The airline said this in a letter sent in response to the senators’ letter, in which they cited an executive’s comments about the airline’s collaboration with artificial intelligence firm Fetcherr and said they believed Delta would use AI to set individual prices and charge as much as the customer would pay, Reuters reported Friday (Aug. 1).
“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,” the airline said in its letter, per the report. “Our ticket pricing never takes into account personal data.”
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, one of the three lawmakers who wrote the letter to Delta, linked to a news article about Delta’s response in a Friday post on social platform X and said he is encouraged by the airline’s letter but wants more information about its collaboration with Fetcherr.
“Many questions remain about Delta’s partnership with Fetcherr — a foreign company that has bragged about ‘using all the data we can get our hands on’ and being ‘very stealth about how we work,’” Warner said in the post. “While I’m encouraged to hear Delta commit to not using surveillance pricing, more transparency is needed around Fetcherr’s data collection practices and how those may factor into the AI-powered pricing recommendations that Delta relies on.”
PYMNTS reported July 22 that Delta President Glen Hauenstein said during the airline’s investor day held in November that AI is a “super analyst” and has delivered “amazingly favorable unit revenues.”
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“We will have a price that’s available on that flight, on that time, to you, the individual,” Hauenstein said. “Not a machine that’s doing an accept reject and a static price grid.”
Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who also wrote the letter to Delta, said in a July 15 post on X: “This isn’t fair pricing or competitive pricing. It’s predatory pricing. I won’t let them get away with this.”
Asked about the post by PYMNTS at the time, a Delta spokesperson said: “A variety of market forces drive the dynamic pricing model that’s been used in the global industry for decades, with new tech simply streamlining this process. Delta always complies with regulations around pricing and disclosures.”
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