No. It's an urban myth. You're seeing the same prices as everyone else, and your personal searches are going to be little more than a blip against the entire rest of the world. :)

Now, there are new pricing tools coming which are allowing for more dynamic pricing, which will be bad for everyone except for the owners of airline stocks -- assuming that there's not enough consumer backlash to matter, that is. ATPCO -- the company that's responsible for publishing airfares to the distribution systems used by tools like Google Flights -- announced that it's expecting to launch a new product to allow individualized pricing this year. And, once that happens, you can expect that your fares might be different than mine, based upon flying and purchase history, etc., and potentially even based upon your search history, I suppose. But, that's not what you're seeing right now.

Prices for fare classes are published (available via many subscription services) and are not changed due to your probing of the website. They do change frequently for other reasons.

Most of the time when you see a price change, what you are seeing is a change in fare inventory -- a fare class no longer available or with new availability.

Additionally, fare class availability can change depending on how you search.

There is also the issue of inventory caching -- since there is a fee for checking certain information for "travel agencies", so they cache or save recent results and re-use them, potentially leading to out of date information.

And of course there are other people checking and booking trips -- and maybe taking that cheaper inventory.

So there are a lot of moving parts (more than the above) and that can lead to strange results if you frequently check pricing. Sometimes prices will return, sometimes they will not.

However, your concern is not completely unwarranted. There is talk of tailoring pricing to the buyer but not aware of any airline presently doing that.

Is this sort of customized price discrimination legal? I could somehow imagine the algo ending up discriminating against a specific demographic by accident, and then the legal troubles that could ensue.

I think jsloan is referring to the New Distribution Capability (NDC). The NDC's purpose is not to personalize pricing like this. The NDC is designed to allow the airline to package fares. Like - right now - you can't really pick and choose whether you want to add a seat, meal, or bag to your basic economy fare unless you're booking from the airline's website. The NDC will allow any booking engine (orbitz, expedia, concur) to customize which amenities your fare quote includes.

The airlines could use the same technology to 'personalize' your fare and charge people who always book nonstops more. But ... the airlines have (so far) promised that they won't do that. We'll see ...

I've also had a few times where I search for a flight on UA, go all the way to the final summary price quote, and if it includes a partner code-share then it will block that availability for up to 24hrs. So the fare bucket can fill up but then after 24hrs it releases again

I imagine the airlines' legal departments are looking into this. :)

https://www.atpco.net/innovation/dynamic-pricing

#2 sounds like what you're talking about. #1 and #3 are the ones that are troublesome to me as a consumer. I believe the article that I read -- I can't find it now -- came out of their February working group. None of this is UA-specific, though, so it probably belongs in another group until/unless UA starts using these technologies.

Agree with the "urban myth" statement. I often use Google or Kayak for their dynamic price tracking tools. Be careful when using Kayak's purchase guide, I have often seen them give the "buy now" only to see the price fall days later. The price alerts can help as well, I bought a ticket once from SFO-HNL and on an alert I saw the price dropped so dramatically that I even after taking the hit for cancelling and re-booking the trip I saved money.

As of now, the certain answer is "No".
But you can bet airlines are looking at how to implement this or something similar.

I check several times a day for reasonable BC fares to many destinations.

If those idiots raise fares based on that, they will depart with many empty seats that could have realized a nice margins.

The problem with some of these theories is that they lack thorough validation testing that software engineers go through.

it's one thing to see a difference between pricing, but that's not the end of the story. You need to be able to reproduce that price change reliably, and maybe using incognito mode to help set the baseline. There's a bunch of theories out there too when you check Uber prices and then check Lyft, somehow the apps are cross communicating and your second check gives you lower prices.

I'm sure ATPCO is trying to develop this capability so they can sell it to the airlines. The airlines decide what gets offered, though, and for now they say they won't target individuals.

To mrt88's point, though, I don't see how airlines could pull this off. I think there would be tremendous backlash if Bob and his neighbor start getting different pricing. Business travelers seem a logical target for higher fares, but then it would be very easy to link this to racial bias. I don't see how the airlines could win if they enter this ring.

There is no way this is going to be implemented in the form of variable pricing for customers based on identity - it would require a complete retooling of the entire GDS platform (there are multiple independent GDS platforms) that agencies use, and would then require an agent to either input someone's identity before getting a price quote, or the price could change after the record was created based on the name and other factors being entered to complete the record, something like this would be wholly impractical and unacceptable as it would make fare quotes impossible....and that's before we even touch on the legal aspects of deliberate discriminatory pricing practices.

The NDC has been in work for years already. The GDSs are now leading the charge because it's the only way they'll stay relevant.

It won't start with quotes per person. I will more likely start with different fare quotes by types of traveler. For example, business travelers are already very easy to identify and could be used as a factor to deliver a higher fare.

See: http://www.iata.org/whatwedo/airline...s/default.aspx

What they are planning and what they can offer are two different things - they will spend millions on technology that may ultimately flag customers for individual pricing, then it will end up in court, and in almost any consumer-friendly jurisdiction like the EU, or the USA post-Trump, the concept will be outlawed and that's the end of it.

Adjusting fares by customer type, not by individual person, is something more likely, but something that exists today - who buys last minute fares? Business travelers. Are last minute fares higher or lower? Are some routes more obvious than others? You don't need a computer to tell you that someone buying a ticket at 10PM for an 8am flight the next morning from LGA to ORD is likely a business traveler who is willing to pay more - hence inventory management 101 and pricing 101 already fixes this "problem", a process that has been in place for decades.

However, in terms of offering bocastephen a fare of $475 and TBD a fare of $505 for the same flight, class of service and for no other reason than our independent relationship to the airline which may include soft credit pulls, some form of background checking, employment checking, income checking, travel history, etc - basically combing through Big Data looking for clues as to who/what we are and how much we should be charged - that is either a non-starter, or will end up in court within hours of being rolled out.

It's discriminatory pricing, it should be illegal, and it's a PR nightmare. What if you walked into McDonalds and the menu had no prices, but the cashier was given 10 seconds to size you up (appearance, attire, etc) before telling you how much your Big Mac was going to cost? You're told $4, but the person in line beside you at the next register is told $3.25, and the person on the other side is charged $6.50?

Then you would be describing every single non-retail business in the world -- and retail, in much of the world, to boot.