Today let’s have some fun talking about animal takeovers, following along Nick’s on-the-fly flight planning, Delta’s $8.1M settlement, and a different perspective on the increased prevalence of AI in ticket pricing. (Saturday Selection)
Animal Takeover: Brace Yourself for Adorable Hordes
Back in Austin, Texas, there’s a neighborhood where a handful of feral peacocks roam the streets. They might have been pets once, but now they sort of belong to the neighborhood, making you feel a little closer to nature than the increasingly urban environment would otherwise have you feel. A wealthy residential neighborhood a short distance outside of Buenos Aires has a more extreme case of this “re-wilding”, with roughly 1000 wild capybaras claiming the neighborhood as their own. It seems the slower pace of traffic and human activity during the pandemic gave the capybara population a sort of revival that some folks were not too thrilled about. I imagine the native capybaras felt similarly about the human invaders who’d claimed the neighborhood for so long. While some found this off-putting, others were eager to welcome these giant rodents back to the community, letting them take over lawn-care, nibbling their yards down without the need for a lawn mower.
As an even more extreme example of animal takeovers (or take backs as the case may be), the remote Australian island of “Christmas Island” gets to experience literally millions of little red crabs taking over the entire island every year as they frenzy toward the sea for their annual mating season. I first learned of this wild phenomenon from Stefan of Rapid Travel Chai. He attempted to see the migration in 2014, but unfortunately the lack of rain did not suit the crabs, and they showed up a month later when he couldn’t make the trip work with his schedule. Nature has its own timeline and that’s why we love it.
We love watching Nick fix his travel plans “on the fly”…
If you’ve been following Nick’s JetBlue 25 for 25 journey, you probably saw that it only took one day for things to go awry. And for those of you who follow our annual team challenges, his trip is probably giving you major Flying by the Seat of our Points vibes. Just as he had to during our last-minute travel challenge back in 2024 (designed to test our team’s last-minute award booking skills), Nick’s on-the-fly travel planning abilities are being put to the test yet again. I think his solution for the cancelation of a critical car rental in Ponce was pretty clever. If you’re not already doing so, consider following along on Instagram where you get the real white knuckle experience in almost real time.
I have to give Nick a round of applause here because not only was he willing to put in the mental energy to figure out how he and his whole family could participate in a travel promotion relevant to our readership, he also agreed to send me footage all along the way so we can include you all in the story. And I hate to say it but…often what makes for a stressful travel day for Nick…makes for a very engaging and entertaining viewing experience from home. (Sorry Nick! We really are rooting for you!)
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Delta to pay $8.1M over COVID-era executive pay violations claim
Delta’s in hot water over some shady behavior related to the COVID Payroll Support Program it benefited from back in 2020 and 2021. That program was designed to help businesses continue paying their employees, and to help airline industries at a time when folks weren’t traveling. But there were guidelines in place aimed at preventing the use of these funds from simply lining the wallets of the fat cats at the top – caps as to how much of these relief funds could be directed to executives or employees earning > $425,000 annually, for example. The claim filed by a whistleblower under the False Claims Act alleges that Delta exceeded these caps, then failed to report these violations once they were discovered internally. Despite their agreement to pay $8.1 million to settle this, Delta’s take is that they simply disagreed on when they were supposed to adhere to these caps, or how those executive payouts were being measured across the timeline of the pandemic. In other words, it sounds like from their view, they were being compliant as they lined the wallets of executives…
Airlines Now Quietly Let AI Set Ticket Prices—Surprisingly, That’s Great News For Your Wallet
In last week’s Saturday Selection, we learned about Delta’s intention to ramp up its use of AI for determining ticket pricing, and Ben of One Mile at a Time’s suspicion that this may not go well for consumers. This week we see a different take from Gary of View from the Wing. He believes that this growing trend of using AI for ticket pricing may actually result in lower prices for consumers, or at least, for the consumers who care about low prices. He argues that personalized pricing is not just about increasing prices where possible, but also about selectively offering discounts to those who wouldn’t purchase without them, for example, leisure travelers. I for one have never been very good at predicting technology trends or their effect on us. I remember telling a friend in college I thought “camera phones” were stupid – I already had a digital camera and an ipod…why did I need those features on a phone? But it’s fun to speculate all the same. So tell us – what do you think? Will AI give this community better prices, or worse?
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I’m with Ben on this one. Personalized pricing most certainly *won’t* be friendly for the customer.