Name: WATCH: How to buy plane tickets in the AI era
Uploaded: 2025-08-09T15:03:03.000Z
Duration: 4 min 33 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You may have heard that Delta is using artificial intelligence to help set some airfare prices.

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That sparked fears that the airline could create a custom price for you, using your data to find how much you'd be willing to pay for a ticket.

But while Delta says they aren't doing that. They are using AI to help them adjust prices in response to market forces faster than humans can.

Here are three things to know if you're booking airfare now and whether custom pricing could impact you in the future.

One, if you're booking airfare now, the same old adages apply to find the best fare.

Delta is testing AI to help set prices on limited flights, about 3% of fares for now, moving to 20% by the end of the year.

But while AI might help prices move up and down faster, we currently all still see the same price.

So for a better deal, it's still a good idea to be flexible, which may mean flying on lower demand days like Tuesday, Wednesday, or Saturday.

Consider alternate airports in the areas you are traveling to and from.

Use flight comparison tools like Google Flights to easily compare cities, dates, and airlines.

If you're flying round-trip, check to see if two one-way tickets are cheaper than a round-trip booking.

And consider budget airlines or basic economy tickets on mainline carriers.

But if you do so, just be sure to pack light to avoid extra fees.

Two, much of the fear sparked by Delta's announcement comes from what Delta or any other airline or other company, for that matter, could do.

What I do hear from many businesses, they're saying that by using AI models, they're able to get both higher revenue and higher profits.

Jay Zagorski is a professor at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University.

We don't have any idea right now which companies are using AI and which are not.

And this is the problem I have with AI pricing.

It's not transparent and it can be taking an advantage of people who are not financially sophisticated.

AI could eventually help you get a better deal.

AI can actually come up with custom prices.

You can see a price on the shelf and if you tend to linger in that aisle a little bit, we can send you a custom ad, hey, 10 cents off, or 5% if you buy two of them right now.

But there is real worry that AI could be used to harness vast amounts of data to build a custom price based on that information.

And that means that your personalized price could be lower or much higher than, say, what someone else looking at that exact same product sees.

Here's Reuters transportation reporter David Shepardson speaking to Ali Rogin on PBS News Weekend.

The example that a couple of members of Congress made last week was, if someone went and looked at an obituary, right, and then went to an airline pricing website,

would they be more likely to pay more money because presumably they're looking at an obituary of a family friend or so on?

Three, so how can you guard against AI-driven custom pricing?

The less data you give AI, the worse its prediction.

Professor Zagorski recommends a few things.

Use cash for in-store purchases when you can.

That won't leave a data trail of what you're interested in or how much you've spent.

According to the FTC, new AI programs could use your browsing history to help set prices for products.

And third, consider using a VPN, which hides your IP address and encrypts your internet traffic.

If like myself, you're worried that using cash might hurt your credit card rewards-funded vacation.

Those rewards, those points, they're getting you some benefit, but you have to pay for those benefits.

And how are you going to be paying for those benefits in the future?

One way is by giving AI information so it can charge you the maximum price.

And for those of us who grew up on the internet and may have given up on privacy to participate in the digital world…

Yes, you don't think there's any downside for you losing your privacy in this digital world, but I'm here to tell you that customized pricing is going to cost you a lot.

And by maintaining your privacy, even if you're doing absolutely nothing wrong, you're probably going to pay less money in the future.