Editorial: A pox on 'personalized' airline pricing at Delta or elsewhere

Chicago Tribune Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune on Jul 31, 2025

Published in Op Eds

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Delta Air Lines says it is rolling out “personalized fares,” which sounds benign and even sweet but is precisely the opposite.

What is really going on is that the massive airline is phasing in artificial intelligence-powered ticket pricing that may offer you a different fare for a particular trip than your neighbor down the street. Delta has insisted that it won’t use personal information, such as age or income, although that is the nirvana of this kind of dynamic pricing.

Big companies spend billions trying to discover who is price sensitive and who is not, so as to charge those who don’t care more than those who do. That was the analog thinking behind the old Saturday-night-stay requirement and the current variable refundability of tickets; price-sensitive leisure travelers need lower fares than business travelers who have no choice but to travel and typically are not paying their own freight. Airfares long have been variable, but using AI to boil this down to the individual at any given moment is going further than airlines ever have gone before.

Savvy travelers, of course, will use their own AI to try and defeat the airline’s AI and figure out the optimal moment at which to buy, but that will leave more vulnerable travelers, such as seniors or young people, potentially at the mercy of the algorithm. And for the rest of us, it will be exhausting.

Where Delta leads, you can bet other airlines will follow. Already, car buying is becoming a battle of AI-fueled data. Savvy consumers are fine; other folks, less so.

We think AI-driven pricing, especially that which is applied to individuals, is a real danger unless it is closely monitored. We don’t need to remind readers how much data an airline like Delta has on its customers, whatever its insistence that it would never use it for pricing decisions. We think there is something fundamentally unfair about the practice on that granular a level: Surely there should be a group of real, fair fares out there, not an infinite number of gradations that makes a task as simple and routine as buying a vacation flight a frustrating exercise that leaves you suspicious you just got ripped off, or at least did not get the best possible deal. No one wants the Uber-ization of the entire travel experience.

These changes are hardly limited to airlines. On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported on new technology emerging in Europe that will allow electronic prices in grocery stores to change without notice hundreds of times in a day, based on various, likely undisclosed, shifts in supply and demand. Imagine: A half-gallon of milk might be cheaper at noon than at 9 a.m. Or you might find that on hot days, the price of charcoal rises, only to fall when it starts to rain.

You can think of it as surge pricing at the grocery store.

Our first worry, though, is that those electronic tags will flash different prices based on the facial recognition of whoever is walking down the aisle, figuring out how much they have bought on their loyalty cards, how much is their typical spend, whether or not they buy on sale or couldn’t care less or even how much their appearance suggests they make in a week. As with airlines, we’ve also voluntarily given up a whole lot of our personal data to grocery stores, seduced by promotions within their apps. Many chains have insisted they wouldn’t even think of such things, but once the technology is in place and revenue is strapped, the temptation will only increase.

We know of no one who asked for any of this. And while this page has long respected businesses doing their best to maximize profit and revenue, we’re with the worried consumer advocates on this one. Data protection and full disclosure assurances are needed, help for vulnerable shoppers is a moral obligation, and supermarkets and other stores that go too far will risk a serious shopper backlash.

We’re already upset at the idea of having to stand for several minutes at the frozen pizza case in case the prices of pies suddenly drop. Who needs that picking up a few items on the way home from work?

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