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About a decade ago, the news got out that the best time to buy plane tickets was on a Tuesday. It had something to do with airlines determining that Tuesday was the least likely day of the week for someone to purchase tickets, which caused prices to dip. Those same advice articles claimed that the worst days to buy tickets were Fridays and days traditionally considered paydays, like the 15th and 30th of the month. I adhered to those rules for years until Google Flights and Capital One introduced their “price-tracking” features which did the work for me.

In recent, post-pandemic years, I’ve realized that the best way to get reasonable flight prices is to use the incognito browser. Airlines track your interest in buying tickets and any potential destinations that you’ve browsed or expressed interest in. In our new, AI-dominated world, Delta is the first airline to admit to this new trend. They’re using AI to determine how much they charge for their tickets. This means that when a customer looks up flight prices, they’ll be shown the prices that the AI “thinks” they’ll be willing to pay vs what is a fair market value. Right now, they claim to use that model “only” 3% of the time, but the plan is to get that AI-pricing model up to 20% by the end of the year.

By the end of the year, Delta plans for 20% of its ticket prices to be individually determined using AI, president Glen Hauenstein told investors last week. Currently, about 3% of the airline’s flight prices are AI-determined, triple the portion from nine months ago. Over time, the goal is to do away with static pricing altogether, Hauenstein explained during the company’s Investor Day in November.

“This is a full reengineering of how we price and how we will be pricing in the future,” he said. Eventually, “we will have a price that’s available on that flight, on that time, to you, the individual.” He compared AI to “a super analyst” who is “working 24 hours a day, seven days a week and trying to simulate… real time, what should the price points be?” While the rollout would be a “multiyear” process, he said, initial results “show amazingly favorable unit revenues.” Delta accomplishes this pricing through a partnership with Fetcherr, a six-year-old Israeli company that also counts Azul, WestJet, Virgin Atlantic, and VivaAerobus as clients. And it has its sights set beyond flying. “Once we will be established in the airline industry, we will move to hospitality, car rentals, cruises, whatever,” cofounder Robby Nissan said at a travel conference in 2022.

“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.”

Privacy advocates noted Delta’s development with concern.“They are trying to see into people’s heads to see how much they’re willing to pay,” said Justin Kloczko, who analyzes so-called surveillance pricing for Consumer Watchdog, a California nonprofit. “They are basically hacking our brains.”

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) called Delta’s practice “predatory pricing,” saying, “I won’t let them get away with this.” A Delta spokesperson told Fortune the airline “has zero tolerance for discrimination. Our fares are publicly filed and based solely on trip-related factors like advance purchase and cabin class, and we maintain strict safeguards to ensure compliance with federal law…”

“AI isn’t just optimizing business operations, but fundamentally rewriting the rules of commerce and consumer experience,” Matt Britton, author of Generation AI, told Fortune. “For consumers, this means the era of “fair” pricing is over. The price you see is the price the algorithm thinks you’ll accept, not a universal rate.”

While differential pricing is not illegal per se, federal laws prohibit charging different rates to people based on their sex or ethnicity, and the use of some identifiers like ZIP codes have been shown to have a disparate impact on protected classes. Without a public record of all fares, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to determine if Delta is charging vastly different fares to people based on their membership in a protected class.

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. Early research on personalized pricing isn’t favorable for the consumer. Consumer Watchdog found that the best deals were offered to the wealthiest customers—with the worst deals given to the poorest people, who are least likely to have other options.

[From Fortune]

This is both frustrating and infuriating. It really boils down to privacy. It’s so predatory for companies to know and charge customers a price based on their own assessment. What happens when customers revolt and refuse to pay? Can people even get the word out to make that possible? Is air travel going to become a luxury for those who can afford it (more so than it already is)? At some point, the airline industry is going to price themselves out of business in the name of profits.

I have two experiences with what I suspect was AI-pricing. The first one happened when I was in Tokyo back in April. I found non-resell tickets to one of the Hamilton 20th reunion shows for an astoundingly cheap price via Ticketmaster. I immediately texted my bestie, who lives in Brooklyn. She looked and said that those same seats were much more than what I’d seen using a Tokyo IP address. My second story happened last week: I’ve been in San Diego since last Saturday. Before we left home, I was using an incognito browser to look at ticket prices to visit London. They were the same price for weeks. I looked at them again when we got to California and they had gone up by more than $100. On a hunch, I did the exact same search using Mr. Rosie’s VPN with the location set for back home. The price went back down to what it was hours before. It sucks that we live in an age where we can barely escape these types of predatory practices. I hope we can figure out a way to stop it.

You’ve planned and saved for months to take your family on that dream vacation. You buy amusement park tickets. Then, you go to buy the flights, except all of a sudden… the price has skyrocketed. Why? Because your airline knows you just purchased those tickets.

— Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) July 24, 2025

Photo note by CB: This is Delta’s Chief Marketing Officer, Alicia Tillman, with Bob Iger.
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photos credit: Jeffrey S.S. on Pexels and Getty