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Online Airline Ticket Ripoffs
Ok people, please tell me I'm insane. Here's what just happened: Yesterday I checked on a flight just to see what the prices were. I checked Expedia and Orbitz. I also tried Hotwire but didn't get far Hotwire can't sell same-day return tickets. On both Expedia and Orbitz I found non-stop roundtrip tickets for $225.
Today, I was ready to purchase a ticket so I returned to Expedia only to find that the nonstop tickets were now $335! If I wanted to transfer flights once, I could get $255, but the $225 tickets were no longer available. Hmm. After just one day? It's possible, but.... So I checked Orbitz. Same thing. What about Travelocity? Same thing. Damn! It looked like I'd just missed it.
But as I was complaining about this to L., she suggested we check it on her computer, just to see if we could get that $225 price again. And guess what? The exact same search in Expedia on her computer gave us that low price—$5 less, in fact. So I bought the ticket through her computer for $220.
At first I thought the travel sites must have set a cookie in my browser; once they saw I was returning to search for a flight I had recently searched, they jacked the price. So I searched with two other browsers (Omniweb and Camino)—they both gave the higher prices, too. This seems like pretty clear proof to me that these travel sites are actually watching my IP address. They track what IP address looks at what flights, and if you return w/in a reasonable amount of time to the same flight, they jack up the price.
Am I insane here, or is this true? L. says Amazon is doing something like this now, too—charging different prices based on purchase history or something. Can this be for real? Swanno suggested the airline ticket sites were doing something similar last summer, but somehow this seems even more sinister. A few minutes searching around Google doesn't reveal any complaints about this, but how else to explain the fact that the same search produced different results on different machines?
Posted March 23, 2006 10:04 PM | life generally
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Wow, that's so strange! I've never heard of this before, but I will definitely keep an eye out for this in the future. Crazy!
Posted by: Craftier Everyday at March 23, 2006 11:53 PM
Yep! This happened to me for the past week or so -- it's INFURIATING, isn't it?
The story I got is that the actual airline computers where reservations are held doesn't provide data to the websites in real-time (why? who knows?). Thus, when you go to book a fare, it only queries the *real* vacancies after you've filled out all the fields and clicked "buy now." Why don't the travel sites use that info then to update their cache of fares on their server? No clue.
But under this model, if, say, 25 users queried the airline DB simultaneously and there were 13 open slots, a sort of DoS effect could occur. That is, the server could return that all slots were full, but if you tried a few minutes later with fewer simultaneous requests, the request might go through. At least that's my current understanding of it. I could, of course, be wrong.
Posted by: blm at March 24, 2006 12:26 AM
Next time this happens, try accessing the site with a proxy.
http://www.freeproxy.ru/en/free_proxy/cgi-proxy.htm
Posted by: THE motherfucking gw law school at March 24, 2006 08:51 AM
You can avoid this kind of thing by using Tor and cleaning cookies regularly. Of course, you'd lose any price adjustments in your favor, too.
Posted by: Jay Goodman Tamboli at March 24, 2006 01:24 PM
I've heard some pretty nasty things about the travel sites pulling bait and switch on flights (those people who actually call them up and ask what the hell happened). If you have the flight number you might be better off calling the airline direct and see if they can match the price for you.
Posted by: Beanie at March 24, 2006 10:02 PM
