Airlines may be ready to start shuffling through your personal data and habits to see how much they can get you to pay for a ticket. In fact, some suspect, they may already be doing that for some passengers.
It’s long been known that repeatedly searching booking sites for a particular route can get you steered to higher prices (after all, you seem to really need that flight), but up to now it’s not been based on personal info gleaned from cookies and online accounts.
The concept, called dynamic pricing, can use data on where you shop, what you spend and more to determine a price you’ll be willing to pay (but it won’t likely offer you anything lower than posted prices!)
John McBride, director of product management for PROS, which provides booking software to a number of carriers including Lufthansa, Emirates and Southwest, some operators have already tried it on some ticket searches. He told Travel Weekly that “2018 will be a very phenomenal year in terms of traction. Based on our backlogs of projects, there will be a handful of large carriers that move toward dynamic pricing.”
The Air Tariff Publishing Company, which serves 430 airlines, has been discussing implementation of dynamic pricing. In a 2015 study by ATPCO, it suggested that “Rather than managing only very broad segmentation, the application of [Customer Relationship Management] to revenue management results in the ability to price at a more granular level: the level of ‘who is asking’.”
We’d better all be asking!
