It drives me crazy when prices of some products changes multiple times in just several minutes span … I’m curious about your experience with buying stuff/planning holidays before dynamic pricing became a common thing.
It drives me crazy when prices of some products changes multiple times in just several minutes span … I’m curious about your experience with buying stuff/planning holidays before dynamic pricing became a common thing.
For holidays: You decided where you wanted to go and when, then you called a telephone number or went to a local travel agency, they told you the price, and you paid them. Usually you’d either send in a cheque or hand over a cheque, which took a few days to clear, and then they’d send you your tickets by post. If you were really advanced you might shop around a little bit, but most of the time you’d end up with the same price, so most of us didn’t bother.
That sounds like a great experience, maybe not the fastest way to get a ticket, but at least prices were not hiked up like they are now
Oh the prices were hiked. Just everyone hiked them the same amount and they knew you were not going to find another better price. Said another way, just because the prices were fixed didn’t often result in savings for the customer…
Prices on average were higher, but you also always knew roughly how much stuff costs. Now the same vacation can be either really cheap or ridiculously expensive or anything in-between so you have to spend a lot of time reaearching and looking around for a deal.
By the same token, not all travel agencies were created equal. My folks arranged for us to go on our first cruise way back in the 90’s. So we went to a travel agency, the woman sweet talked my folks into a “lovely” room - lower levels, inner room with NO windows as we discovered later. My parents had a room with two twin beds, and so did my brother and I. The rooms did not connect together, nor was it “cozy” - it was literally two twin beds side by side, with a nightstand in between. Then there was a TV on a shelf, and a door to the bathroom next to the door to the hallway.
The travel agent also told us this was a brand new ship (Norwegian cruise lines, it was the smallest ship in their fleet) and it had an arcade for my brother and I to enjoy. Except when we got to the ship, the room was labeled “employees only” - and there was essentially nothing on the ship to do for two young boys - no video games, no game boys, nothing. Oh and they only had like four movies playing in repeat on the televisions in the bedrooms - Ace Ventura Pet detective and “father of the bride 2” were two of the movies I distinctly remember because I saw them enough times on that ship to never want to see them ever again
Later we found out that travel agents got all sorts of perks/kickbacks like free room upgrades, or welcome fruit baskets, etc. And they could choose to gift them to their clients… or some agents would keep all those perks for themselves and splurge on a premium cruise vacation for their families.
Go figure my father (who is a real life bad-luck-brian) picked the absolute worst travel agent in our small town who pushed us into a trip on the smallest/worst cruise ship in the fleet for a family with two young boys.
Before it was really easy to shop around, you might make a couple of phone calls to get a handful of competing prices. But sellers were often not selling the exact same products and services, so you would have to do some calculations on the differences in order to make your choice.
That really only happened for higher-priced things, though. For everyday stuff, you would know who had it locally, go there, pay whatever they were asking, and take it home. The time and effort you had to spend in order to find exactly the right thing at exactly the right price wasn’t worth it for lower-priced things.