited slice of what agents could actually do.
Kinda funny - agentic flight booking was the poster use case for Semantic Web Services [1] 2001-2005. The whole thing collapsed because no one could agree on inputs/outputs (RDF/XML, ontologies). Now LLMs just wing it from plain text.
I like that the server includes a feedback_to_devs tool. I tried the flights tool with Claude and it was pretty buggy and limited in what it could do. I asked Claude to give feedback to the devs and it gave a decent bug report and feedback on the API (seriously, why doesn't it include the airlines??)
It's interesting to think about what the post-MCP monetization era might evolve into. How would the MCP client or LLM handle sponsored results? How do companies get into the "good graces" of LLMs so that they are referenced by them? Is this process be more or less gameable than SEO?
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadAnd book! That's a very exciting bit of tooling to add into an assistant, but there's lots of complexities...
Each result includes a booking link directly to the flight chosen
Oh well, we're not at the future we hoped for yet then, but it's progress.
Given this, I'm not sure what business purpose there is to ship an MCP API like this, aside from goodwill and exposure.
Anyone who books their flights entirely through a chatbot deserves to have their plans screwed up, and whatever company sold the chatbot to them deserves to have these irate customers yelling at them.
It will take an awful lot for me to trust an AI with an airline ticket.
feedback-to-devs sends feedback to the Kiwi mcp server devs.
That's an interesting way to collect feedback, but I also wonder if users of this will miss seeing that tool enabled and then inadvertently send other feedback or private data to the Kiwi devs too.
The intersection of "informed enough to use an MCP server" and "unwise enough to purchase from Kiwi" is small.
It’s equivalent to the in-browser Artifact workflow but that’s kinda annoying to work with, I usually want to export those outside of the chat client at some point.
1. http://ksl.stanford.edu/people/sam/ieee01.pdf