ryanair may have a little ruse going...

falc_2

leeegglestone wrote:

just tried it again and it seems one flight falls on to be a penny making overall

37.98 so even cheaper

See these special offers creep up all the time i dont think we can ever do a fare test.

you may be right, though I think we are learning quite a lot about the skills of booking cheap flights here! then again 4 days is quite a big gap - not entirely conclusive as might think you'd lost interest. am going to now do a little test but won't tell you the details until it's over so as not to spoil it...

falc_2

right, having done my homework the jury is out on ryanair's ruse. It appears that if it knows you as a repeat customer, it can put prices up, but when I try buying things on ryanair it seems to keep the price the same however much I check. I am not a regular Ryanair customer. Clearly if one is buying flights on the internet one needs to delete all cookies before searching for flights and preferably buy each ticket separately apart from the child ticket obviously!

iceman_2

It's not a ruse at all. The price structure is based on level of demand for the particular flight. The reason it will have gone up is that someone else will have booked a seat on the flight in question. Similarly, if no-one has booked for a while the price will be lower.

dmg24

Iceman is correct. It is a simple case of supply and demand.

falc_2

iceman wrote:

It's not a ruse at all. The price structure is based on level of demand for the particular flight. The reason it will have gone up is that someone else will have booked a seat on the flight in question. Similarly, if no-one has booked for a while the price will be lower.

STill doesn't explain why it was one price when my au pair, a regular customer, logged in, and another when I logged in.

falc_2

Thanks to everyone who helped out with this thread. My conclusion is that internet companies such as Ryanair use a complex system of customer profiling which sometimes affects the price of the flight either positively or negatively so that it is possibly useful to have a separate "neutral" account which you can use to check prices on major purchases such as airline tickets. Also very useful to know that when doing group bookings with airlines everyone should buy their ticket separately. The world is getting very complex!

kittiwoz

They log your IP address so the answer is to price check on one computer and then make the booking from another computer.

rjh090384

happned to me too
checked one day was good price, checked it was within budget but couldnt book it until next day
checked back and it had gone up again but booked anyway
checked back next day and it was down to what it originally was
i was none too impressed

mixu

I think you're all reading too much into this... low-cost airlines have revolutionised the industry by using yield management techniques. The price goes up if the flight looks popular and goes down if seats are not selling — somebody could be booking flights as you're checking the price so it could increase any second.

This is the whole basis of budget airlines' philosophy. If you remember 10 or 15 years ago BA charged £300-400 to fly to Prague or £200 to fly to Nice... it was a fairly set price.

Booking early is usually the key but often, if you hold your nerve, the price drops within two-three months of departure if the airline has increased the price too much too early.

It's a complex system but relatively simple at heart. I don't believe for a second they're logging IP addresses...

mrsv69

People are not reading too much into this at all. It happened to me too. It's not just the airlines, it's the same when you use websites like Travelocity, Expedia etc. The price rose steadlily the more I shopped around or if I went back to a previously visited website. The best thing was when the Virgin Atlantic flight completely disappeared and more expensive hotel/flight details were offered. Once I cleared my cookies all the great cheaper deals came back, including the Virgin flight which I grabbed pretty quickly once I worked out what was going on.