Before I buy a plane ticket I perform a small private ritual, and I have never once had evidence that it works.
Private window. Cookies cleared. If the fare moved twice while I sat there thinking, I switch from laptop to phone, on the theory that the airline watches one and not the other. Then I buy whatever number is showing and wonder, the whole way to the airport, whether I paid the price or my price. A superstition with a keyboard shortcut — recommended to friends in the tone of a man who knows something.
The ritual, it turns out, is not only mine. In a proposed class action filed in April, a customer says a JetBlue fare climbed while they booked travel to a funeral — and, per the complaint, the airline's own account on X suggested they "[t]ry clearing your cache and cookies or booking with an incognito window." My folk remedy, handed back as customer service.
In June I wrote here about the price built for you before you reached for your phone — that piece was about grocery carts. The question has moved to the fare screen, and somebody with committee letterhead has put it to an entire industry in writing.
The first time the question went to all of them at once
On August 11, 2026, Frank Pallone, Jr. of New Jersey — the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee — sent the same letter to eight carriers: Alaska, American, Delta, Frontier, Hawaiian, JetBlue, Southwest and United. He requested answers by August 25, 2026.
"Consumers deserve to know if businesses are using their personal information to manipulate the prices they pay," Pallone said when the letters went out. They extend an inquiry he opened on May 11, 2026 with letters to 25 companies, and rest on a plain charge: that companies "appear to be relying on technological advances to maximize profit at the expense of consumers who are already stretched thin financially."
The Hill summarized the ask: whether the airlines use income, spending history, location and browsing data to set prices, and whether prices undergo human review before taking effect. The letter itself is stranger.
It defines a "data element" to cover income, race, employment, spending patterns, loyalty program participation, browsing behavior and location — then keeps going, down to device characteristics "including, but not limited to unique device ID, IP address, battery percentage, and device type".
Battery percentage. Somebody thought it worth asking, on the record, whether the charge left on your phone helps set what a seat costs.
The questions are just as pointed. Question 8 asks who reviews the prices an algorithm calculates, then: "Who decides if those prices go into effect or do they occur automatically?" Subsection (e) asks "is there an upward limit to how high a price may be set for a customer?" Question 9 asks whether the airlines build customer segments "based on income, sex, age, race, or other similar criteria." Question 13 demands every analysis evaluating "the actual, evaluated, or projected revenue … of any use of data elements from consumers to inform or set prices," going back to January 1, 2025.
Two things to keep straight. This is a request, not a subpoena — a ranking member cannot compel anything. And as of this writing, with the August 25 deadline past, none of the eight has said publicly what it sent back, and the committee has released nothing. That silence is ordinary; such correspondence stays private unless a member publishes it. But it means the story here is not what the airlines admitted. It is the question itself.
About that six percent
One number from the letter traveled furthest: "One study found that an airline boosted its own revenue by as much as six percent by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) pricing based on consumer information, an increase that comes at the expense of consumers."
A study, then. So I went to the footnote. Footnote 6 cites "Are Airlines Spying on You? … Forbes (Dec. 9, 2024)" — a consumer-advice article, not a study. Its actual sentence: "In one trial, a large unnamed network airline saw a 6% revenue boost by switching to AI-powered pricing."
Unnamed airline. One trial. And Forbes never says that trial used anybody's personal data — "AI-powered pricing" covers the ordinary revenue-management math airlines have run since the 1980s. If you are demanding that an industry account for its arithmetic, your own first paragraph should be as well sourced as the answers you want.
A better number exists, and it is worse for the industry. Consumer Reports notes that multiple companies have told the FTC that these tools have increased revenue by between 2 percent and 5 percent, and margins by 1 percent to 4 percent — their own results, reported to a regulator. Does that raise what you pay? "Yes, but not always": who wins and who loses "is extremely difficult to determine and is almost never clear to the customers themselves."
What the airlines have already said, on the record
The JetBlue case is the loudest. Phillips v. JetBlue Airways Corp., filed April 22, 2026 in the Eastern District of New York, alleges the airline uses website trackers to collect behavioral data without adequate consent, then uses it to set ticket prices dynamically based on each consumer's perceived willingness to pay. Those are allegations; nothing is proven, and JetBlue denies them: its fares "are not determined by cached data or other personal information."
Delta's denial is older and flatly categorical. In its own published letter answering three senators in July 2025, the airline wrote: "There is no fare product Delta has ever used, is testing or plans to use that targets customers with individualized prices based on personal data." Its AI pricing, that letter says, runs on aggregated data.
