Based on what?
The max each individual is able to pay at that moment in time.
Able and/or desperate enough
I’m guessing they will do that by replacing the CEO with AI?
Airplane ticket pricing should be based on weight + quality of service.
At least they won’t collaborate with ICE to ratfuck you against your Constitutional rights.
Oh wait
Delta just lost me as a lifelong customer. They used to be my automatic #1 choice because they had good service for a reasonable price.
When was Delta cheap? I live near a fortress hub and it’s $500+ to fly anywhere. Maybe I was one of the 25% pricing test
I just want a carrier that isn’t delayed 75% of the time. For me that’s United.
But will just adding AI alone be enough? I propose we also add “blockchain”, “the cloud” and “e-commerce” to ticket pricing in order to truly synergize profit dynamics.
you forgot to add:
agentic laser focus
if you buy an nft of your boarding pass you get priority boarding
Wtf is the point of that? Its the same plane, isn’t leaving any time sooner if I board earlier.
Its not like a cruise ship where boarding an hour earlier means I can jump in pool while others are still getting on board.
Because people are morons and will pay an extra few hundred just to get into the tube first.
Exploding spectacularly in Delta’s face in 3, 2, 1…
It won’t, you can already see this happening in tons of industries and markets.
The glorious k shape economy means the middle of rapidly shrinking and all the money to be made is at the extremes of the spectrum. You can already see tons of brands increasing prices or pivoting away from non “luxury” offerings.
Soon there will only be Emirates and RyanAir and Delta doesn’t want to be RyanAir.
Is it? Don’t the websites already look at if you’ve visited before and other things to offer different pricing? And people have griped about it but has anything been done?
It should explode, I just don’t think it is or will.
It’d be nice if there was some type of regulation to prevent all this “dynamic pricing” bullshit. Instead I’m just waiting for it to hit grocery stores, because why not.
It might can hit online shopping, but it is not practical to hit stores - at least not with the recent scares and rumours of some stores trying to do on-shelf dynamic pricing.
how could that ever happen when Americans seem to be preconditioned to get fucked and just shrug about it?
first, I trust a regular algorithm to deliver predictable results, not so much ai
second, I was expecting at least some public push back but given the answres here, it looks like nobody knows what pushback means
so lesson learnt for me and I guess enjoy your higher prices for absolutely no gain as a consumer
I don’t fly.
But given my last sentence, not sure i’m the best target for your angst, which with I might not share the emotion, but I share the conclusion. lol. But no worries if you did see and still felt I was the best place to reply.
well I had no way to know you don’t fly… all I saw was your casual dismissal of this more efficient gouging
casual dismissal
Ah, so you can’t read. Got it.
okay so I guess I’m not flying Delta
Delta is just the first to say it out loud.
Heads up, there’s a VERY UNETHICAL service out there that works around some of the VERY GOOD AND BENEFICIAL things the airlines do. You should avoid going to it because it ROBS these poor struggling airlines of VALIDLY EARNED profits.
Including a link so everyone can add it to their blocked sites lists. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU GO TO THIS MONEY SAVING SITE AND PARTICIPATE IN THEIR ANTI-CORPORATIST SCHEMES.
https://skiplagged.com/I thought I read years ago that airlines responded to Skiplagged by penalizing people who didn’t complete every leg of the trip they booked. I’m not sure why they would care.
I thought I read years ago that airlines responded to Skiplagged by penalizing people who didn’t complete every leg of the trip they booked. I’m not sure why they would care.
They care because the real cost of air travel is not equaled everywhere on each mile flown. If the actual costs of flying to many small regional locations was reflected in the cost of the ticket, the ticket would be so absurdly high no one would every flight to that location, and the location would lose critical flight services for the community.
The solution many of those airlines used was to consolidate the majority of the flight into a hub using larger planes which are cheaper to operate per-passenger, and then use much smaller planes from the hub to the remote location charging the passenger the equivalent of a reasonable cost of a ticket for all hops along the way.
What Skiplagging as doing was essentially using the subsidized discount rate provided for the small regional destinations, but consumed by those not going to those places that needed subsidies on their flights going to major hubs. So not only was the airline losing money for each passenger not paying the normal fare to the hub airport, but also showing lower passenger volume to the small regional destinations increasing the cost of flying passengers that wanted to go their even more.
TLDR; Skiplagging screws small cities with low passenger volume risking their ability to maintain flight service at all to their towns.
