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 10:04 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack | life generally

Sell your law school debt on ebay!

Speaking of student loan debt, Asian Provocateur points to one of her classmates who is offering us all the chance to help him pay off his loans on eBay.

My name is Erik Mayans. I am currently a law student in my third year of law school. I have done well in school, but I have a problem. A huge problem that only gets more unmanageable as the interest continues to pile on. I am talking about my law school debt, which is currently well above $50,000.00. In less than three years, I have put myself in over $50,000 of debt to cover tuition expenses.

So, in my effort to escape this crushing debt load, I am going to make you a deal. Before I do, I want to ask you one question. When you give to charity, does it make you feel good? Satisfied?

Well, that's what I am offering. Your personal satisfaction!

By making a donation to help me pay off my crushing law school debt, you will be helping a young law student pay off his tuition debt, and that just may give you some of the personal satisfaction that you're searching for. So reach into your hearts, give a little (or a lot!) and get a lot in return--satisfaction! Along with the feeling of warmth and goodness you will get by helping me, you will also receive a personalized thank you card!

Sounds like a great idea! Can't you spare $5 for Erik? And hey, since my debt is more than three times what his is, how about you send me $15? If 10,000 of you would pitch in you'd be making my life infinitely better!

On a totally unrelated note and also from Asian Provocateur, if you're a fan of Russian figure skater and gold medalist Evgeni Plushenko, you have to see this video.

Posted 09:54 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack | 3L

Jury Duty in D.C.

What happens to a law student called for jury duty? The same thing that happens to most of the other people called: nothing.

I spent the other day in D.C. Superior Court in the juror's lounge waiting to be called for a panel, but the call never came. Of course I was disappointed, but it did mean we got to leave at about 3 p.m., so I wasn't really complaining.

Read on for the long and completely stupid story of how I managed to complicate my jury service by getting a judge to issue a warrant for my arrest!

The excitement came before I actually reported for duty. I was originally summoned last fall—I think it was late October I was supposed to show up, or maybe November. I didn't take it very seriously b/c I just assumed there was no way a law student—and one who wants to be a criminal defender, no less—would ever make it on to a jury. In fact, I forgot all about it until sometime long after I was supposed to report, so I just figured they'd send me another summons for a different day. I based this assumption on my experience living in California where I received several jury summonses, never responded to any of them (because I was moving every few months and almost never actually living at the address where I received mail), and suffered no consequences at all.

But you know what happens when you assume something... D.C. apparently takes jury duty a little more seriously than those California jurisdictions because last month I got a notice ordering me to court to “show cause” why I should not be held in contempt for failing to report to jury duty. The notice said I could be imprisoned for 7 days and/or fined $300 if I could not show such cause. Yikes.

But wait, it got worse—I forgot the show cause hearing, too! Yeah. It was scheduled during Spring Break and although I put it in my calendar, I forgot to tell my calendar toremind me about it. And since I was on break, I wasn't checking my calendar; I didn't really think I had anything scheduled, and I just didn't look. Oops. So by that time I'd failed to appear for a court summons twice.

This actually worried me quite a bit. I know that if one of my criminal misdemeanor clients doesn't show up to court when he's supposed to, the court takes that very seriously and simple excuses like “I forgot” just don't fly. Would it be different for jury duty?

So I went to the court the next business day with much trepidation. Were they going to throw me in jail? Would I have to beg the judge for mercy? Would they at least fine me? Was this going to be something I'd have to report on my bar examinations?

Most of you will probably be unsurprised to learn that none of those things happened. True, the judge had ordered the issuance of a warrant for my arrest, but lucky for me the warrant had not been issued yet when I showed up with hat in hand and begging for mercy, so the good people in the jury office just cancelled the warrant and assigned me another day to return for jury duty. That's it. Bing, bang, and I was out of there. I then reported for jury duty as ordered, waited around 4-5 hours, and went home a completely free man.

But you know what? The next time I get a jury summons, I think I'll just avoid a lot of anxiety and hassle and just go to court when it says I should.

Posted 09:28 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack | 3L