Does Browsing cause Algorithms to Raise Prices?

In retrospect, it is almost uncanny, the way my favourite flight to London kept appreciating every time I went to my favourite travel site. I couldn't help getting irritated with my wife who I thought was solely to blame for her incessant procrastination.

But in hind sight I found it suspicious that my favourite flight kept moving its price up.   Even though it wasn't a very special week,  a special time of the year, or a very special airline.

So while I do understand that airline tickets like everything else in the travel industry follow a dynamic pricing model, I wasn't really convinced that all was fair.

Search v/s Buy

The question I was asking myself was, if you do a dozen searches on each site for the exact same date & city, does that cause their computers to suddenly raise prices, because it thinks demand is up? So in effect a site which has a certain ticket for sale during the search process, is only available at a higher rate during the buying process.

To be fair, the algorithm formulas I am sure are complicated and change a lot, and unless you're doing hundreds of searches, the price fluctuations are probably not specifically related to your searches. You can sometimes see a huge surge of ticket prices, even on a small local airline that does it own booking and is not on makemytrip or Travelocity or Cheaptickets etc..  This is true for say local short flights with in the US for example.  If there was a  45 minute flight to Las Vegas. you can get the one way seats as cheap as $19 or as expensive as $150. If you ask 10 people why they think the prices swing so much you get 10 different answers!

Static v/s Dynamic Pricing

So how ever much you are cribbing about Uber prices for example, even in high peak  times, dynamic pricing does mean that  the price charged for a ticket is directly proportional to the probability of selling the seat - airline supply and demand, or in the case of Uber taxi supply and demand.  Fly to Isle of Man on Easy Jet when nobody else wants to and you might just get seats for £ 20  just to fill some seats. As your flight date approaches and there's lots of empty seats, the rates stay low. Not many seats? Guess what! The rates go up!   Or taking a cab in Mumbai from the South Mumbai to the suburb of Andheri during peak hours. You can sure Uber will be charging you 3x -5x the regular rate.

This brings me to the question of why do people book tickets through travel sites? Is it only for the low prices or is it also a function of service?  I.e are you just replacing you old fashioned slow travel agent with a travel booking site like Makemytrip, Cleartrip, Expedia, etc. And also because you can get last minute deals, weekly deals, promo codes and coupons and a host of other tempting benefits including clubbing your hotel, car hire, taxi and other travel needs?  Important question for all of us to answer.  Not to mention some of the goodies that come with being a loyal user and the partner tie ups?

Or is it generally because your previous experience with that particular travel site has been really good?  I know why I travel by Uber for example.  So I don't have to worry about driving through Mumbai traffic. I don't have to worry about parking. I don't have to worry about some stupid Mumbai driver scraping my car.

 And for any reason if you are still a doubting Thomas maybe you can try this little trick in the book, although I am not sure it works.  One way to get around this problem is to clear the cookies in your browser. A website sends you cookies and most browsers keep the cookies until they are renewed. Cookies are  saved information like passwords, recent searches, items in your shopping cart, etc. If you don't clear your cookies, your information is available to the retailer and they have the capability to know what you are interested in. Clear your cookies before you browse. Of course  all of your saved information will be lost so you will have to log back on to website, etc. 

Or otherwise just use your favourite travel site, because you think it gives you great service and you can trust them.

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