Delta’s new AI-powered pricing strategy | Hacker News Reader

Delta’s new AI-powered pricing strategy

blog.getjetback.com

43 pointsbdev1234566 comments

Recent & related:

Delta moves to eliminate set prices, use AI to set your personal ticket price - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44596355 - July 2025 (91 comments)

Seems like there's a relatively simple solution for this: allow airline tickets to be resold.

Apart from the fact that this restriction massively benefits airlines, I've never understood why it's not allowed. No matter what, you still have to go through security and present your ID there, so the additional security benefit of knowing a traveler's identity at the time of purchase seems pretty marginal.

Ticket touts on the most popular routes? No thanks!

why not? let the market decide the price

If resale was freely allowed, you'd get a ton of middlemen skimming the margins, i.e. arbitrating. Like we have with concert tickets now.

I'm imagining a website that functions like a commodity trading website that allows anyone to buy and sell tickets for a given airline/time/location. Airlines could buy back tickets if they wanted.

That only works with concerts because of severely constrained supply. There's only one Taylor Swift, and she can only perform so many times each year. Yes there's probably no shortage of artists in general, but they're not interchangeable (certainly much less so compared to airlines). The air travel market is, therefore, not nearly as constrained.

I dunno, ticket reselling might not be strictly better, but it seems unlikely to be worse and at the very least it would be nice to have the option of selling your ticket if your plans change. As it is, you generally either have to pay extra in advance for that privilege, or just eat the loss. Either way it's great for the airlines, therefore not great for consumers.

Airlines have zero financial incentive to allow ticket resales. This would only happen under some sort of government mandate.

The Civil Rights Act requires companies not to discriminate against legally protected classes. That includes both disparate treatment and disparate impact.

I can't see how "personalized pricing" would remain unchallenged, given those hurdles, if it truly means pricing fares based on individual characteristics.

It's totally fine to have loyalty programs that reward people who fly Delta frequently with better rates.

But when an ML model is making inferences about a person's willingness to pay based on what data a company has collected about them, that really feels like it's moving into murky waters, even apart from the predatory element.

yeah seems likely if they know peoples browsing habits they could easily indirectly be basing prices on protected characteristics

You’d have to demonstrate that the pricing consistently is high/low based on one of the protected classes to successfully challenge it.

Assuming their model is accurate at predicting economic value and assuming that the wage gap between men and women still exists, wouldn't it be relatively straightforward to show men as a group are quoted higher prices?

Men aren’t a protected class. I’m not sarcastic: They really are not, it’s legally ok to charge men more.

The general problem here is that "disparate impact" is incoherent. If you charge everyone the same price then you're de facto excluding people with less money, and therefore have a disparate impact on the basis of various protected classes because of the correlation between e.g. race and poverty.

Now suppose you charge less to people with less money. Is that what you're supposed to do? No, sorry, there was a preexisting disparity in your customer population on the basis of national origin and doing that makes it worse, you still lose.

There are multiple protected classes and how something affects one of them is often the inverse of how it affects a different one, so it isn't possible to not have a disparate impact. And then whether something is considered to in any given case is nothing but politics and vibes.

If you are getting a different treatment purely because you’re a man, then you can absolutely sue and win.

"Men" and "being a man" sure as hell is a protected class, and there are plenty of lawsuits to back it up. e.g.

https://www.foxnews.com/story/texas-man-settles-discriminati...

like it's literally a 5 second search on the google or bing to prove

I thought the bar was that you had to prove that it doesn't discriminate which a is much higher, I thought this is what drove many settlements.

Personally I would rather limit all price discriminations to a simple predictable and publicly inspectable customizable formulae. It's like the finance guys who exalt the virtues of increased liquidity but that disappears the moment you try to use it. Similar for the extra complexity for price discovery.

Maybe their excuse will be that it can't be proven whether or not the deep learning model is discriminating based on this or that, it's just taking in as much data as possible?

As a student of political science, I agree with you. However, the current political administration and Supreme Court seem unlikely to be interested in protecting consumers in this way.

the current administration and SCOTUS are doing everything they can, aggressively, to screw over the average consumer

There's complexity here that could sway a court. A few years ago, we engaged an AI company to identify potentially problematic hospitality customers. Those were required to check in in person at the front desk instead of the app. Sounds like it could fail those tests, but those tests are for humans and this is AI!

the second it leaks that "potentially problematic hospitality customers" disproportionally target a minority you and the AI company will be sued aggressively from all sides.

Oh sure, and the publicity would actually be worse. But these were organized crime gangs that would check in, steal everything, and leave in 15 minutes. So the investigation and targeting was fairly narrow. It wasn't designed to filter unruly guests or anything else.

Interesting thought.

What specific protected class is "harmed" by personalized pricing?

And how would you prove that the model discriminated against them based on a protected element?

