When it comes to getting affordable airfares, price comparison websites are all well and good, but they don’t really address the fact that prices are constantly changing. That means that, while you may have gotten the cheapest flight from Los Angeles to New York at 10 o’clock on the Wednesday when you booked it, there’s no guarantee that it’s still going to be the cheapest flight closer to the time of departure.
That’s where an amazing new A.I. comes into play. The latest service offered by robot lawyer website DoNotPay (best known for getting thousands of people out of parking tickets), it claims to be the first-ever service to reduce the price of your flight after you have booked. Compatible with all U.S. airlines and travel booking services, it forces companies to pay their customers whenever the price of their ticket drops. It does this by observing the legal small print that requires airlines to give customers the option to amend their bookings — but which few people actually do.
Instead of making you spend hours of your life on customer service lines, DoNotPay finds all the travel confirmations in your email and then checks for a cheaper price for the same type of ticket 17,000 times per day until your flight departs.
When the price drops — which can happen as often as every six seconds — the A.I. will scan the exact terms of your ticket to find a clause which allows you to rebook at a cheaper price. It will then switch you to the cheaper ticket, and make the airline refund you the difference straight back to your account. For instance, if you paid $380 for a United Airlines flight from New York to San Francisco and this price then drops to $120, you’ll automatically receive $260 from the airline. Best of all? The product is completely free to use.
“Imagine sitting down for your flight and knowing that the person sitting to your left paid half as much as you,” Joshua Browder, the brains behind DoNotPay, told Digital Trends. “Unfortunately, airlines have been exploiting people by charging different prices to different people. My product allows you to get money back automatically when the price of your ticket drops, making sure you to get the cheapest seat on the plane for your fare class.”
Did we mention recently how much we love A.I.?
