So we took a family vacation recently and we had to drive halfway across America and what creeped me the fuck out was how we were getting such different prices on different phones while looking at the same hotel room on Priceline. For example I would look for a hotel in Chicago and find a room for a $180, then my cousin is also looking for a room on his phone and I look over and the same hotel room is $50-$70 cheaper. This kept on happening in every city we went to, like there was such a huge fluctuation between the prices one person would get on their phone and what someone else was getting. We noticed that the people with higher end Samsung phones were getting a much lower rate than those with cheaper phones. Have you ever experienced such price discrimination and is there really anyway to protect yourself from it? And do you think it’s ethical for companies to charge different rates for the same product? Should there be some legislation to protect consumers from this seeing as how AI is just going to make it easier for companies to price gouge consumers to the max.
Travel companies have been doing this shit for years. The most egregious is that Apple users tend to get shown higher prices overall but it’s been around in many forms for a long time. They call it “Dynamic Pricing”
I remember Amazon being called out for doing this a few years back (like the early to mid 2010s if I’m recalling correctly). Theirs was particularly ridiculous because you could be on their site logged in, and in an incognito tab logged out, and be seeing different prices reported on the same product pages.
Always shop around for prices in incognito mode.
Does that hide the device you are browsing on? I thought it just doesn’t save to your history and doesn’t share cookies between incognito and non-incognito tabs.
Incognito mode simply deletes any history and cookies stored in a given session. Your browser and device information can still be queried.
Check here: https://www.deviceinfo.me/
More like fresh browser, default settings, no cookies, no logins no nothing. Just straight to what you’re shopping for. Dont change windowsize, position,anything
Or use TOR browser which does all of that by default and more.
I read that even with tor you shouldn’t mess with the window as to not make it unique
And some common browsers let you open a top tab, like private browsing, but full tor
On a phone: Firefox focus and a VPN do well.
This is why I hate booking stuff on a mobile phone. It’s quite slow and I have no control over it. On a PC I can more easily compare between sites, check again on another browser if I want, and on and on.
Many people expect a fixed price for most services. Similar to not getting scammed by local taxi drivers in 3rd world countries, you have to be savvy enough to know what prices are actually “deals”.
There is a theory that travel websites use trackers and other information readily available about your device and browser to advertise different prices to different people. A lot of VPN companies use this in their marketing actually— showing different prices for the same airline tickets depending on which VPN server you’re connected to in the world.
I haven’t done much research on this personally, but you may be able to see it in action by opening the same site in a normal and an incognito window and searching for a flight/hotel. Or trying the aforementioned VPN trick. There however doesn’t seem to be any specific rhyme or reason for it, and no one can say that XYZ browser connected to ABC server will get you the cheapest prices. There are just way too many variables in play and these kinds of algorithms the websites use are all well-guarded secrets.
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You’re right- theory probably wasn’t the best word. It is known that companies do this but it’s impossible to concretely say how and in what circumstances prices change.
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I work for one of the companies in the Priceline group and I can categorically say that this is not something we do. We do differentiate for logged in users vs not logged in and for different levels of our loyalty program. The hotels can change their prices on a whim though and many hotels update their prices multiple times per day depending on availability and other factors so it may just be a weird coincidence (you may be correlating an effect with something that isn’t actually the cause).
I just tried this yesterday and I was still getting different prices for the same hotel on desktop and mobile, it wasn’t as bad as when we were on vacation where every single person in the car was seeing a different price for the same search criteria we put in. About 70% of the hotels had the same price yesterday but the other 30% ended up being almost $50 more expensive when I looked on desktop. So I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all and I actually encourage you to try searching for the same thing on different devices to see what I’m talking about.
We do offer “app exclusive” rates but they are supposed to be labelled as such (this is basically because we save a ton of money when people have our apps installed because we don’t end up paying it all to Google for PPC and can pass on some of the savings).
Are you certain in these conditions that everyone is looking at the exact same property for the same dates, same number of people, all logged in, same level in our loyalty program etc? All sorts of things can trigger different prices but the one thing that absolutely doesn’t is the type of mobile device you are using. We just don’t differentiate between types of mobile devices.
Same city, same search filters, different prices for different people 🤔
Feels like I’ve heard of this happening before. Curious what others chime in about it. I haven’t experienced it myself but I don’t travel much these days.
This has been going on forever. Decades ago, it was common to be charged more on travel websites if you were using a Mac then if you were using windows. These days they use a lot more profiling to try to squeeze more money out of the people they think are willing to pay.
I priced airbnbs in Oaxaca then hopped on to a VPN exiting in Brazil and got better prices. Then the next time I tried that I didn’t get different pricing.
I remember the days when airbnbs were a cheaper option to hotels, now their service fees have just ruined the site.
I think new amateur speculators have driven up prices too. Honestly I don’t fault Mexicans for charging Americans more. It just made me decide I don’t need to be a gentrifier. I can stay in the US.
So many things are variable or negotiable, like cars, insurance, car rentals, furniture, mattresses, and houses. I feel like most people get the standard deal but they throw a few people a bone maybe to get good reviews or because the rep likes them.
I think sometimes Karens get a good deal by throwing a fit but you can also just ask, “That’s more that I was wanting to spend, can you do $x?” Doesn’t hurt to ask.
