{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Travel Tech Podcast","title":"The Pricing Fight Inside Every Airline","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3620,"description":"Two euros can decide who wins a metasearch sale. Inside most airlines, moving them is still revenue management's call, and it is rarely fast.\n\nValentino Portnoy is the CEO and founder of TravelDax, a B2B platform that collects flight pricing data from metasearch engines and turns it into competitive insights for airlines and OTAs. He and Alex discuss why airlines now track OTAs more closely than rival carriers, how internal politics slow down pricing decisions, and why classic machine learning still beats gen AI on pricing. They also cover agentic automation for legacy systems and what AI chat booking means for distribution.\nWhat You'll Learn\nAI and metasearch: Metasearch sites dominate AI chat answers to flight questions, and are doing better there than in traditional search.\nOTA monitoring: Roughly 75 to 80% of airline usage on TravelDax goes to tracking OTAs rather than competing airlines, including whether their branded fares are displayed as intended.\nMetasearch visibility: An airline fare listed below six or seven OTA offers is effectively invisible to the traveler.\nLosing the customer: Airlines that tolerate OTA undercutting still lose control of loyalty and the customer experience.\nGen AI vs machine learning: In TravelDax's testing, classic machine learning still outperforms gen AI on price prediction and recommendations.\nThe last mile: AI agents operating on local machines could automate the final price change that legacy airline systems block today.\nInternal friction: Conflicting goals between revenue management and commercial teams are a bigger barrier to pricing agility than technology.\nSpeed over accuracy: In competitive pricing, acting faster than competitors matters more than being right every time.\nConnector risk: AI labs can see which travel connectors succeed, and the best performers risk being absorbed into the platform.\n\nTime-Stamped Highlights\n(0:00) Two Euros Can Make a Huge Difference\n(2:03) A University Project That Predicted Fare Drops...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/LxpvuNpWwfSGFL1KA1WhoZf9L55ykAqb5rgjXNFqi3c/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9mY2Yz/ZjA5OGE1ZmEyMTk4/ODJkYmU1YjhlYjRk/YTMzNC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}