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The Pricing Fight Inside Every Airline
Two euros can decide who wins a metasearch sale, and inside most airlines, moving that price is still a slow, politically fraught process. Valentino Portnoy, CEO and founder of TravelDax, unpacks why airlines now watch OTAs more closely than rival carriers, why classic machine learning still beats gen AI on pricing, and what agentic automation could finally do about the legacy systems blocking the last mile of every price change.
Show Notes
Valentino Portnoy is the CEO and founder of TravelDax, a B2B automation platform that collects and analyzes flight pricing data from metasearch engines and delivers competitive intelligence to airlines and OTAs worldwide. A software engineer by training, Portnoy built one of the first metasearch engines in Latin America before consulting for airlines and OTAs, experiences that revealed how difficult and expensive it was for carriers to get reliable, competitor data specific to metasearch. TravelDax was founded seven years ago to close that gap. In conversation with host Alex Brooker, Portnoy explains that roughly 75 to 80% of TravelDax usage is dedicated to tracking OTAs rather than rival airlines, covering both undercutting and whether branded fares are displayed correctly, because an airline fare buried behind six or seven OTA listings is effectively invisible to the traveler. He argues that internal conflict between revenue management and commercial teams is a bigger barrier to pricing agility than any technology limitation, and that in fast moving competitive pricing, acting quickly outweighs being precisely correct. On the AI question, TravelDax's own testing shows classic machine learning still outperforms generative AI for price prediction, though Portnoy sees agentic automation running on local machines as a credible path to finally executing that last price change that legacy airline systems currently block.
Click to expand the full episode transcript (9,303 words approx.)
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About the Travel Tech Podcast
Hosted by Alex Brooker, founder of Airside Labs, the Travel Tech Podcast features authentic long-form conversations with leaders, innovators, and startup founders shaping the future of aviation and travel technology. No scripts, no sponsors, no sales pitches — just real conversations about building technology that matters.