Would airlines increase prices for a customer who must travel at a certain time, e.g. to attend a funeral?

Generally the airline doesn’t know whatever reason a person buys a ticket, and just raises the last minute price for everyone

However it happened to a Vietnamese woman sometime ago that she didn’t have to pay the extra fee to board the earliest flight when the airline knew that she was hurry to attend her mother’s funeral.

This woman came to the airport early and asked to change her ticket to the next flight, but the airline personnel said that there’s only a seat available in the business class. She’d have to pay 1.5m VND more to get that seat. Looking at her worn shoes, old clothes and haggard face due to hard labor, no one might expect that she would pay that much money. But she said yes. Being surprised by that answer, another person asked “Do you really want to fly in business class?” while she was paying the fee. She replied “Yes. What else can you do when your mother has just died?” and tried to hide her tears.

Then the personnel told her to stay there and came to discuss with his manager. After sometime he came back, return the money to the woman and told her that she can fly without paying the extra fee.

It was confirmed by Vietnam Airlines that the story is real. But unfortunately I can’t find the source in English, but this was posted by a Facebooker and then appeared on every newspaper. If you want you can use an online translator to read

• https://vnexpress.net/tin-tuc/cong-dong/nhan-vien-san-bay-gay-xuc-dong-khi-doi-ve-mien-phi-cho-khach-vua-mat-me-3287381.html
• https://vitalk.vn/threads/chu-me-chet-thi-phai-lam-sao-ha-chu-bong-co-khoang-lang-giua-san-bay-dong-duc.2524795
• http://vietnamnet.vn/vn/doi-song/chuyen-1-5-trieu-cam-dong-o-san-bay-tan-son-nhat-264741.html

I am assuming you’re buying the ticket online.
In agencies criteria may vary.

Yes and no.

For the mentioned event the answer is clearly no. Like others mentioned: how would they know? Even if they knew: How would they manage that: offer you a price higher than to others? Would they raise it to everyone risking lowering their sales and final profit?

Now, if your friend is the prime minister of Poland things might be different. In general airline companies raise their prices with time and demand. If demand increases (because many people are travelling from the UK to Poland) than prices might get inflated. I gave the prime minister as an example, because it would be a big event but it could be anything else like a football match between Manchester United and KS Cracovia.

There are however events that raise prices even if there is no demand yet. A very good example is Christmas. The starting prices are usually higher around that date.

If your price is expensive that’s because by nature, deaths are not announced. You probably had to buy the ticket last minute and, like mentioned before, prices tend to rise as the flight date is nearer.

Would airlines increase prices for a customer who must travel at a certain time?

Absolutely. That’s the whole idea behind flying with business class being half-empty most of the time. If you don’t mind the price, you can even book the ticked for later today or tomorrow for most destinations.

This pricing is not targeting you specifically, in fact, it’s targeting business customers who don’t care that much about the price. However, when you’re in an urge for personal reasons, you start acting like a business customer (short notice, no flexibility regarding dates), so you get to pay the same price.

This could never work with the way airline tickets are currently sold, and here is why:

You rarely tell airlines who you are before you have already been offered a price and are in the middle of the booking process.

Most people search for tickets through third/fourth party travel agencies or even huge search engines that trawl all the airlines and agencies. These systems have absolutely no functionality for conveying the identity of the customer back and forth while requesting prices. And even if they in some absurd way did, the user could easily circumvent it by using incognito mode/a VPN, their computer at work, etc. So when the customer starts to book a ticket and tells the airline his/her name, he/she has already been offered and accepted a price. In fact, that price was probably one of the reasons he decided to book that particular ticket. It is too late then for the airline to change the price. The airline would have to say something like

Oh, it is you? Nevermind, the price just increased by 400 dollars.

That would be patently absurd.

Moving on, even when I book my ticket, the airline may have no idea which particular person I am. My name may be John Smith, and the airline may have thousands of other customers with that name. Giving more information (date of birth, loyalty program customer number, passport number, etc.) varies from case to case.

