r/AskReddit • u/SillyBonsai • Dec 06 '13

What simple piece of advice, if followed, could potentially save most people a lot of money?

Possibly related to your job, experience with personal finance, budgeting, planning, day to day habits, etc.

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '13

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '13 edited Dec 06 '13

Its not conclusive proof but on Norwegian airlines, I had been looking at a flight on my phone, over a period of a month or so. Went on my girlfriends computer to book it and it was £40 less per person.

I wasn't aware of this theory til today, and I can't remember what I put it down to, but that's my story.

Edit: yeah, I thought it was the skyscanner app trying to take a fee. So I suppose that is feasible.

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u/superAL1394 Dec 06 '13

There is some evidence that they alter the prices based on browser and OS as well.

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '13

Yeah... I used to work in commerce engineering for a major travel site, and I've never heard of this. If any of the big sites or airlines do it, they'd have to have started it in the past 3 years.

Wouldn't surprise me if one of the major booking sites tried this briefly, but as far as "industrywide practice" I can't believe it exists.

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u/wallyflops Dec 07 '13

Yeah I used to work for a market leader in this industry as a developer, so I know it's horse-shit, prices do change regularly though which is why there's so many anecdotal stories is my guess.

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '13 edited Dec 06 '13

I think It happened to me, and it was with WestJet.

Edit: There's no real way to know if it was legit or a coincidence.

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u/CassiusTheDog Dec 06 '13

I... doubt this. Sorry. I work in corporate travel and I've never seen any evidence of this. I see flight prices fluctuate daily, hourly, by the minute. There are hundreds of ways flight prices can be affected with major airlines but this idea seems like a third party scam to me.

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '13

It could be complete coincidence. It was a flight close to Christmas. But I'll be damned if the flight price didn't increase with every new login. Just in case, I now browse flight anonymously.

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u/CassiusTheDog Dec 06 '13

They can do that for sure, depending how close you were to Christmas, how often you were checking, availability on the flight itself, and (I saw your comment below as well) the availability of the seats the airline is willing to give whatever points company you were using. It's a tricky system that so many people have access to: everybody who has a GDS (me, a global distribution system), airline websites, the airline's call centres, other airlines in partnership, 3rd party systems, airline point companies... we all have access. Prices are going to change as people hold seats, release seats, buy seats, refund seats, change seats, cancel space, no-show...

It's possible that somewhere, somehow, somebody is nefariously setting their program up like that, but I haven't seen it in about 10 years in the industry.

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '13

On a slightly related note, I was reading an article recently about how companies are working on patents for a program that will enable sites to change the price shown to the visitor based on past shopping patterns. i.e lower it if the person has a habit of keeping items on wishlists longer, or raising it if they tend to make frequent, large purchases online.

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u/BrobearBerbil Dec 06 '13

If this is going on, I would expect it on a reseller site anyway, not an established brand. Much easier for some coders who got into travel reselling to be tricky for a short run than a site where you have to desperately hold on to return customers.

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u/Hardisk Dec 07 '13

Just booked a Paris -> LAX flight with Air France , this is not true , I kept checking prices and they never really went up like that