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Different fares for different folks

Internet Marketing

Rucksack Brian started this discussion 14 years 1 month ago

While searching for travel deals, have any of you ever found a difference in price for a flight, hotel, hostel, car rental or anything else that varies depending on which internet browser you use? This article suggests that you might just find a better deal with one browser over another.

"Believe it or not, just using a different browser can get you a dramatically lower travel deal," Lisa Freeman from Consumer Reports said.

Consumer Reports ShopSmart learned this when it searched for the same itinerary at the same time on the Expedia travel site using two different browsers -- Safari and Firefox. It turns out the flight was $718 lower using a Firefox browser.

I don’t see any reason why the browser would make a difference. The businesses would have nothing to gain by encouraging one browser over another.

I do, however, think that search results could vary based on the language you use to search. My girlfriend was booking a flight from Europe to the US on kayak.com, and she found that Lufthansa was actually the cheapest option. But it didn’t appear at all when she searched in English. It only showed up in the search options when she switched the language to German. Lufthansa is a German airline, so I suppose there could be some benefit to selecting German-speaking clients. Was it just a fluke? Who knows?

If it were possible to selectively offer availability to customers based on language or other desirable factors, would you consider that discrimination or simply targeted marketing?

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Scotch Argus

14 years

As the comment at the bottom of that article said, it's more likely to do with the old lower price being shown in firefox due to it's cache not being updated while safari might be showing the updated. Otherwise it's to do with tracking cookies which have remembered a previous visit and then bumped the price up when you go back. I have certainly had that happen - clearing the cache of cookies or even better using something like chrome's incognito browsing gets rid of this problem.

I doubt that they are actually offering higher prices based upon which browser you use. (Although I couldn't totally discount it - maybe they feel apple users are more wealthy than others. After all, they will pay top dollar for a computer that doesn't even have USB port).

I think in our business if you offered lower prices to certain market segments this would create a bad feeling in the hostel. As the customers talk to each other they may well work that say Germans are paying more than Italians - not a good look!

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