Airlines Race to Adopt AI 'Surveillance Pricing' That Could Kill Off Cheap Seats

Airlines Race to Adopt AI 'Surveillance Pricing' That Could Kill Off Cheap Seats(simpleflying.com)

10 points by thm 4 hours ago | 4 comments

inigyou 2 hours ago |

The results of my track_location tool show that the user is homeless and sleeps under a bridge. I need to offer a low price. I should offer slightly below the cost of providing the service in order to ensure this user's future loyalty.

kotaKat 1 hour ago |

Is it surveillance pricing or is it just offering you a different fare class?

For example, the United "fare classes" decoded; https://i.imgur.com/mNZ3gYc.png

I suspect they're just shifting fare bucket availability dynamically. Less G (lowest discounted) fares, more U "high fare" economy tickets when someone searches on the fly.

Somewhere you'll be able to find a ticket counter to walk up to though and ask for that G-class economy ticket, though. Much like how I book my tickets on Breeze Airlines at the ticket counter on Tuesdays at 10 AM, to avoid the technology fees - and fly for something like $30 round-trip to DC and back.

altmanaltman 4 hours ago |

> Essentially, surveillance pricing is a technologically evolved form of dynamic pricing that already exists. The application of AI as the driver behind dynamic pricing makes it capable of considering a massive amount of data in a rapid time period to empower much more sophisticated market analysis.

But how? There's no actual explanation of how this will work? What will evolve? What will they do that they already don't? If they wanted to kill cheap seats fully, they could have easily done with currently available tools so how will the AI demon being available means they will "race" to do something they could have always done?

coffeebeanHH 1 hour ago | |

The article sounds to me as if they just claim the 'need' for AI raises their operational costs that much so that they need to find better methods to raise prices. But yeah, they can stream their data just onto linear algebra with similar results. Or the simplest model ever: More attention -> more virtual demand.