airlines should be banned from increasing prices the more you search

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This pisses me off no end. The more you search for a particular flight the higher its cost goes. Even ba do this shady thing! Luckily I know that you just have to clear all your cookies and start again to get the original price. But they must trick millions out of people that don't know how to do it.

How do you go incognito? Thanks for the tip.

why would you pay £800 for £400 flights? you'd just go elsewhere.

I'm currently looking at flights for two holidays later this year with two popular budget airlines and I've just done the private/normal browsing trick.

There is no difference in price and one set of flights where I've looked a few times (prices have been up and down all over the place) are currently cheaper (even on normal browsing) than I've seen them in the last few months so I've booked them. They could go up or down further from now on, but at least we've now secured our flights.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I've never noticed it. I often search in one browser and book in another because I use quidco as you often get a few quid in cashback and they say clear your cookies to get the cashback (if you search through expedia for example, the cookies will direct the cashback as commision to expedia as that is how they make their money). So search in one browser and book in another as the cookies are tied to the browser if you see evidence that it is happening.

However, I have noticed very different pricing when looking via different routes when looking for travel insurance - the price you get through a comparison site will be different to going direct. Similarly hotels - different comparison sites show different prices - I think this is the point of the hotelscombined website.

In my experience, the price of flights for us never varies that much for the type that we book (DP and I fly to Europe approx 4 times per year, outside school holidays). Probably varies by less than £100 for the two of us, which is about 10% or less of the total cost of the holiday. While it's nice to make a saving, its not worth getting into a huge tizz over.

I know of someone whose job is to set the pricing at a budget airline. It is a hugely complicated art with lots of variables but the aim is to fill the plane with people paying an average price that is as high as possible, purchasing as many extras as possible. Empty seats lose them money, as do too many discount seats. But if they don't discount the seats, people will go elsewhere if there is a choice to do so. He has a fancy title that is something like 'Revenue maximisation executive'.

It happens with train fares too. You just clear the cookies and you are back to the cheaper fares that you first looked at.

Ah yes forgot it happens with insurance also!

I know it happens 100% as on the ba site is says x seats left. They went from 160 to190 as I kept searching and stayed there for a day, then as if by magic as soon as I went private they were back to 160. All the time it said 8 seats left.

I'm a bit at all the people saying this is fine business practice. Sounds as bad as PPI to me.

it's different to ppi, with ppi you were sold something you weren't asked for, this is you agreeing to a price which has changed.

I think it must be more complex than just cookies, I think they must do clustering, too. Say you do a search from gatwick to dublin going friday and sunday, hundreds of people must search for that. But if you search, I dunno, inverness to jersey going tuesday coming back thursday, and then do the same search 4 mins later in incognito, I reckon they guess the second search is the first person, using IP tracking and especially if they are able to detect whether you're using incognito, so i reckon they'd just send the same price agin. Whether this is true I don't know, it's just my semi educated guess.

so my tips are
1, do searches for the wrong day first,
2) use incognito or vpn or different network,
3) do next search at different time to first search

Oh yes it is true and happened to me last year with a Turkish airline. I didn't know about this and the prices for the exact same flights I was looking at shot up by £ 200 in total. It made me book without checking again to avoid the price gong up further. I looked at the site from dh's iPad in the evening and the prices were lower again. Not a myth.

It's not true, it's an urban myth.
I've been checking prices on 3 routes with 3 airlines yesterday and today, on my regular browser and incognito and guess what?
No difference in fares !
I could check late. And the fares could go up or down but that's due to yield management by the airline not my cookies.

It's not an urban myth. It does happen, but not all the time by any stretch.
It's not as big a thing as its made out, but its definitely a thing, its well known.

Yes it's a well known myth!!
It really doesn't happen, fares change all the time, every time a seat us booked it can affect the fares available for sale.

I think it's true, hapoens all the time within minutes of an original search!

It depends on the company. With some flights - they go up as more people book them - hence it is cheaper to book many flights as soon as they're released.

Believe it if you like, but I'm telling yo that is not how airline pricing works

You can look at a route/date 10 times on different browsers or different days and you could get the same fare 10 times or get 10 different fares.
It proves nothing except that as I've said airline pricing is very complex. Based on the number of seats originally in each fare bucket and how those seats sales are going the price will go up or down.

They do this! And the insurance companies

National Express do this also

I searched for two holidays. Found a good price. Caught up with Oh showed him and went to book. In ten minutes it had gone up ten pounds.

It does happen. Having worked in the online strategy industry for 20 years, trust me, brands have been changing their prices based on your online behaviour for years - its called Dynamic Pricing (and variants).

These guys, for example www.feedvisor.com do it for Amazon; “We basically work out how much a brand is worth to the customer and then raise the price to what we think they are willing to pay to buy a certain product from that retailer.”

There are many many other things that affect the price too, including day, time, demand, shipping costs....etc, and travel related products are even more complicated, but many products will vary depending on your activity over the past few days/weeks.

It's the basic theory of capitalism - goods and services don't have intrinsic worth, they are worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for them.

I think it's horrible, BTW, and I don't think it's really fair because it's not what somebody is willing to pay - if it's still the cheapest one you can find, you buy it. Nothing to do with what you were willing to pay to begin with.

It can't possibly happen with UK train tickets. Anytime, off-peak and super off-peak fares are all a fixed amount for a given route. Advance fares are variable price but they are done on a purely first come first served basis. Web portals can add a booking fee but they can't alter the fares.