Originally Posted by aindfan

By the way, in case anyone here doesn't have a good appreciation for why airfare pricing is a hard problem to solve (in light of the mess that airlines got themselves into), you can read Computational complexity of air travel planning, a talk from an MIT computer science course presented by someone from ITA back in 2003. While I have no affiliation with either ITA or MIT, I think the talk does a great job explaining the challenges (especially if you have a computer science background).

Thanks for everyone's responses!