All of them as they’re being used to compete and discriminate against each other.

That's not really how it works in the US. You have to prove that you were dicriminated against based on a protected class.

Everyone getting different prices doesn't mean its illegal:)

You can’t charge black people systemically different prices than white people, for example. Neither better nor worse prices. Proving causality would likely be the hard part, but a systematic survey of disparate pricing could show disparate impact. AI models frequently are invisibly biased on race because of some feature that operates as a proxy measure that the developers don’t recognize. eg something as simple as ZIP code combined with a name is a highly reliable predictor of race, and there are many similar, far more subtle ways bias can creep into a model.

You’re assuming that we have a functional government that doesn’t turn a blind eye to discrimination.

How can anyone allege discrimination when all you have is an AI telling you the price you get? It’s not open source and you don’t get to see data across all races or sexes or whatever to spot a pattern.

I think we just need new regulations and laws. Maybe make income or wealth a protected trait you cannot discriminate on. Or require transparency and reporting on algorithmic pricing. Or higher taxes for businesses that use these tactics.

But that’s years away, if ever. I bet all airlines will do this. I’ll just fly even less

> “make income or wealth a protected trait you cannot discriminate on”

Seems like that would be problematic for progressive tax rates.

Honestly it’s pretty clever. “Wealth is a protected class” would fit right in with the modern right-wing rhetoric, continuing the inversion theme already established with “actually whites are the targets of racism” and “actually Christians are persecuted in the West”, etc.

Time to open source some adversarial AI! De-wealth your data footprint for better prices, leave digital traces that say “I’m dirt poor, but willing to buy if the price is right”.

I think the OSS community might be able to fight this fight.

I don't think that's possible, there's too much data that pairs your real identity with purchases.

Even Delta's own information on your past purchases (recall tickets are nominative) could be enough to size you up.

I don't know who's responsible, but there's clear information sharing related to using a credit card in the US. E-mail address and whether you have Amazon Prime are two examples I've seen (I was never asked for permission to share this information).

Then there's smartphone-based payment methods, by Google and Apple no less. I'm sure that results in no data at all being disseminated.

I don't think it'd be too complicated for a few major retailers, Amazon and airlines to get together and have a good estimate of your income (or at least of your expenses). What are you going to do against that? Pay by cash everywhere?

I dopn't know, could be doable, at least some basics to muddy the water and maybe more:

Use packages like selenium, VPN providers could offer more turn-key w/ advances features as a value add SaaS.

The idea is, you're not blocking the pricing models, you're feeding them a perfectly consistent bottom-tier consumer profile. They don't love you as a customer, but they'll take you, they know you're a reliable buyer for the right price. You just never buy unless it's at the absolute floor. There's be the need for regular cat & mouse tactice, like with VPN & IP blocking those trying to get around geo blackouts.

a) Use headless Selenium automation to simulate a stable consumer footprint: flight searches, cart abandonment, loyalty program logins, price comparisons.

b) Enrichment networks (LiveRamp, Oracle, etc.) pick up your cookies, browsing behavior, email patterns, so give them exactly what they want: budget travel habits, low-income signals, and no upsell interest.

c) Keep a consistent synthetic persona: same email, same billing ZIP, same bargain behavior, every time. Never act like a deal hunter, just a reluctant flyer with no flexibility.

d) Optional: pair it with a residential-looking PO box address ++ curated device fingerprint (e.g., Firefox on Win10, 1366x768). Avoid exit nodes from sketchy VPNs or known scraper IP pools. Prepaid credit cards.

e) You're not avoiding targeting, you're training the model. Over time, it learns: this user only converts at the floor. That's what it shows you.

Too much effort? Bundle it: Again, imagine a VPN-style service that quietly builds your fake profile over weeks using open-source tools. Privacy meets price manipulation.

Relax, the ticket isn’t $4,999 because you’re broke, it’s pre‑success tax on your inevitable successful exit. They do see your YCombinator IP after all. Or...open the site in Lynx on an old ThinkPad. The fare will drop by half.

I feel like Lynx on a ThinkPad would signal techie more than broke. How about Internet Explorer on Windows XP, maybe using the public library wifi?

Internet Explorer on Windows XP just means you are Putin. Millions in hidden Swiss accounts.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/17/vladimir-putin...

If you don't fit (hah) within their features you're more likely to end up with an answer near the average.

Chromebook

If you fly a lot it might pay to get a pre-paid Android beater from CVS to use to buy tickets.

But this is our future boring dystopia. We're not going to get the post-scarcity future from Star Trek but the techno-feudal hellscape of cyberpunk novels. Hooray technology!

Wasn't priceline.com doing something similar many years ago by showing inflated prices to those using safari vs another browser?

What most surprises me with this article is that "personalized pricing" is even legal to begin with.

What can possibly justify this being legal? It seems ripe for abuse.