Hold that beside what Delta's chief executive, Ed Bastian, said recently: AI could ultimately improve the airline's profitability by as much as 50%. The same report notes that as of July 2025, Delta said AI was influencing three percent of its fares, with a goal of reaching 20% by the end of that year. Both can be true — pricing off aggregated data is not pricing off you. But notice the weight that distinction carries, and that Question 13 exists because internal documents are the only place to check it.
The strangest data point is the trade group. In June, at a House Judiciary hearing, Airlines for America CEO Chris Sununu said it would support legislation banning surveillance pricing — "Banning surveillance pricing? 100%. Yeah, it's terrible" — and that no airline it represents currently engages in it.
So everyone denies it, the lobby volunteers to outlaw it — and a committee still thought eight letters were necessary. That gap is the story.
The strongest case that I am the unreasonable one
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a market-friendly tech think tank, argues the evidence "shows that the capability exists and that firms are selling it—not that anyone has documented widespread consumer harm." It cites a field experiment in which over 60 percent of consumers paid less under personalization, and warns that a ban "does not lower prices; it merely reshuffles them…Price-sensitive consumers lose." Drew Ambrogi of the Chamber of Progress says regulators "shouldn't treat a personalized discount like a personalized markup". And the sharpest hedge comes from the regulator itself: "the extent to which businesses currently use personalized pricing is not well understood, and the effects of personalized pricing on consumers are unclear."
Here is where it thins. Many companies say they don't personalize base prices while acknowledging that they personalize promotions and discounts. Picture a $4.30 gallon of milk where one shopper pays full price and two others get 15 and 25 percent off: three shoppers, three different prices. Whether you file that under discount or markup is a question about vocabulary, not about anyone's wallet — and the FTC's own January 2025 staff overview, careful to say it is not part of the 6(b) study, found those price differences "observed across industries, including … travel vendors."
Eight days later, the FTC answered — with a rule that binds nobody
On August 19, 2026, the Federal Trade Commission proposed an enforcement policy statement on personalized pricing, opening 30 days of comment once it publishes in the Federal Register, on a 2-0 vote. Chairman Andrew Ferguson: "When consumers see a listed price, they expect it to be same price that everyone else sees, not the retailer's estimate of how much they are willing to pay based on their personal data." Then the limit — the FTC "does not have the legal authority to ban personalized pricing in all circumstances." What it proposes instead is disclosure: businesses should disclose not just that the price is personalized, but also the basis for that personalization and the types of data on which the personalization is based.
Read the fine print. The statement says of itself that it "does not confer any rights on any person and does not operate to bind the FTC or the public." In The American Prospect, David Dayen notes the agency "declines at this time to take any position on whether some personalized pricing practices are unfair even when fully disclosed to consumers" — while, as he notes, the inquiry that might have settled its own "not well understood" was effectively stopped at the beginning of 2025. Even the vocabulary moved: Trump's FTC doesn't call it surveillance pricing at all, Gizmodo noted.
Europe already ran this experiment, and its own Parliament says it isn't working
Here is where I would normally tell you Brussels solved it. Brussels did not.
In the European Union, personalized pricing is legal. The bloc's own advice to consumers says so — "This practice is not illegal, however as a consumer you are entitled to complete price transparency" — then adds the part Americans don't have: "traders are obliged to inform you whether the price is personalised based on automated decision-making." That sits in the amended Consumer Rights Directive and has applied since May 28, 2022. Europe has been running the FTC's proposal for four years.
How is it going? Not well, says the European Parliament's own research service: the directive requires the disclosure, but "the scope of application of this provision is limited" and "this information obligation is not sufficiently effective." The GDPR route — reading its automated-decision rules as a consent requirement — is, the same study says, "highly controversial. Case law is not available." A peer-reviewed paper by Fabrizio Esposito argues the GDPR already grants consumers a right to be offered the impersonal price — an argument, not a settled holding.
So Europe's consumer bloc has stopped waiting. BEUC's recommendation number nine is blunt — "Restrict personalised pricing" — because "EU law does not prohibit the personalisation of offers, prices or advertising and only sets a few limits." The Commission's answer is a Digital Fairness Act, announced as a legislative initiative for the fourth quarter of 2026, aimed partly at unfair personalization. In the consultation feeding it, among respondents who wanted EU action, 77 percent — 1,157 of 1,507 — backed restricting personalized pricing in general; business associations and large companies sat in the 5 to 20 percent range.
One rule matters from an aisle seat: Europe's air services regulation requires the final all-in price to be shown at all times, and fares to be available without any discrimination based on the nationality or the place of residence of the customer — a protection the US lacks.
So the contrast is not "Europe banned it." Europe adopted disclosure four years before Washington proposed it, and found that disclosure alone mostly produces a sentence nobody reads. We are about to buy the same furniture and act surprised when it fits the same way.