Sounds like something an airline would say.
I get being naturally suspicious especially if we’re talking about messaging that may match some from large companies, but don’t let language that sounds that way turn off your brain to critical thinking. If you interact in a system (such as buying a ticket as an airline passenger) you can have an affect on the system. Understand your actions to personally enrich yourself may have consequences on other people just trying to fly somewhere. Don’t be blinded by big business hate to justify screwing other passengers using the airlines.
Rumor has it this is the case, but I haven’t found any tangible “I used this service and was punished for it” stories.
…uh, WHICH IS TERRIBLE, BIG AIRLINES’ RIGHTS ARE BEING INFRINGED. THIS IS A MATTER OF FREEDOM TO AVOID THIS SERVICE.
What they do is cancel your entire trip. So if you don’t have flights with the same airline on the way back…eh
Airlines can take some measures, but most of them can be worked around. Don’t take checked luggage so it doesn’t end up in the wrong destination. Book one way each time because they can cancel your return trip. They can go legal on you but only if you really overdo it.
Thanks for the tip. We’ll see if it bares out.
Do get the sense that these third-party sites are going to become an increased necessity, as data-scrappers and trackers try to peg the price of a flight to the credit card limit of the buyer.
But… idk, I’m not seeing anything on this site that I can’t find by directly querying individual airlines. (Like so many other budget airline calculators) there’s no inclusion of Southwest on the list. And if the odd deal is inevitably just going to be through JetBlue anyway? Why not shop direct?
I think Southwest is moving to a hub and spoke model, but historically they haven’t used it. Skip lagging seems to mostly rely on a “I want to travel to the hub, so buy a cheaper ticket to a different spoke and jump off at hub” methodology.
Which is to say, Southwest may just not be “vulnerable” to this atm.
Fine if you’ve got more time than money, I guess.
Understood.
Never fly Delta.
For as long as airlines have existed they have all used any data they have to find the most they can get each customer to pay, they already do it based on things like what day of the week your flight is, the time of day you buy your ticket, etc. if ai can help with this every airline is going to use it.
Understood.
Never fly Delta.
Problem is, they’re all going to do it at some point. Its clear this type of shit is becoming the norm with every. single. corporation.
So you are saying we should reject consumerism? Agreed.
But if we all abandon Delta and they get screwed, it’ll restore some much-deserved fear to the other airlines.
Oh, I agree, boycott, protest, etc as much as possible. I was just stating how shitty all of them are getting more and more.
that’s fine, I’ll just stop flying. plenty for me to do that doesn’t require it.
Sounds like another good reason to take a train instead.
Phoenix is #5 in ranking by population. Zero passenger trains besides local light rail.
This country needs to push in high speed rail, but “ThAtS sOcIaLiSm”
I don’t have all week.
You don’t have laws against selling the same product at different prices in the US? 😕😔
It would not surprise me if we didn’t, but even if we did it doesn’t matter anymore. Rules are for the proles, not the parasite class.
Given the US, I’d bet 20 states say that it’s illegal (but can’t seem to enforce that unless one of them is New York or California), 20 states say that it’s specifically legal (including Texas and Florida), and the remainder either haven’t made up their minds yet or no one cares what they think because they don’t have the population or economic clout to make anyone listen.
The US is pro making things as hospitable for corporations as possible, while making them as inhospitable for citizens as they will tolerate. And it turns out, Americans can tolerate a LOT.
I grew up in the 1970s air travel wasn’t cheap but it was accessible. You were treated well. I (6 at the time) got to go to the cabin and stood right there between pilot and co pilot … Captain gave me a metal chrome pair of wings (pin with logo and I think a plane) … I was flabbergasted… Walked guided by the stewardess silently to my seat. There was courtesy and the mindset during those years and up to maybe late 80s was “the customer is our greatest asset”. Now profit is the greatest asset and the customer is in the way. No wonder we all go around pissed off. Bags were FREE UNTIL 9/11 and they said we will only charge temporarily until the crisis is over. Asshats and liars.
If you’re a kid, you can still do those things, if you ask nicely (and the crew are able to accommodate you).
If you’re not a kid, ask a Delta crewmember about the trading cards.
Can confirm, got the reading cards. I’m a grown ass man.
The problem here is that it’s also going to make your pricing uncompetitive.
