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Comment by jasonthorsness | Hacker News Reader

I am revolted by this; no matter what price I end up with or how long I spend I will always suspect I have paid too much, which I have to feel as a personal fault because it means I'm a bad shopper or negotiator (if you can call it negotiation when talking to AI). It's bad enough with car dealerships; if AI lets this model expand to all products, then maybe we should call off the whole thing.

I understand there are cultures with more normalized haggling, so it's interesting to me that this might not be the most common viewpoint.

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In cultures with more normalized haggling there's a conversation happening between two humans with agency, which this doesn't even have.

Ticket prices were already based on machine-learned algorithms. This is no different; they're just calling it AI, because investors want to hear that. There are entire organizations out there, across industries, which do this already (e.g., hotel prices) so this isn't simply Delta and/or airlines.

I don't mind variable ticket prices as much as I mind PERSONAL ticket prices. Maybe it's an immature point of view, but if the airline is screwing everyone that's one thing, but if everyone else is getting a good deal except for me and I am subsidizing other tickets by paying more for my incompetence it feels worse.

Yeah, prices have been dynamic for a long time. My method for getting better sats is buy the cheapest ticket that can be upgraded. Then, check for upgrade pricing daily. You'll see prices move all over day to day. Buy the upgrade if the price hits your threshold.

I've received a number of upgrades very reasonably priced this way. It also helps that airlines would rather sell the seats for small amounts than give away 'free' loyalty upgrades which keeps seats open.

Side note: but this is also why online privacy matters. If there's little to no data on you, you will appear as a new customer, and you can get really sweet deals.

Use a new browser session, use something like Tor that protects you from fingerprinting, poke around on a VPN, try changing your user agent. Don't log into anything. This is the ideal way to shop.

This is about individual pricing tailored to each customer though.

There has been a bit in that direction before, like hotel websites showing higher prices to users of Apple devices, but not individualized prices as far as I know.

That was never substantiated.

> This is no different;

This is different. The personal price discrimination is what's new.

No it’s not. They’ve been using your identification via cookies for years.

There's a lot of haggling/negotiation that's gone on long before there was ML/AI but people in cultures where the price is the price (for most things) just don't like it. Some is more transparent than others.

Well aside from the difference mentioned in the title

Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem that innovative compared to our current system where you can spend hours optimizing airline points, and shopping across various airlines.

I suspect oTAs would not be able to customize the price and thus only their direct sales would be impacted by this feature. Which means people that are loyal to a brand or business travelers would be hurt by this

I find your apparent faith that there might be some possibility that this isn't just a ploy to squeeze more money out of customers frankly inexplicable at this point. Were you born recently?

I'm old enough that hearing "were you born recently" comes across as a compliment ;)

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