Keeping an eye on holiday prices online

AnneMarie4687

It is seems that if you keeping an eye on a specific holiday on line that somehow the tour operator will know you are interested and increase the price each time you look at the cost of this holiday. When I looked at the same holiday for the first time on line from a friend's computer which had a different IP number the cost of the holiday was considerably cheaper. It this common. If this is not the case it appears to be a strange coincidence

nykied

Try deleting your cookies and internet browser history and looking again. See whether there is any difference. It could just be fluctuations in the market.

InsideInsurance

AnneMarie4687 wrote: »

It is seems that if you keeping an eye on a specific holiday on line that somehow the tour operator will know you are interested and increase the price each time you look at the cost of this holiday. When I looked at the same holiday for the first time on line from a friend's computer which had a different IP number the cost of the holiday was considerably cheaper. It this common. If this is not the case it appears to be a strange coincidence

The OFT (or it may have been TS, cannot remember) did announce they were going to look into this some time ago but the few big boys that were asked for comments all denied it happened. I never saw the outcome from it so its a bit of guess work.

Personally, I've checked monitored things from home on my Plus.Net connection using my desktop and at a later time checked using my laptop and a 3G card (Three or O2) and never noticed a price difference but that could be equally coincidental of the companies that I have been using.

Theoretically its perfectly possible to do from a systems perspective but would cause problems for those accessing from work computers or certain ISPs where total strangers are all sharing the same outward facing IP

hgotsparkle

I found this when booking my holiday. Whilst I was researching hotels and looking them up online etc, when I went back to them to book they went up quite a bit, so I went to my mums and used her computer to book and they were much cheaper.

InsideInsurance

There's also been some that say that if you visit the site from a Mac you will see different results than a Windows machine and even within windows machines you may get different results based on the age of the operating system etc.

I believe one company did say that they ordered results differently by operating system, Mac users were high to low price ordering and Windows were low to high. Both can switch and no pricing differences were admitted but did demonstrate people are using computer characteristics to segment their business

DUKE

Some of them are live so they fluctuate.

RoxRoxBling

The prices do tend to go up and down. Even when I've used the same device. didn't even think the operator's would track what we search.

jonesMUFCforever

I have noticed something slightly different - eg a budget airline quote for a flight from A to B for a certain date with a little box saying only x number of seats left at this price, implying (to me anyway) that the flight is selling fast and prices are likely to increase if you don't book immediately.
I logged off and forgot about it for a week (flight was many months away) and lo and behold the flight was at the same price with the same number of seats available at the same price!
Don't always believe what their website says!