"For an extra 15% off your final purchase, simply enter your social security number!"
[0]no proof, but presumably one or both of their analytics teams have figured out this signal, given its prevalence in the population
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/17/vladimir-putin...
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!
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)
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.
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!
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.
I think the OSS community might be able to fight this fight.
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?
What’s the big deal? We live in a society that’s been doing this for at least n-thousand years! :)
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.
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.
jawns•12h ago
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.
lawlessone•12h ago
darth_avocado•12h ago
morkalork•12h ago
eastbound•12h ago
AnthonyMouse•11h ago
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.
darth_avocado•8h ago
cjbgkagh•12h ago
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.
mvieira38•12h ago
fwip•12h ago
Hilift•12h ago
chollida1•11h ago
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?
righthand•11h ago
stult•11h ago
scarface_74•11h ago
SilverElfin•11h ago
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
pavlov•11h ago
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.