Book flight, dinner and train with an agent (failed)

Poster gave an agent a flight, a London dinner for two and a train ticket; it finished none, with OpenTable blocking robots.

What They Did

The poster ran a repeatable test where an agent used a headless browser step by step, identified itself in its user agent, checked robots.txt before each page, solved no CAPTCHAs, and entered no personal details. It tried booking a Saturday 8pm London dinner and a King's Cross–Edinburgh train, but mostly hit robots.txt bans, bot checks, broken retailer handoffs, or forms that required a person to supply card, name, and phone details.

How It Went

It completed none of the three errands. For dinner it checked nine places in under ten minutes and only one let it search availability; for trains, National Rail found ten options quickly but the purchase flow failed before checkout.

Worth Knowing

The main catch was not model capability but access: approved APIs existed for some flights, while restaurant and train booking paths were effectively closed to a consumer agent.