If airlines are allowed to do this, I don't think there'll be a thing we can do, seeing as tickets are nominative.

As someone who always checks both Uber and Lyft, and always keeps both apps open during the ride so the loser knows I went with the cheaper alternative[0], I'm guessing I won't be flying Delta anymore.

[0]no proof, but presumably one or both of their analytics teams have figured out this signal, given its prevalence in the population

For better or worse I think Delta will be happy to lose you as a customer. They are not a low-cost carrier, and their current business strategy is focused on charging higher fares for slightly better service than the competitors. As far as they're concerned, price-sensitive consumers who are looking for the cheapest fare can go fly on Frontier or whatever.

I travel around the world a lot, and Delta was by far one of the the worst airlines I have ever taken. I doubt they 'charge extra for slightly better service'.

Delta's strategy might fail but that's what they're trying to do. Delta is mainly competing against American and United, and to a lesser extent against Southwest. Whether Delta is worse than Singapore Airlines or Emirates or something doesn't really matter.

it is true that airlines in the US are generally a bit trashy.

the funny part about the backlash is that the travel budgets are likely somewhat pareto distributed and under the not-personalized pricing strategy it is the little guy who is probably overpaying for plane tickets, not the corporations and the wealthy individuals

It's not usually up to businesses to compensate wealth inequality by adapting prices to customers.

I personally find this appalling, not because of the prospect of paying more or less, but because of the arbitrariness and opacity of it all. I'm not too excited for a future where we'll have to spoof various browser identities and try different times of day and VPNs to book plane tickets...

At the extreme, some people could find themselves stuck or in very difficult situations because of this kind of practice. Oh, your parent is on their deathbed? Shouldn't have said that to a friend on Messenger or WhatsApp.

And I don't understand what could possibly justify personalized pricing (towards consumers, not businesses) of non-personalized goods and services being legal in the first place.

Historically, all prices are negotiated. We ended up with a culture of flat pricing for efficiency, with only a few high value items like cars being negotiated. You walk into a car dealer and spend hours to determine exactly how much they can get you to pay for the car you want. But now with advanced automation, it's worth the complexity to extract the maximum value out of each customer again, even on small purchases of a dollar or two.

This is an interesting way to think about it. I would argue that flat pricing wasn’t for efficiency but “fairness”.

And also point out that AI driven price discrimination isn’t anywhere close to negotiated. You’re stuck with the price the machine gives you, with little to no recourse, short of rewriting your entire digital life!

Queue VPNs set up specifically in low-income areas to provide lower pricing on the internet.

How do they defeat private mode in my browser?

By defaulting to high until low is demonstrated?

By defaulting to infinity (not selling to the person at all) until enough info is demonstrated.

For safety

I can see that now.

"For an extra 15% off your final purchase, simply enter your social security number!"

Probably by showing you lower prices and then going “oops the seat is no longer available” the minute you try to book it with your personal information.

Simple, by defining the price for customers they have insufficient data on as max(price). Private mode and VPN are actually super easy to detect for someone willing to extract the maximum value out of you.

Sounds like consumers need AI identities to help them get the best deals from this kind of thing.

That is why this is so diabolically effective. To book the ticket they need your real id, quickly correlated across the hundreds of brokers willing to sell your data. I bet they have a partnership with Visa and Amex.

Currently that data is entered long after they display price information.

The article notes that they might require you to be logged in to your DeltaAir account to see the (good?) prices for routes.

I’m curious what this will do to route planning tools, resellers and travel agents. Ones I can think of would be Booking.com or Kayak — you couldn’t even see price info? That would be a radical change.

The source for this "article" is a company trying to sell an air travel related service that would be out of business if airlines changes their pricing model. It's also clearly written with AI hence the bullet point recap at the end. So I would take it all with a huge grain of salt.

Don't we already have individual pricing on lots of things like used cars, contractors doing work on your house, car insurance, etc? Most people that work in sales have some ability to adjust pricing based on their personal judgement of the customer(mark). Do you think there's not discrimination by a contractor when they come into your house and size you up and what they think you are willing to pay or maybe they just don't like your race/religion/smell. I'm just a little confused when it's so outrageous if airlines or amazon gives different prices to different people when it happens every time there is actual one on one price negotiation.

I’d say two big differences are 1) human vs machine (especially when you get to the scale of something like Delta airlines) and 2) you have a lot more power in the negotiations you described! Basing it on 5 years of purchases and historical data isn’t a negotiation—it’s a “my way or the highway”

This is end-stage capitalism, where the corporations become cartels. They're no longer happy with making a profit based upon providing good competition based upon efficiency gains. They are looking for profit maximization at any cost.

> Delta Engineered a Pricing System That Sorts You by Economic Value

What’s the big deal? We live in a society that’s been doing this for at least n-thousand years! :)

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