So, in order for this to occur, all this would have to change drastically. Airlines would have to start demanding to know the identity of the travelers before offering prices, both directly and through search engines and agents. (No airline would pioneer such a policy, as it would lose them massive amounts of business, but nevermind.) Then, they would need a complex system of surveillance. They may use the same cookie-based system that advertisers use, looking at your other web traffic and searches and trying to understand why you were interested in flying. Analyzing the social media (whatever is publicly available, anyway) of you and your social media friends may also help them. However, this AI would have to be rather complex.

As @usr-local-ΕΨΗΕΛΩΝ pointed out, many countries also have laws demanding equal service and pricing to all customers, and he also made a good point regarding competition.

I tried to do some research and I can expect two parts of the answer, one of wich was originally posted as a comment

Technically Techno-theoretically

I already stated:

With the increasing techno-control operated by over-the-tops and the power of big data such situation could be possible in the future. Airlines will recognize devices by ID or cookies and match them with individual profiles provided by tracking networks (advertising, marketing), and calculated with (not only) searches and social media posts of the individual and his network. A "need-to-buy" score might in the future be used to increase prices and/or deny discounts on individual basis, on the grounds that the customer is more likely to buy the product at any condition.

I said that there is little technical barrier preventing such. Defending your privacy on the web is an option, but it is out of the scope of the question (see also: How do I prevent cookies and apps to track my entire life?)

Now that I have space for that, the "need-to-buy" score is a theoretical score (I am trying to find the patent by Amazon for its real name) that a predictive market analysis may apply to an individual versus a product. The higher the score, the more the individual feels the need to buy that product and the more he is available to pay on grounds of the need. Soemthing opposite to the well-known concept of market demand which is made only on big figures. Flu example: flu vaccine can become more expensive in October because many people fall sick, hence more demand, not because you are demanding it.

On the downside, the above hypothetical approach does not work in a competitive market. Airlines operating on the same route compete each other. Assuming (by absurd) that they both know you have no choice than fly, they still want to compete each other on selling you a seat, hence a good reason to lower their price tag. Note that my illustration might look like the airline decides the price to apply by the time you browse their website with your browsing history in your cookies.

AI is not capable of that, to my knowledge. Marketing strategies are planned very well in advance on statistical models. As highlighted in other answers, the airline’s pricing model may increase price on last-minute passengers because in the past years they found this strategy to generate good revenue. Marketers don’t care about your loss.

Legally

I doubt it could be possible in Europe, but with an asterisk*

In Europe, there are severe non-discriminatory pricing rules, and Antitrust is very active on that. Non-discriminatory pricing is a broad definition. It does not limit to gender/race/etc. for individuals. It is the principle that any company that is selling utility is required to apply the same price to any individual or business customer.

So an airline selling London-Warsaw for, say, an advertised price of 200€, cannot require you, @jasonPark, to pay 400€ for the same flight because they know you are in an urge. When I say they sell it for 200€ I assume I will browse their site with a "neutral" browser in incognito mode from a network that could not be easily tracked back to you: i.e. the price I would see.

The asterisk is: I can’t find information whether product discounts can be discriminatory. In general, I think they can because some companies do normally make personalized voucher codes for individuals that opted in to market researches.

This is the caveat: even if they knew (assume they know), the airline cannot overprice the ticket above the maximum fare, but may refuse to propose you a discounted price.

You can always buy at the current price, for whatever reason. The airlines already anticipate that you have an urgent need when you book short notice, so typically the prices go up as the departure date approaches (unless the flight is super empty and they want to fill seats)

My wife had to change a flight because a close relative passing away. The airline agreed to waive the change fee but only after she presented the actual death certificate (which she happened to have).

Some airlines will give you a bit of leeway here, but the agents do get to hear a lot of sad stories from customers, most of which are entirely made up, so having some actual documentation can help the case.

The bigger question is how would they know?

People buy plane tickets all the time for all kinds of reasons. You are not required to tell an airline why you are flying, only when and where (so they can sell you a ticket). Airlines do vary ticket prices but they generally do so proactively and less reactively. There is lots of info out there on how they set their prices like here, here, and here.

Depending on the airline, in your given situation you may even get more flexibility or a discount.