Airline Website Cookies

GillsMan7 · 15 June 2011 at 2:26PM

Apologies if this is common knowledge, but from doing a search, I’m not sure that it is.

Ever been on an airline website, checked the prices, talked about it with your partner or whomever, and then revisited the website only to find that the fares have risen? Panicking that the prices will continue to rise, you buy the tickets at the inflated price, before they get even more inflated.

Well, there’s a way to beat this. Airline websites use cookies to track what fares you’ve been looking at. Click here for a more detailed explanation: http://www.elliott.org/the-navigator/no-airline-cookie-conspiracy-what-about-this-trail-of-crumbs/

It happened to me this week. Wanting to go to Las Vegas to celebrate my 30th in November, I found tickets with Virgin Atlantic very reasonable at £516 per person on the dates I wanted to travel. I discussed with my girlfriend and when I came back to book yesterday, the price was £1,200 per person. Gutted, but undeterred, I decided to do some investigating. I tried accessing their website via anonymouse.org, which allows you to browse the Internet privately. However, I wasn’t able to access their site: “you can’t access our site without enabling cookies” informed the error message.

I therefore decided to access via another web browser (Chrome) which I rarely use to see if this made a difference. Because cookies are generally specific to one browser or another, Virgin Atlantic wouldn’t be able to track whether I’d visited their website if I used another browser.

So, with Firefox (my usual browser) and Chrome open, I ran the exact same for flights to Vegas on the same date. Lo and behold, on Firefox the prices showed as £1200 per person, on Chrome it showed as £516pp. Concrete proof that they used cookies to determine that I’d searched for this flight before (in Firefox) and artificially inflate the prices.

I subsequently opened up a third browser (IE), cleared my cookies, logged onto Quidco, booked the Virgin Atlantic flights at £516pp and got my 2% cashback tracked as well.

And that’s the way the cookie crumbles!