EasyJet price increased DURING booking process

Westin

amandaleeds wrote: »

I had this same problem...easyjet said theywsold out of the cheapest seats while I was in the process of checking out so I ended up paying a higher price.

I then read on a forum that if you've repeatedly checked the price of a particular flight the airline can tell from your ip address and bump the price up. The way around this is to clear the cache and cookies prior to booking. I tried this the following day and lo and behold the cheap seats came up again so they hadn't sold out.

Lesson learned for me!

Not quite.

The infamous cookie story is a myth in regards to under hand measures to bump up the price. As is someone sitting at EZ HQ looking at your IP address and then squeezing another £5 on your fare.

What does however happen is that fare class availability will be reduced if people start the booking process and those "seats" get removed from that fare class (or "bucket") and the data cached. It then takes a short while for that cached data to clear and the "seats" drop back into the system again. This is likely what you found when you did a new search the following day (although it shouldn't take that long to drop back).

It is also possible that a cookie placed during the booking enquiry will be stored and used on your computer to pick up on the enquiry if you return to the site. It's not intended to do anything more than to help you so you don't have to retype the search again e.g. searched route and dates. A new search will check the latest price.

zagfles

Westin wrote: »

Not quite.

The infamous cookie story is a myth in regards to under hand measures to bump up the price. As is someone sitting at EZ HQ looking at your IP address and then squeezing another £5 on your fare.

What does however happen is that fare class availability will be reduced if people start the booking process and those "seats" get removed from that fare class (or "bucket") and the data cached. It then takes a short while for that cached data to clear and the "seats" drop back into the system again. This is likely what you found when you did a new search the following day (although it shouldn't take that long to drop back).

If that's the way it works, why would the prices ever increase during the booking process? If they're held at that fare class?

Happened to me once - but it was a small increase, about £10 between 4 of us, not a big deal but shouldn't really happen. If it's people "getting in ahead" that implies the seats are not temporarily held during the booking process, and so you could end up going through the whole booking process then being told the flight is full :eek:

Lucylaw

I came across the prices increasing as you booked yesterday when booking the newly released winter flights to Tenerife. It changed 3 times by which time I was totally fed up and had to go out anyway. Big mistake leaving it as the ticket prices shot up by £300 for 4 people. As they seemed to still be rising I booked the flights.
I continued to monitor the prices and they went up several times again.
When I looked again this morning the outward bound flight had dropped by almost £40 per seat back to the original price I had been looking at yesterday morning. To say I was annoyed is an understatement.
Anyway following the advise on this site I rang Easyjet and after being cut off once and waiting over 40 minutes for the phone to be answered I got a credit refund for £150! Result! 😺

budgetflyer

Nice one. Easyjet do have a price promise, excluding sales.
This could of course be a new tactic by Easyjet to squeeze extra out of customers. Trialing it and monitoring to see how much they can get away with.
if the chosen flight put in basket is removed from the fare bucket, then no one else should be able to nip in and take it as has been suggested, so the price shouldn't really change.
The only change may be due to payment method