By Emmanuel Mounier, Secretary General, Global Travel Tech.
Introduction – A tool on trial
Dynamic pricing is having a difficult year. In the United States, state legislatures have introduced more than forty bills in 2026 alone restricting how online marketplaces set prices, and the first are already law. In Brussels, the European Commission is preparing its Digital Fairness Act, expected before the end of 2026, which also is expected to include dynamic pricing regulations. In Spain, a draft law under discussion would oblige sellers using dynamic pricing to announce in advance the maximum and minimum prices a product or service can reach while it is on sale. And in the United Kingdom, the sale of Oasis reunion tickets turned dynamic pricing into a common enemy for Oasis fans around the world.
I understand the anger. Some of it is justified. But before we regulate dynamic pricing out of existence, we should nuance the picture by remembering its benefits.
The anger is not coming from nowhere
Let me be clear: there are abuses. When the price of a product can increase multi-fold while a customer is waiting in queue, or from one day to the other, something is wrong. When a headline price is one that almost nobody will ever actually pay, that is false advertising. Constant and unexplained price changes go against the principle of transparency and provide a very unpredictable customer experience.
The Oasis episode is instructive, though not in the way most people remember it. Fans watched tickets advertised at around £150 sell for more than £350 and blamed dynamic pricing. The UK competition authority investigated and found no evidence that prices had been adjusted in real time during the sale. What it found instead was a transparency failure: two categories of standing tickets, the cheaper ones sold first, and fans left queueing without being told. The problem was in fact not with dynamic pricing, but with a lacking level of transparency – meaning customers queuing for the cheap standing tickets were not told that these were already sold out and that they would have to go for a more premium ticket at a higher price.
The price that moves opened the door
So why does travel rely on dynamic pricing at all? Because it works. And the prime beneficiaries have been the consumers.
Airlines pioneered flexible pricing decades ago, and low-cost carriers turned it into the engine of affordable travel. A seat is worth nothing once the aircraft doors close. So carriers learned to price every seat according to demand: cheap when the plane is empty and departure is months away, more expensive when everyone wants the last seat on a Friday evening. That is how the twenty-euro airplane ticket was born. It exists because someone else paid two hundred euros for the same ticket on a day when demand surged. Segments of the population who could never have afforded to fly at fixed prices have been able to discover the world through cheap trips enabled by dynamic pricing.
The same logic has since spread to accommodation, rail, and even experiences, with the same benefits. Off-season discounts fill hotels in November. Cheaper midweek fares spread demand and take pressure off overcrowded weekends. None of this is new economics. Dynamic pricing is just supply and demand in real time on digital marketplaces. Travellers today can set price alerts and shift their dates to catch the lowest fare. The prices are indeed moving, sometimes unpredictably and at certain times producing extreme prices. But now the consumers can actually watch the price move and plan accordingly.
What a “protected” price would really cost
Now look closely at some of the remedies on the table. The Spanish draft law would, in effect, require a published price corridor for anything sold through dynamic pricing. Some American proposals go further and would prohibit the practice altogether.
What would that achieve? A corridor that is wide tells consumers nothing. A corridor that is narrow abolishes the bargains at the bottom, because a seller who cannot raise prices at peak times must recover its costs somewhere, and it will do so by lifting the floor. A hard cap on a fixed supply does not create cheap tickets either. It creates instant sell-outs and a thriving resale market where consumers are less protected.
There is also a distinction too many of these bills blur. Pricing based on real-time supply and demand is one thing. Pricing based on your personal data or your device’s browsing history is another. The second raises important questions regarding fairness and privacy, and it deserves scrutiny. The first is simply a market doing its job in the open.
Regulating abuses, yes. Limiting access, no
So what should regulators do? Focus on transparency. A price should not change between the moment a customer starts the checkout and the moment they pay. Tiered pricing should be disclosed before people join the queue instead of being revealed hours later when it is finally their turn. Personalised pricing built on personal data should be clearly signalled and closely watched. And existing consumer law should be enforced.
What regulators should not do is confuse the abuse with the tool. For most of history travel prices were fixed, and fixed meant high. The moving price is what opened up the gates of travelling for the many.
A fair price is not the same thing as a fixed price. Regulating abuses, yes. Limiting access to travel, no.