Fresh off a victory lap after a better-than-expected earnings report, Delta Air Lines is leaning into AI as a way to boost its profit margins further by maximizing what individual passengers pay for fares.
By the end of the year, Delta plans for 20% of its ticket prices to be individually determined using AI, president Glen Hauenstein told investors last week. Currently, about 3% of the airline’s flight prices are AI-determined, triple the portion from nine months ago.
Over time, the goal is to do away with static pricing altogether, Hauenstein explained during the company’s Investor Day in November.
“This is a full reengineering of how we price and how we will be pricing in the future,” he said. Eventually, “we will have a price that’s available on that flight, on that time, to you, the individual.”
He compared AI to “a super analyst” who is “working 24 hours a day, seven days a week and trying to simulate… real time, what should the price points be?”
While the rollout would be a “multiyear” process, he said, initial results “show amazingly favorable unit revenues.”
Delta accomplishes this pricing through a partnership with Fetcherr, a six-year-old Israeli company that also counts Azul, WestJet, Virgin Atlantic, and VivaAerobus as clients. And it has its sights set beyond flying. “Once we will be established in the airline industry, we will move to hospitality, car rentals, cruises, whatever,” cofounder Robby Nissan said at a travel conference in 2022.
‘Hacking our brains’
While Delta is unusually open about its use of AI, other carriers are likely to follow. Already, United Airlines uses generative AI to contact passengers about cancellations, while American Airlines uses it to predict who will miss their flight.
“Personalized pricing has been an airline goal for the past decade and a half,” Gary Leff, a travel industry authority who first noted Delta’s AI strategy, told Fortune. “Delta is the first major airline to speak so publicly about its use of AI pricing, to tout it for its potential upside at its investor day in the fall and to offer concrete metrics around its use in its recent earnings call.”
... continue reading