How airlines charge you more

I think most of us, anecdotally, knew it was happening, but here's an article about how airlines are using AI to charge us more for flights, as well as a few strategies we can use to mitigate the effects a bit.

Many airlines (Delta, Air Canada and Porter are singled out in the article, but I'm sure they are all doing it to some extent) now routinely use AI to identify potential passengers who might be able and willing to pay over the odds for specific flights. So, when you browse an airline's website, what you are seeing are "personalized offers" based on your "willingness to pay". It may just be another example of "dynamic pricing", which has been used for years, but it is now being weaponized by AI (just one more headache AI has thrown our way).

Among the data it uses: past purchases over your lifetime; data from your airline loyalty program; demographic data about income, residence, etc; time of booking (business people, who are assumed to be able to pay more, tend to book later); browsing habits and device types; how full certain flights have been historically; specific events happening in destinations; etc.

Airlines says that it is currently only used for a small minority of sales, but that minority is rapidly increasing, because the airlines like what they see. Canada has slightly better privacy rules than the USA, for example, but given that most people just click "Accept" when faced with all that legal and technical jargon about cookies and permissions, we are pretty much all unwittingly putting ourselves are risk of what are effectively scams. "Implied consent" is often sufficient for some privacy intrusions.

So, what can we do about it? Well, a few things: avoid logging in to an airline's loyalty program until the moment of purchase is perhaps the most important one; use a virtual private network (VPN) to hide your location; clear your device's cookie and browser cache regularly; use third party fare-trackers to avoid giving unnecessary data directly to airlines; use incognito or private browsing; and be wary of the browsing habits of other people in your household, which can influence your own experience (yes, I know!)

It's a pain, for sure, and it's depressing that we have to fight against "the system" for our basic rights in this way, and be compelled to play the games of vendors.