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.

I must be very unusual then

but I enjoyed paying £5000 rather than £8000 for my flights
it covered the whole of the food and drink while we were away

and my car insurance reductions now total £750

I should try it for yourselves. I clear the cookies all the time and it is not a myth. How can it be a myth when I find a train fare, go back in a little later and it has gone up- clear the cookies - go back and it is the first price? Not once, but every time I have done it since my son explained. I prefer to get my cheaper price rather than be told surveys have said it is a myth. I have found the same with Eastjet.

I'm not saying it's not true, but I have never found it to be the case, and I spend hours searching for flights, hotels etc when we go on holiday.

This weekend I have been searching for easyjet flights, I've searched their site several times, from both my computer and my phone, and the price has not varied by one penny. I've also gone in 'incongnito' and the price as still remained the same.

Then today I went to book, and the price has come down by £20. But I'm sure that this is the airlines dynamic pricing and nothing to do with cookies.

I do find that hotel prices fluctuate day to day, but this is always in line with a change in the exchange rate.

Try as I might, I can't get the price to change from multiple searches.

It definitely happens. A few weeks ago I was looking for a flight to LA. After two days of searching, almost all the airlines I was looking at prices had gone up, some by over £800. Look on DH's phone, they're all the original price or within £50 of it. I was literally sat there refreshing the page on my computer and then the page on his phone, and the prices were like night and day. Unless the airline's change their prices back and forth every few seconds and I somehow managed to keep ending up with the same prices on the same device, it happens. I've experienced the same with Amazon, insurance companies etc.

That said I think the biggest thing that's tracked is what kind of buyer you are and how much disposable income you actually have/are willing to spend. Do you regularly make impulse purchases, or quickly panic buy after weeks of 'window shopping' when a site says the item is low in stock? Or do you decide what you're willing to pay and simply close the window if the price of something you wanted has gone up? I am the kind of person who would normally panic if prices shot up and rush to buy before they go up again, and I can very easily be persuaded to abandon my budget. My DH on the other hand would be put off by a sudden increase and if it went over the price he had in his head, he just wouldn't buy it and he'd change his plans accordingly ie. he wouldn't be able to be lured back with the original price. The data collected on us would show this difference in mentality pretty clearly.

I think this because it happens to me all the time, but to DH rarely, and when it does happen to him it's always something concerning his hobby from Amazon, which is the one area where he might actually cave and buy something for more than he wanted to spend.

Shall we do a (as far as possible) synchronised search? As a collective we'll be using all types of devices, from all different IP's, places etc, see what we come up with?

I've done the following if other's want to do the same?-

Ryanair
Manchester-Lanzarote
Depart Fri 3rd July
Return Fri 10th July
2 adults

My price using laptop- £449.96 (paying by debit card selected)

Go!

This explains that it's most probably bunk, and also explains why all the posters upthread who believe it happens get different prices at different times:

www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/10/cookies-flight_n_6430592.html

From that link, if you can't be bothered to read it:

"A study from travel site Hopper found that on a flight to Las Vegas, most passengers paid about between $400 and $600 for a seat, while some lucky ones paid $200. The most expensive seat on the plane, meanwhile, cost a whopping $1,400 more than the cheapest one.

The reason is that airlines market seats for different prices across different platforms, and they change prices over months, weeks and even days as demand for these seats changes. Cookies or not, Seaney explains, there's always a chance your flight is going to cost one price on your first look and a totally different price the next."

My price using laptop- £449.96 (paying by debit card selected)

That's what I got too, and I tried it three times in half an hour, on the same computer, so it doesn't appear to be using cookies in my case.

Ah that's good budgie that they're the same price. Are you able to check around the same time tomorrow? Would be interesting to see if we both get the same again. (as in, now "they're" aware we're interested in that route/date etc)

Will do , Shakey

Brilliant!

Anyone else care to do the "experiment"? More the merrier

try a better search

expedia
Heathrow to San Francisco, direct
any airline
28th July, return between 7 and 10 days later

I'll be interested to see the variety of prices that come up

also, on your ryanair search, try it again three days later and see what comes up
both open search and incognito
as the trick does NOT work on the first search as its all about cookies

£458.96 for the Ryanair Lanzarote search.

I think this may have happened to me with booking trains? I just tried to book advance tickets, have searched for same journey several times, from my station the "cheapest" tickets we're over £50 more than from one station away (in either direction)! I tried clearing cookies and tried on another computer but no luck so I ended up booking from one station past mine. Ridiculous and odd.

I get 458,96 GBP on the German site. 449.96 GBP when I switched back to UK site (I live in Germany so it automatically directs me there).

Heathrow to SanFransico 28july10 days cheapest I got was £1,104.
For 7 days £1,084

Talkin

I've got £1100.66 for LHR- SFO, 2 adults, direct, depart 28th July, return 4th Aug (didn't give me an option to select between 7-10 days, so selected 7)

£1120 for 10 days

For the Lanzarote I got £450.

try it again in three days - same computer

Lanzarote - £477.96

I search obsessively before I buy something that costs more than a few hundred pounds, and this has never happened to me. I've never bothered to clear cookies or go incognito either.

It's really bizarre that it apparently happens to some and not others. Why is that?

How about the fare has gone up because someone booked some seats ?
That's how airline pricing works.
You are all so determined to prove something that doesn't exist that you will make up reasons for fares going up.
And in 3 days time the fares will likely have increased as more seats are booked. Maybe they'll drop if the airline wants to increase sales.
That's how airline pricing works, it's a live system. Every time a seat is sold it can affect the price of the remaining seats. There is no fixed price, a flight could have 10 or 12 different price levels on it. Someone could pay £40 the person next to them could pay £300.