More on Plane Ticket Shopping

[DandyDon]

I've explained my experiences before in which I learned that the airline computer was tracking my shopping then raising fares on me as I shopped, until I learned to clear Continental.com cookies and try again: finding lower fares! :w-t-f:

Even that doesn't work at times tho. Yeah, I check the airline's site, but I have learned to always check Sidestep.com too - or Kayak.com (same site, same log-in), long my favorite for searching. It's screws up on locations at times, like not knowing all of the nearby airports to check, or putting Villa Blanca Cozumel 30 miles east in the Atlantic - so like with Wiki, I confirm info elsewhere. But if you open a few tabs and compare different approaches, different origins, arriving & departing Cancun, open-jaws trips with arrival in one and departure from the other, flexible dates - it's a handy tool. You can also use it to check multiple other search sites like Airfare.com, Priceline, Expedia, Hotwire, Vayama, Travelocity on the same click, and it always checks Orbitz!

Then Sidestep will usually link you directly to the airline's site with the record set up there. Get this tho: I had one trip I was helping with recently with Continental.com giving higher fares before and after I found lower fares found on Sidestep for the same exact trip, link booked on Continental. I tried logging at Continental in with my Platinum elite account: no good. Cleared cookies: no good. Sidestep was simply booking on Continental.com cheaper than Continental.com would on the same ticket, and my so called preferred status with the airline was not helping nor was my cookie clearing trick. :sigh_2:

Special note: After you have done your best searching, it never hurts to call the airline for an over the phone quote. It cost a few bucks to book thru them, but they do get the lowest fares, usually.

I used to think that Lubbock people were just stuck with higher fares to Coz as we seemed to always pay so much more than almost everyone else, usually in the $500s when the rest of the US and parts of Canada were getting $300s. Now I think I was just paying too much for my lack of experience.

Two months ago tho, I couldn't find anything good. After paying a flat $300 once, I couldn't get into the idea of paying twice as much to Coz! I could not find anything for less than $600, but found Roatan for $560, so I booked the latter. NOW it has come back down for my preferred dates, but I've been wanting to get back to Roatan anyway....

It's also good to set up daily email alerts for preferred itineraries of course, extending 30 days beyond actual ticketing date. If you book with the airline and the fare goes down within a month, many airlines will refund the difference less $50 fee, which is at least better than the $150 charge on most changes.

I know: Orbitz will refund all of the difference if it goes down, but for that gimmick to work - someone else has to book the same departure from the same city, same flights to the same destination, same identical return - virtually impossible!​

Hope this helps someone enjoy more trips...!! ilot:

 

[reefduffer]

Hi DandyDon,

I've read and appreciated your advice about clearing cookies between searches on travel sites, and I've actually seen the effect a couple of times. I use FF, normally keep cookies off and cleaned up with specific exceptions like SB, but when I'm shopping and need to enable cookies at some site, I'll often keep the 'clear-cookies' window up and punch them out between queries.

I saw this article a couple of days ago and actually immediately thought of you. Your post here is a good prompt to link to this:
Even without cookies, a browser leaves a trail of crumbs

If it's not clear, it suggests that there could be a "meta-cookie" arms race in our future. Between your IP address, OS/browser versions, the exact set of versions of all your browser plugins/addons, etc, all of which can be interrogated by the host site, not to mention specifics of your query (e.g., flights to Bonaire in late March), a site like AA or Alamo could ID you as the same client, even without cookies.

Given that 90% of their customers probably don't even know that cookies exist, and 90% of the rest don't know about or can't be bothered with this particular abuse of them by the sellers, I doubt that it's an immediate problem. But you never know where this might go. The big motivation here on the bad-guy side is advertising, and once they solve the problem with deployed no-cookie-client-ID software, the travel sites could just piggyback on that at minimal expense.

It had me speculating about countermeasures, some extension of the "private browsing" mode that would disguise/lie about your browser configuration. Tricky problem, and one I'm not going to be involved in solving, but interesting.

EFF, running this study, are one of the good guys here. They would like everyone to give them samples of their browser profiles so they can understand the problem in detail (see the link). [FWIW, I trust EFF; I've been supporting them for many years.] At the same time, you get an idea of how unique your configuration is. I found it a little chilling to see mine. If there are going to be countermeasures, or maybe privacy legislation, they would arise from the work of orgs like EFF.

 

[Puffer Fish]

Don, Airfares are a competitive "game". Airlines will charge whatever they think they can get away with.. until it is obvious they cannot. For the most part there is no actual "fare" for any flight.

Oh, and flying a lot with any airline will get you lots of perks, but it means you are loyal to them, and that means they can charge you more.. as frequent flyers are the single biggest profit buyer for tickets. Never mind in your specific case you are using it to go diving.

I live in Knoxville... sometimes it is cheaper to drive to Atlanta and fly from there.. sometimes it is cheaper to drive to Nashville (usually, by the way), but we are going to OZ in a month, and surprisingly, it was much cheaper to fly thru Atlanta via Knoxville, than from any other city, including picking the flight up in Atlanta. Why? Well it turns out that no one from Knoxville wanted to go to OZ, so they reduced the cost.

In your case, you see the ticket price too high, so you go somewhere else... others do the same... the airline computer "sees" fewer tickets being bought, and then lowers the price.. too late, tickets still are not selling, so the price freefalls down to the lowests they are willing to sell it for. This yoyo effect is of their own making, and cost them more than they make, but once they start doing it, they cannot stop themselves.

 

[DandyDon]

Wow Reefduffer, they're certainly far ahead of this ol' farmboy.

 

[bleeb]

It had me speculating about countermeasures, some extension of the "private browsing" mode that would disguise/lie about your browser configuration. Tricky problem, and one I'm not going to be involved in solving, but interesting.

Theoretically takes a bit of effort, but once someone has done it, it's often easily reproduced.

The open source privoxy proxy server may include part of what you're thinking of. It can lie about what browser and version you're using. It can also block specific scripts, but identifying those is more difficult and web site specific.

Some of the discussion about the fingerprinting techniques mention if you're running something like Firefox, with the NoScript add-on you can control execution of Flash, which is the most common way web sites can extract the fingerprint data from your machine. Since most e-commerce sites are relying many on Javascript for the actual transaction, the impact should be less frequent.

Some of the commentary also points out that minimizing unique identifiers can help. Minimize add-ons, ActiveX controls and additional fonts. And the most generic machine is apparently Firefox on XP with no browser enhancements.

Of course, unless your computer is actually portable, they can already make a decent guess based on IP address. With high speed wired Internet access, most ISPs don't actually often change your address, even though they're in principle dynamically assigning them. This is often true even if you power down all your equipment.