Delta Is Killing Fixed Ticket Prices—AI Will Charge How Much It Thinks You’re Willing To Pay [Roundup]

by Gary Leff

News and notes from around the interweb:

  • Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI that determines how much you personally will pay for a ticket

    “Personalized pricing has been an airline goal for the past decade and a half,” Gary Leff, a travel industry authority who first noted Delta’s AI strategy, told Fortune. “Delta is the first major airline to speak so publicly about its use of AI pricing, to tout it for its potential upside at its investor day in the fall and to offer concrete metrics around its use in its recent earnings call.”

    …To complicate matters, while industry experts expect the impact of AI to mean more revenue for Delta, the impact for individual passengers is less certain. In the short-term, AI might mean more discounts offered upfront when Delta needs to fill seats, said Leff. Short-term, shoppers might benefit from using a VPN and clearing cookies when browsing for airfares, but long-term, Delta and other airlines might require passengers “to be logged in for purchase of tickets in order to obtain status benefits from an airline, essentially being fully within their ecosystem to gain the benefits of that system (i.e. submit to personalized pricing to get extra legroom seats),” Leff said.

  • Airlines sell bonus miles but don’t usually monetize status, outside of recognizing customers for their ticket spend, or indirectly based on revenue a customer generates through their credit card partner. Vietnam Airlines, though, is now selling 90 days of double or triple qualifying miles which is brilliant, though fencing it to exclude residents of Vietnam.

    This expands their partnership with StatusMatch which has been offering paid LotusMiles status matches and even matches hotel status. As a SkyTeam member, their status is even useful flying Delta (I use my Air France status for priority check-in and free checked bags as well as free exit row seats).

  • Mastercard will issue a higher tier of card, ‘World Legend’ – presumably the difference being higher swipe fees funding more benefits.

  • New Details in Air India Crash Probe Shift Focus to Senior Pilot: Black-box recording and report details indicate the flight’s captain switched off fuel flow to engines in succession, one after the other. (HT: crucker)

  • Feel good story of the day:

  • Every single day… all day long… no matter the airline. Such a terrible customer experience.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Congrats on the quote in Fortune, Gary! The ‘thought leader’ strikes again! Woo!

  2. On the Air India 171 updates, if it really was pilot suicide, it’s so disturbing. I’ll admit, I didn’t want to accept that as the reality. It’s just so wrong. Criminal.

    Have been following Captain Steeeve‘s videos on YouTube; he’s great. As he and his recent guests have discussed, there clearly needs to be more support and to de-stigmatize mental health counseling and treatment in the aviation industry. I get it, folks want to keep their jobs, but also, people shouldn’t die like this. Tragic.

  3. How will AI work with business travel? Especially if different people use the same admin asst and they each have a different preferred airline? Definitely won’t be able to log into their ecosystem as a state employee.

  4. Is it just me, or have we replaced the word “algorithm” with “AI” to make it sound like a new thing?

  5. Delta is dreaming (again). The only way the AI pricing approach works is if the third party booking sites are also using it to display “specialized” fares to you for the other airline fares displayed in your search, too.

    Just use a VPN and clean/private browser every time you purchase a ticket. And enter your SkyMiles number (if it remotely matters to you) after purchase.

  6. @Captain Freedom — And when selecting locations for your VPN, and as I believe @Gene once recommended, please consider Romania. The weather in Bucharest is lovely, year round, and the airfare is super cheap. Noroc!

    @Pat — Can’t wait (sarcasm) for the next round of ‘buzzwords’ in tech/finance/culture. Before, it was ‘FinTech’ and ‘an app’ for everything and the ‘dot com’ bubble, etc. ‘Unicorn!’ Oh, how the ‘hype train’ continues… (The HBO show Silicon Valley really exemplified this nonsense for that era.)

  8. I hope the Air India crash process continues to a conclusion without political interference.

  9. @jns — Once again, I’ll admit, I was initially skeptical, speculating that it could have been mechanical failure (Boeing/GE problem) or fuel contamination, but it really does seem closer to 4U9525, ‘deliberate’ action by the pilot. Like, pilots don’t ‘accidentally’ turn off both fuel control switches one second each the other within 30 seconds of takeoff. So, the question now is more about ‘motive.’ Why did that pilot do what he did? We may never know. And, if you/anyone really is ‘dealing with something,’ please don’t take others with you. There are more honorable ways. Seriously. So, unlike AA5342 earlier this year (when you-know-who wrongly, initially blamed ‘DEI’), there does not appear to be any meaningful ‘political’ interference with AI171 so far, unless you are aware of something that the rest of us (and the investigators) aren’t.

  12. High time.m for airlines to monetize carry ons. Rationing the supply of slots is not an efficient economic policy

    Bins are the most expensive real estate they have since bags in the hold are cheap to load and offload while bags in the cabin cause expensively long turnarounds and loads of delays. And they’re GIVING IT OUT FOR FREE while charging for checked bags (cheaper for them to handle)?? Completely idiotic.

  14. The suggestion to use VPN and clear cookies is junk — simply use Google Flights or similar aggregator.

    That article is pretty bad, written by someone who doesn’t understand airline distribution but wants to sound like an expert.

  15. @1990
    Your “buddy” wasn’t wrong. Lobach was ONLY in that helicopter because she was a lesbian AND a White House staffer. She couldn’t even follow basic instructions from ATC and should have never been allowed to even ride a bicycle…..of course her boss wasn’t too good at that either.
    Cheers!

  17. @CHRIS — Ya know, this is why I like fishing… sometimes the bait works. Yeah, the background identifiers (sexuality, gender, partisan affiliation, etc.) of those (or any) pilot really isn’t the story, but it’s great ‘culture war’ play for that moment, if you’re going for ‘bad-faith’ methods. Very Roy Cohn to not let a tragedy go to waste. From the other perspective, it would seem anyone who is not a white, straight, Christian, wealthy, at-least middle-aged, conservative man is basically automatically gonna be deemed ‘inexperienced’ or whatever, then scapegoated, even when their background is not at fault. Likewise, anyone who fits that description above will likely be deemed a ‘bigot’ by the left; also not good. Anyway, if we’re gonna do ‘this’ all over again, might as well call-in @Mantis, @Andy S, @Michael Mainello, @AC, and the other anti-‘DEI’ crusaders. Great again…

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