Now picture the version that ships in 2032
None of this is happening, as far as anyone outside these companies can show — which is the point.
It is 11:40 on a Tuesday night. You are booking a flight for a funeral, because that is when people book flights for funerals. Your phone is at 7 percent. You have searched this route four times in two days, and a loyalty account from 2019 carries a salary band you long ago forgot giving anyone.
Nothing on the screen says any of that. There is a price and an "i" in a small circle beside it. Tap it and a pop-up appears; at the very bottom sits the sentence disclosing that an algorithm used your personal data — not my invention, but how Pallone's letter describes one retailer's compliance with New York's law today. Nobody taps it. You buy the ticket.
The government has written this story down: the FTC's own illustrative harms include a hotel charging more when a consumer's data suggests "the consumer is traveling for a funeral or some other can't-miss personal business."
So, again: is there an upward limit, and does anyone decide these prices go live? No public answer exists. In 2032 the honest answer may be that no human was in the loop, and the ceiling was whatever the model believed you would tolerate on the worst night of your year.
What the people who study this actually say
This is not a left-right fight — the most surprising thing about it.
A week before Pallone's letters, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing titled "Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing" on August 4, 2026, with witnesses from the UFCW, MIT, the American Economic Liberties Project, Groundwork and Wharton. Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, chaired it and called the practice "the unholy trinity of everything Americans hate: spying on people, ripping them off, and taking away jobs". Reporting from the room found no real difference between the parties; Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, described a "bipartisan feeling of urgency."
The consumer-side experts doubt the disclosure fix on empirical, not ideological, grounds. Lauren E. Willis, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, says "the FTC has reams of evidence that disclosure is rarely an effective form of consumer protection," partly because "companies know how to use language that is technically accurate but not informative." Consumer Reports' Grace Gedye argues regulators should instead "prohibit companies from using consumers' individual data to personalize prices in the first place." Lee Hepner of the American Economic Liberties Project is harder still: the agency "is squandering its authority to stop this practice and instead places the burden on consumers to protect themselves."
Almost nobody, on either side, defends secret pricing off personal data. The fight is over whether telling you about it is a remedy or a receipt.
What does this mean for you?
Demote the incognito ritual. No public evidence says clearing cookies moves a fare, and the one time an airline recommended it, it was answering a complaint, not publishing a method. Harmless, free, not a defense — you cannot audit this from outside, which is why the letters exist.
Learn the sentence your state makes them show you. Since November 10, 2025, New York has required certain algorithmic prices to carry the disclosure "THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA", at up to $1,000 per violation. Go tap the little "i" beside a price and find where it is hiding.
Know what your state's law does not cover. New Jersey's Fair Price Protection Act, effective August 1, 2027, is the first state law of its kind to let consumers sue — but it reaches groceries and other foodstuffs, not airfare, and it will make New Jersey the fourth state to restrict data-driven pricing, joining New York, Connecticut, and Maryland. Check what yours actually covers.
Use the 30 days. Once the FTC's proposal hits the Federal Register, the public gets a month to comment — one of the few places where a paragraph from an ordinary person lands in the same pile as a trade association's forty.
Booking inside Europe? You have rights you don't have here. The trader must tell you when a price was personalized by automated decision-making, and fares must show the final all-in price.
Ask the follow-up. Whether these answers ever become public is a choice, not a legal outcome — and "will you publish what they sent you?" is a fair thing to ask a congressional office.
The lesson, as I see it
The most revealing line in Pallone's letter is not an accusation. It is a question: is there an upward limit to how high a price may be set for a customer?
You only need to ask that if the answer might be no. And that a committee had to ask it at all — of eight companies that deny doing this, in an industry whose lobby would happily see it banned — tells you how little anyone outside those buildings can verify.
Which is what my private-window ritual was really about: not a defense, but a way of not asking, because asking felt futile. What am I going to do, subpoena Delta? Somebody with letterhead just asked, politely, and we are about to learn what that is worth.
My vote? Disclosure is the floor, not the ceiling — Europe has stood on that floor since 2022 and its own Parliament says it is too low. The better ending is the one these letters make possible: publish the answers, all eight side by side, with the revenue analyses Question 13 asked for. The airlines say there is nothing to find. If so, transparency costs them nothing and settles the argument for a decade — and the rest of us can go back to booking flights like adults.
Somewhere in eight sets of internal documents sits an answer none of us can check alone. The HAIA Foundation works that gap — between what a system does and what you are allowed to see. Know someone who books flights in a private window and calls it a strategy? Send this along, then come read the rest with us.