[Tom Otley]

Good story in The Sun – and well researched

Do airlines hike prices if you keep looking at the same flights on the same day?

Do airlines use cookies to increase prices for flights?

[LuganoPirate]

I’ve never really noticed it. I do find the closer to the date the price will often drop if the pax load is light. Of course the reverse applies if the flight is very full.

[openfly]

Yup seen it myself recently. Looked at the prices on a new search on my PC instead of my iPad and bingo, the earlier lower prices were there.

[GivingupBA]

[quote quote=849736]Yup seen it myself recently. Looked at the prices on a new search on my PC instead of my iPad and bingo, the earlier lower prices were there.
[/quote]

I do exactly the same as you, for the same reason. It has happened several times to me – that’s my experience anyway.

[ontherunhome]

I am also a believer that they do. I think it is something to do with cookies. One trick i use is that i search in say a chrome browser and then book in say Firefox, browser. This has given cheaper flights. However sometimes you are unlucky. The other day a flight to HK went up £50 in a couple of hours.
BA buy now to secure a fare is worth considering, then you can shop around and come back, or buy elsewhere and just lose a small deposit.

[MartynSinclair]

I usually buy my longhauls via a TC (good article about them in the magazine his month).. avoids the fare hikes due to cookies and generally a TC can hold a fare a little longer..

Plenty of TC’s on the Forum, where I met the one I use…

[tomwjsimpson]

I’ve seen this in the past and first noticed when looking to book flights with Lufthansa – the airlines use the cookies data from your web browser, clear the cache from your internet browser and cookie data and it won’t know you’ve already visited 🙂

[LuganoPirate]

Apparently several people looking at the same flight can also push the price higher. If those people don’t book then the price comes back down.

[capetonianm]

Another factor is that where there are multiple passengers, if there are less seats left in the subclass for the lower fare than there are passengers, the system will automatically quote and book for all pax in the higher subclass.

I have saved a lot of money over the years when we travel by booking 1+2 rather than 3. It can mean that you pay an extra ‘admin’ fee but it usually saves money.

[TominScotland]

The collective view above seems to be that the article which Tom posted is tosh or is everyone buying into an urban myth here about booking which, on a grander scale, is unlikely to be true?

[NNoah16]

Yes they do. I always search from different browsers / devices / web sites without logging in to circumvent this.

[handbag]

I always clear my cookies if i am going back to look at flights. That way the price doesn’t go up unless it genuinely would have.Not sure if it is true, but have been doing it for years and it seems to work.

[capetonianm]

That way the price doesn’t go up unless it genuinely would have

The flaw in that argument, sadly, is that unless you know exactly how the airline manages its yields, you won’t know whether the fare would ‘genuinely’ have gone up. Would the fare have gone up? Yes? No? Maybe? You can’t prove a negative.

Airline ‘A’ could, for example, take seats out of a lower revenue bucket and drop them into a higher one to give a fare increase, then they find that a competitor ‘B’ on the same city pair has dropped their fares, so ‘A’ will move a few seats back into a lower bucket.
The algorithms are complex and the parameters change all the time. It’s a black art!

[simeoncox]

[quote quote=850080]The algorithms are complex and the parameters change all the time. It’s a black art!
[/quote]

I am reminded of a decades-old science fiction story where two oponents at war were managed by computers anticipating and cancelling out each others’ ICBMs. The stalemate / anihilation was avoided by mathematicians of one side making calculations outside the computer algorithm space.

Sadly, that is not applicable these days as the world is too tightly bound up in the wwweb.

(Incidently, how do travel agents get on? Do they have their own counter-algorithms, or are they privy to other mechanisms?)

[Flightlevel]

[quote quote=850080]The flaw in that argument, sadly, is that unless you know exactly how the airline manages its yields, you won’t know whether the fare would ‘genuinely’ have gone up. Would the fare have gone up? Yes? No? Maybe? You can’t prove a negative.
The algorithms are complex and the parameters change all the time. It’s a black art!
[/quote]
Do airlines really compete on an hourly basis against competitors fares?
In a previous life I flew standby and could always see seats were available if an airline was still selling low fares.
Airlines really only endeavour to fill their’planes and thats their main priority.

[Author]

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