AI Flight Pricing Can Push Travelers to the Limit of Their Ability to Pay

Frequent flyers and consumer-rights advocates often complain about the convoluted nature of airline ticket prices. Discount tickets can quickly become expensive through the use of “drip pricing,” extra fees for once-free amenities such as checked bags, the good snacks or a seat next to your child. And a dizzying array of fare classes with “dynamic” prices that shift over time has made it much harder to get a deal by planning ahead, or even to know whether the price you’re offered today is better or worse than the one you’ll be offered tomorrow. According to a white paper, whose details haven’t been previously reported, this opacity might soon get much worse.

The paper was authored by Uri Yerushalmi, co-founder and chief AI officer of Fetcherr, an Israel-based software startup that works with Delta Air Lines Inc. and several other carriers and that’s marketing its services more widely. In it, Yerushalmi describes a pilot artificial intelligence program that Fetcherr created for an unspecified partner airline. He describes taking a relatively simple pricing structure and replacing it with a head-spinningly complex one, featuring many more fare classes with prices that swing wildly from one moment to the next. According to the paper, which the company shares with prospective customers, such pricing structures are so complex they “go beyond human cognitive limits.”