Amusing: Website promotes pricier deals to Mac users than PC users

Federhirn

A story I came across amused me today:

Basically, Orbitz, a travel retailer, has been looking at their web stats, found Mac users spend more money than PC users, and decided that the deals showing up on the first page(s) of results when searching for, say, hotel rooms, should be different from those they show to PC users - i.e. Mac users should be seeing more expensive, premium products.

The article I am referring to is called "Orbitz pitches pricier hotels to Mac users, PC users see the cheap stuff" and can be found on the PC World website. (As new user, I am not allowed to link to it)

Fair enough, I suppose: anyone who does not switch from "popular results" or "featured results" or "our recommendations" views to "sort by price" is not doing themselves any favours. But who'd have thought that the (first) prices customers see when shopping are influenced by their hardware / browser choices?

John_Gray

So why is that surprising? If you can afford to buy a Mac you must be spectacularly rich, and so can be sold anything!

bazster

That's funny - but perfectly logical. After all, Mac users have already proven themselves to have more money than sense.

Federhirn

(Not sure whether your response is sarcastic? At any rate, I don't own any Apple products...)

The thing that intrigues / slightly worries me about this sort of strategy is that it might catch on - and be used more nefariously.

Imagine trying to book a flight with Ryanair, going through the process, arriving at the final page, and seeing a "browser charge" - which is stacked: £5 for Chrome/Opera/Firefox, £10 for IE7+ (because the web user is not very savvy), £20 for IE6 or below (because the browser is hard to be compatible with), and £30 for Safari (because the passenger is an Apple user and therefore someone worth fleecing and probably won't be bothered to start up a second browser and go through the process again), with a free option called the "Ryanair browser" (which you could download, but which displays your web pages in a frame surrounded by adverts that Ryanair collects the revenue from).

Or imagine using a retailer's app on a smart phone / tablet - but the one for iPads and iPhones only displays expensive products when you search, while the one for Android devices includes cheap ones among the results.

I just find it quite baffling that the information a user receives is altered depending on the technology they use to access it. It seems contrary to what I would expect from a website. It had not occurred to me that this would be the case.

bazster

Why? If you make a purchase from a bricks-and-mortar business where haggling is customary (e.g. a car dealership) they will pitch their products and prices according to apparent customer stupidity, why should the interweb be any different?

Dexters_Indignation

see here
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/26/orbitz_apple_pricing/

It makes sense really!
It is not a rip off apple plan!

VoucherMan

Federhirn wrote: »

"browser charge"

Already started