I just experienced Wizzair pricing mess/algorithm/or what today?

pseeker_2 · 19 September 2012 at 11:30AM

effect: Wizzair quotes prices on SEARCH, but shows different ones on SELECTION (the total price seems to stick).

Bizzarre, unless i'm missing something obvious.... is it a glitch, a feature, an experiment or an algorithm going mad on Wed?

Can you replicate this?

In my case a flight got miraculously cheaper (than quoted) this morning, and later on the return leg even got dearer (than quoted)!

I thought at first they somehow started pricing in the booking charge, but that does not even makes sense as that's linked to your payment method.

Pictures (you'll need to click on them once more on the website to see better resolution):

on selection

later on logged in [= ClubPrice quoted first, and *should be* automatically selected]

even later [cookies erased, just in case...]

the long story:

With WizzClub paid I knew I'm getting discount anyway deal anyway.

So on Tue I checked a return flight for October, noted the club-prices [23.99 out 19.99 back], and went on to compare Ryanair et al... got distracted by life (Facebook and Derren Brown showing that night ;-))

Checked the prices in the evening and it was now some £10 more for the out journey [31 out 19.99 back]... "!!!!!!...me!" you hear.

Anyway, lazy and high on Brown's mind-tricks with not much to loose, I slept on it.

In the morning I checked again from my phone, was the same, ok, end of waiting game i think, let's book.

Start up my trusty XP Pro and Opera browser

the club-flights are now 28.39 and 20.39, I don't really notice the small difference and go on to book.

To my belegued surprise, what I'm paying for is: 24 + 16! Not complaining as you can imagine.

But intrigued, later I chech it again, and only get bemused more....

To add to the bizzare - on my smartphone the prices are different again (not logged in into wizzclub),
The end total price £58.98 remains the same, it seems it's the quote prices that are all over the place?

Any thoughts and resolutions?

laupsek · 14 June 2013 at 9:14AM

Wizzair seems to have some sort of software that detects the number of clicks that people make for a given flight and subsequently bumps up the price. I found this out by doing some experimenting on a randomly chosen flight. The more clicks I made onto my chosen flight (and navigating away again to another flight) the higher I pushed up the price. Their software seems to perceive this as a sudden high demand for that flight and adjusts its pricing accordingly. Because this "demand" wasn't in fact genuine, the software has a set time interval before readjusting the flight price back to normal. The increase in your return flight here incidentally was just simply that someone else bought that seat at the cheaper price before you managed to get round to it, as prices are structured at different levels with only a limited number at any one level eg there may just be 5 seats at say £30, 10 seats at £40, 30 seats at £50 etc. Incidentally, I've also noticed with Wizzair that it's always much cheaper to book flights on an individual basis if you are traveling with more than one other person and the best way to research the price of a specific flight time is not to put the real one in your search but a different one, 2 or 3 days either side of the one of interest to prevent you "bidding" against yourself.