Price gouging and dynamic pricing go together for the airline industry like love and marriage.

The airlines love dynamic pricing but never want to talk about it.

And there is a reason for it – dynamic pricing sees air fares change by hundreds of dollars from day to day.

Dynamic pricing is great for the airlines but leaves the consumers in the dust.

So what exactly is dynamic pricing?

It’s the practice of varying the price for a product or service to reflect changing market conditions, in particular the charging of a higher price at a time of greater demand.

And most customers have no idea that dynamic pricing exist and how widely the differences are in air fares.

So we decided to check it out over a period of two month by picking return flights from our hometown Vancouver, Canada, to a sunny holiday destination spot, Zihuatanejo, Mexico.

The time frame was the month of December and January 2025.

We used the website Google Flights, using the criteria of one passenger, flying one-way economy, to keep us posted on the different fares.

Here is the breakdown – the fares were sent to us by email in November for different departure dates – one-way, Vancouver to Zihuatanejo. Prices were in Canadian dollars.

January 2 – $1,014

January 17 – $402.

January 2 – $924

December 20 and 27 – $236

Although we only showed you prices from Vancouver to Zihuatanejo, prices from Zihuatanejo to Vancouver were basically the same. And we only picked a few prices to illustrate the vast price differences, adding more prices would not have made a difference.

And with the full-fledged advent of Artifical Intelligence becoming more sophisticated you can bet that the airlines will use AI tools even more so they can squeeze more dollars out of consumers.