Archive: https://archive.today/OBySp From the post: >>At 9:08 in the morning a nonstop ticket from New York to Los Angeles showed $233 on the airline's own site. By 9:41 it read $248. When a travel-alert email arrived at noon the fare had jumped again, this time to $287. Nothing mechanical changed on the aircraft. The swings came from software that treats every empty seat as a living security whose price must drift until the moment the door closes. Those rapid shifts are not rare. Airline fare files are pushed to global distribution networks three times each day, and each push can reprice a seat class across thousands of flights. On top of those bulk updates the revenue system listens to live booking activity. A single seat on a domestic route can march through as many as thirty-five different price points between its first day on sale and departure, some of them within the same morning or afternoon.