Customer Reviews

The Future of Pricing: How Airline Ticket Pricing Has Inspired a Revolution

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The Future of Pricing is a short book which presents some of the scientific techniques that airlines use to price tickets and discusses how these techniques may become common to other industries. The style is engaging and the examples are applied. The book hooked me.

However I found the content lacking. The author comments in the preface that he didn't want to write a 'guru book' nor a personal memoir. It's a pity because either style would have been better than the current book. The book does not contain math. This limits its appeal to people like me who want more formality and a more thorough understanding of the science. However, the book presents subjects that are complex enough that I doubt a naive reader would enjoy it. In a word, it's neither here nor there, hitting an unfortunate middle ground.

If you are looking for a short and entertaining read about pricing, this is a great book. If you are looking for a more 'meaty' book, you may be disappointed.

Sometimes the most obvious business practices are the most complicated - and the most interesting. This is the case with airline pricing, so E. Andrew Boyd has chosen a great topic. As an expert in the esoteric field of operations research, he has done business readers a great service by presenting the history, evolution, theory and practice of airline pricing, and by tracking how it revolutionized pricing in many other industries. Boyd weaves his personal stories and insights about mathematics, gambling and airline history into a very readable, high-level business book. While this is a seemingly esoteric topic, getAbstract highly recommends his book to those in the transportation, travel, tourism and restaurant businesses. It will be especially valuable to intrepid executives in other industries who want to push the frontiers of pricing based on the latest science about operations.