Does browsing ticket sites in incognito mode and/or from different IP's result in cheaper ticket prices?
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 26 Jul, 2023
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The French administration in charge of enforcing trade and advertisement regulations (DGCCRF) and the observatory of data privacy (CNIL) held an investigation on IP tracking on an unspecified set of vendors of train and flight tickets operating in France. Their conclusion was that they could not find any evidence that prices would rise when you check the same site multiple times.
They did however find evidence that prices would sometimes depend on what other sites you had visited before. In particular, if you visited a price comparison site, you are more likely to be offered a cheaper advertised price but with higher fees added when ordering the ticket.
Additionally the price of a ticket depends, sometimes openly (if you dive into the small print), on the time at which you buy the ticket — it seems that booking at 4am is cheaper than booking at 11pm.
Yes, these tactics do work. I have experienced, for example, the rising price effect when refreshing a browser window with an itinerary already listed. After the refresh, the price has increased. I opened another browser (Chrome), did the same search and the price was the initial lower price. I refreshed, and the price went up to match that of the original browser (Safari).
If I searched a site or airline site located in a specific country from another country, the price was higher. If I used my VPN to appear as though I am in the country, the price was lower.
This has occurred on Airline specific sites, like AA.com, aircanada.com, flychinaeastern.com, airasia.com, etc., as well as search engines like vayama.com, hipmunk.com. If the price itself hasn’t gone up, what happens is that the seat I was looking at supposedly sold out, so I had to look for a different seat, or date. But as I said, doing the same search with a different browser would always return that initial lower price.
That said, this is a lot of rigamarole to go through, and most prices increases were only a couple hundred dollars. If you consider that you might spend several days doing this, you will experience a genuine price increase of more than a couple hundred dollars related to how close you are to the departure date.
I fly several times a year and this always occurs. Of course, my itinerary doesn’t change much so I recognize a good deal when it pops up, and just buy it rather than do all the above.
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