Before every holiday season, such as Christmas and the New Year, there are many offers published online by airlines, hotels, and travel destinations. A lot of people plan a weekend getaway or a winter trip to disconnect, choosing destinations that are either cool and refreshing or warm paradises where the cold is but a distant memory: but beware of flight and hotel bookings, because with them come not only the excitement but also less visible (and less known) mechanisms that determine online prices.
More and more often, two distinct users see different prices for the same product or service: the “fault” lies with dynamic pricing and with profiling and algorithms that influence travelers’ choices, often without the people involved being aware. Here is a guide to understand what it’s all about.
What Dynamic Pricing Is and How It Works
There is a hidden side to online travel bookings during holidays (and beyond), and it’s important to be aware of it. As noted by Federprivacy in its study, between the end of November and the middle of December each year there is, predictably, a surge in online searches for the purchase of flights, hotel stays, and vacation packages. Leading booking platforms report traffic increases of between 25% and 40% compared to non-holiday periods.
This growing volume of online activity generates a huge amount of browsing data, which feeds sophisticated automated price optimization systems. It is precisely during this seasonal peak that a quiet phenomenon intensifies, little known, yet increasingly widespread: the dynamic pricing, the practice by which prices change in real time based on user behavior.
But what is it really about? In Italian it is called dynamic pricing and it answers the question “Why can two people pay two different amounts for the same product at the same moment?”. It is the automatic variation of prices that depends on demand, time, seasonality, or user profile.
The Evolution Toward Hyper-Dynamic Pricing
A practice that in 2025 evolved further, to the point of being defined as hyper-dynamic pricing (hyper-dynamic tariffing): algorithms, thanks to AI and Big Data, analyze in real time demand, availability, geolocation, weather forecasts, time, device type used, and even the user’s search and purchase history. The result? The price of the same airline ticket, shown to two different users, can swing substantially.
With hyper-dynamic pricing, furthermore, prices are no longer updated once or twice a day, but can vary continuously and in real time, even in a few seconds. In plain language? For airlines that have adopted this pricing (currently still a few worldwide), flight prices undergo dozens of variations in a matter of hours. The logic is to extract from each user the best price they are willing to pay for a service.
What It Will Look Like in 2026
Although hyper-dynamic pricing will continue to grow, probably not all airlines will be able to adopt it immediately, but it will be a gradual transformation. On the other hand, there is a need to protect consumers: authorities and European institutions are already working to guarantee greater fairness and clarity in airfares, preventing price discrimination among different customers.