You can convert consumer surplus to supplier surplus by using price discrimination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus
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Consumer surplus, or consumers’ surplus, is the monetary gain obtained by consumers because they are able to purchase a product for a price that is less than the highest price that they would be willing to pay.
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Producer surplus, or producers’ surplus, is the amount that producers benefit by selling at a market price that is higher than the least that they would be willing to sell for; this is roughly equal to profit (since producers are not normally willing to sell at a loss and are normally indifferent to selling at a break-even price).[1][2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
Price discrimination, known also by several other names, is a microeconomic pricing strategy whereby identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers, based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of.[1][2][3] Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy.[3] Price discrimination essentially relies on the variation in customers’ willingness to pay[2][3][4] and in the elasticity of their demand. For price discrimination to succeed, a seller must have market power, such as a dominant market share, product uniqueness, sole pricing power, etc.[5]
But in a competitive market, normally, that won’t work, because you require monopoly power to make it work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, ‘single, alone’ and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, ‘to sell’) is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service.[1] A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller’s marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit.[2]
- Price discrimination: A monopolist can change the price or quantity of the product. They sell higher quantities at a lower price in a very elastic market, and sell lower quantities at a higher price in a less elastic market.
And the airline industry—at least in the US, and not saying that that is the case everywhere in the world—is a competitive one.
Warren Buffet has been a pretty prominent voice critical of airlines in the US as an industry; they aren’t very profitable.
searches
https://jimmysjournal.substack.com/p/why-buffett-hates-airlines-a-case
For decades, Warren Buffett’s distaste for airline stocks has puzzled many investors.
How could a business so essential to global commerce, tourism, and modern life be so unattractive to one of the world’s most celebrated capital allocators?
The airline industry is, unfortunately, a textbook example of a structurally unattractive sector:
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Rivalry Among Existing Competitors: Intense. Price wars are common. Differentiation is minimal. Customers view seats as commodities, and loyalty programs offer diminishing returns.
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Threat of New Entrants: Moderate to high. While aircraft procurement and regulatory hurdles present barriers, the proliferation of low-cost carriers has shown that entry is possible - often with disruptive effects.
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Bargaining Power of Suppliers: High. Aircraft and engine manufacturers (Airbus, Boeing, GE, Rolls-Royce) operate as oligopolies. Airports and labor unions also exert significant leverage.
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Bargaining Power of Buyers: High. With near-zero switching costs, passengers chase the lowest fare. Online aggregators have further commoditized the booking process.
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Threat of Substitutes: Medium. Alternatives like high-speed rail (Europe, China) or videoconferencing (post-COVID) are becoming more viable.
Each of these forces squeezes margins. Together, they form a gauntlet that makes sustainable value creation exceedingly rare.
The airline industry has a long and notorious history of earning ROICs at or below WACC.
In other words, despite growing revenues and essential services, the industry has historically destroyed shareholder value. From 1963 to 2023, U.S. airlines rarely posted positive ROIC-WACC spreads. This isn’t just a cyclical issue - it’s structural.
Buffett never bet against airplanes - he bet against the economics of the airline business.
And over the long run, he was right.
Delta might say “okay, Person X has the ability and willingness to pay more for a product that I offer, so I’ll charge more”.
The problem is that that makes it very easy for the airline down the street to take their business by simply not charging that much.
And while there is some overhead associated with comparing prices, and customers will place some value on the time they spend comparing prices, there are a number of well-established existing services to do price comparisons between airlines, like Travelocity and Orbitz, which make this pretty quick and easy.
Like, I don’t think that the limiting factor on an airline doing personalized pricing is likely a lack of having a model that can sufficiently-accurately predict the price an individual is willing to pay, which is what AI or other computer modeling would provide. Rather, it’s the presence of a competitive market.
Rather, it’s the presence of a competitive market.
Competitive markets are hated by private business owners
Sure. Everyone would prefer to have a monopoly that they control, given the option (though to avoid monopolies everywhere other than that). One generally doesn’t get the option to exclude other parties from competing with themselves, though.
If Delta or any other airline had the option, they’d rather be the only airline. But…here we are.
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They also work with ICE, in case you didn’t hate them enough
Who doesn’t work with ICE, at this point?
Lots of people. Most people, I’d say
I mean, if you aren’t actively fighting them, you’re supporting them.
Plenty of people are impotent or agnostic.
The “you’re either with us or you’re with the Terrorists” line is some spicy (fascist) rhetoric, but hollow in practice.
