Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Delta Air Lines Inc commenced operations 96 years ago. The air line operates from nine hubs with Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport the largest. This is measured in terms of total passengers as well as number of departures. The regional subsidiaries as well as contractors operate under the name Delta Connection. Delta operates 5,400 flights daily, serving 325 destinations in 52 countries on six continents.
Delta Air in the digital environment
Delta Air Lines DAL.N said on Friday it will not use artificial intelligence to set personalized ticket prices for passengers after facing sharp criticism from U.S. lawmakers and broad public concern. Last week, Democratic Senators Ruben Gallego, Mark Warner and Richard Blumenthal said they believed the Atlanta-based airline would use AI to set individual prices, which would “likely mean fare price increases up to each individual consumer’s personal ‘pain point.'”
American politician and Marine Corps veteran Ruben Gallego currently serves as the junior United States senator from Arizona. He assumed office during January 2025. He currently serves office with Mark Kelly. Delta said it has not used AI to set personalized prices but previously said it plans to deploy AI-based revenue management technology across 20% of its domestic network by the end of 2025 in partnership with Fetcherr, an AI pricing company.
Senators praised Delta’s commitment not to use AI for personal pricing but expressed many questions and want more details about what data Delta is collecting to set prices. The senators cited a comment in December by Delta President Glen Hauenstein that the carrier’s AI price-setting technology is capable of setting fares based on a prediction of “the amount people are willing to pay for the premium products related to the base fares.”
Congressional issues on AI
Last week, American Airlines AAL.O CEO Robert Isom said using AI to set ticket prices could hurt consumer trust. “This is not about bait and switch. This is not about tricking,” Isom said on an earnings call, adding “talk about using AI in that way, I don’t think it’s appropriate. And certainly, from American, it’s not something we will do.” Major US airline American Airlines Inc is classed as the largest airline in the world. This is in terms of passengers carried as well as daily flights.
Democratic lawmakers Greg Casar and Rashida Tlaib last week introduced legislation to bar companies from using AI to set prices or wages based on Americans’ personal data and would specifically ban airlines raising individual prices after seeing a search for a family obituary. They cited a Federal Trade Commission staff report in January that found
“retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services — from a person’s location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage.”
Flying with or without AI
The FTC cited a hypothetical example of a consumer profiled as a new parent who could intentionally be shown higher-priced baby thermometers and collect behavioral details to forecast a customer’s state of mind. Delta said airlines have used dynamic pricing for more than three decades, in which pricing fluctuates based on a variety of factors like overall customer demand, fuel prices and competition, but not a specific consumer’s personal information.
“Given the tens of millions of fares and hundreds of thousands of routes for sale at any given time, the use of new technology like AI promises to streamline the process by which we analyze existing data and the speed and scale at which we can respond to changing market dynamics,” Delta’s letter said.
The digital environment evolves almost as fast as the speed at which the world turns. A lot of the changes and amendments relate more directly to advances in artificial intelligence. One of these notable matters is the AI revolution in revenue management. This helps to transform the way businesses are able to generate as well as manage their revenue. A prime example of the benefit that this can have is the 51% of finance companies that have shown a revenue increase of at approximately 10% due to this AI implementation.
GCN.com/REUTERS.