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No airline cookie conspiracy? What about this trail of crumbs?

April 18, 2010

Airlines and online travel agencies surreptitiously use computer “cookies” they’ve implanted on your Web browser to track your activity on their sites and then raise prices when it appears that you’re interested in a fare. That’s the rumor, at least.

I inadvertently resurrected a long-simmering controversy over this rumor a few weeks ago, when I blamed airfare fluctuations on a practice called “caching,” which lets airlines or travel agencies store a copy of all fare information on their sites. Caching is efficient and cost-effective for the company, but less than 5 percent of the fares may no longer be available.

So what’s really going on?


Many travelers are convinced that the price changes are deliberate. “I am absolutely sure that there is nothing unintentional about these price switches,” insisted Bernhard Kaltenboeck, a professor of veterinary medicine at Auburn University in Alabama. “The online reservation systems track your computer and raise the price on you when you seem to be actually interested in the flight.”

For years, I’ve brought views such as Kaltenboeck’s to the industry, and for years, it has vehemently denied any tampering with prices. But a few weeks ago, a story that made me start to doubt everything I’d heard caught my attention.

A United Kingdom-based hotel site called VivaStay reportedly dinged customers by way of a special link from an affiliated Web site that showed slightly higher prices than those quoted to customers who clicked directly on the VivaStay site. VivaStay apologized, but said it was unaware that the price variation was frowned upon. Although the story was hardly noticed outside Europe, it’s the first time I recall a company admitting to tinkering with prices in this way.

But what happens when someone accuses a big American online agency of the same behavior?

Just ask Mike Turner, who booked a Cancun vacation package through Travelocity with a friend a few weeks ago. They bought the trip together at the same time, while on the phone. “When we finished choosing the flights, rooms, and other options, we went to finalize the purchase and a box popped up saying my price had changed and I could either accept, or pick another flight,” said Turner, who manages a tire store in Eagan, Minn. “My friend was picking the exact same hotel, flight, and options but did not get this message.”

So Turner and his friend started the process again, selecting their flights and rooms one more time. The same message appeared. Travelocity wanted Turner to pay an extra $500, which he eventually did. Turner phoned the company and asked for an explanation, but a representative offered only to cancel his reservation. E-mail appeals to refund the price difference were ignored.

This looked like a clear case of price bait-and-switch, so I asked Travelocity whether cookies were to blame. “Simply not true,” said spokesman Dan Toporek. The agency investigated Turner’s claim and found that the bookings weren’t identical. “It appears that Mr. Turner booked a package that included a junior suite, whereas his friend’s package had a more standard room. That was the reason for the difference in price,” he said. (Half a grand for an upgrade to a junior suite? That seems a little rich.)

Could these price fluctuations be our fault? Some of them might be, like my own recent efforts to buy an inexpensive flight, where I waited too long and the fare wasn’t available anymore. But can they all be written off as user error? No, they can’t.

Donna Brinkmeyer, a teacher from Sioux Falls, S.D., says that when she recently tried to buy a ticket to Vietnam, she handled her reservation through the Delta Air Lines Web site by the book. But when she was actually ready to buy her flights, the airline informed her that the ticket she wanted was $300 more than the original price quote.

“Disappointed, but curious, I returned to Delta’s home page and began the process again,” she said. “The same lower fare was still displayed, so I worked my way through the process again only to be informed once again that the fare was no longer available. Over the course of a half hour I repeated this process two more times. Same result.”

I’ve brought cases like this to other airlines in the past, and the answer is always the same. Even with evidence, such as screen shots and printouts, the only way you’ll ever prove the cookie conspiracy theory is with an affidavit from the head of the travel company’s IT department.

But customers think they know better.

“There must be a systematic process designed to lure the buyer with a price that the company does not intend to honor,” said Bob Flood, a health physicist who lives in Las Vegas. “Consider this: In the natural order of things, if there is no bias in a process, there are about as many negative outcomes as positive outcomes. The process of posting the lower airfares — that is, making them initially available — should result in as many surprisingly lower prices at booking as it does surprisingly higher ones because they have all been taken.”

He makes a good point. I’ve heard of only one or two cases where the fare dropped.

It may be impossible to prove conclusively that travel companies use cookies to raise their fares, or to bait us with low fares. But smart travelers have found a way around it. Caren Barnes, a teacher from Lincoln, Neb., simply logs off whenever a low fare turns into a high fare. “I go to another computer,” she says. “There’s almost a 100 percent chance you’ll see the lower fare you saw the first time.”

Another technique worth considering is to clear the cookies on your Web browser. Each program handles this task slightly differently; consult the “help” option in your application’s menu for directions.

Bottom line: Don’t think of a travel site as a supermarket. Instead, picture it as a Middle Eastern bazaar. How much for the ticket? Whatever it looks as though you’re willing to pay.

(Photo: virtualpilot88/Flickr Creative Commons)

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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22 comments

  • Carver

    Is this silly thing still around. This is a fairly simple. If airlines were using cookies as bait and switch, some enterprising 15 year old would have isolated the cookie(s) by now and proven this conclusively.

    Turners situation is an obvious example of caching.

    Bood Flood statement is true but reflects a profound lack of understanding of airline pricing. As lower priced seats are sold, only higher priced seats with fewer restrictions remain. How complicated is that?

  • Bruce InCharlotte

    Consider price shopping in parallel on your computer using two browsers, Internet Explorer in one window and Firefox in another. They don’t share cache files or cookies and you can flip back and forth between the two quickly to see if there’s any difference.

  • Richard

    “Is this silly thing still around. This is a fairly simple. If airlines were using cookies as bait and switch, some enterprising 15 year old would have isolated the cookie(s) by now and proven this conclusively.”

    I don’t think you understand how cookies work.
    All cookies do now is store a unique ID on your machine that lets them monitor your travels through their site on *their side*.

    There’s nothing to figure out. 23580725048369720823079340823-7235-85280-09743643634985693453 is just as relevant of a cookie as ANOFH9534GNVRVERJ-VEJG3FF0RJFJMR0C450 34GU4C4C3-34N34-C3 is. Both are randomly generated values that have no meaning outside of your browsing session.

  • Ruth

    I have experienced this – albeit rarely – with the American Airlines website. On each occasion that I cared to call their Customer Service, someone on the phone said that they could see the fare and could book it for me over the phone. I would suggest giving that a try before just complaining that the fares are fixed. Computers drive us all crazy with some nonsense every day – but a good customer service department is a company’s best friend for keeping us paying clients using their business.

  • tom

    Have experienced it myself using parallel ‘puters. Best way to avoid it is to clear the browser history when you close it & re-open it. Also, clear LSO’s (deep seated cookies) as well as clearing any ‘flash’ tracking. Google these to find out additional info.

  • MVFlyer

    Maybe not cookie conspiracy, but strong possibility of bait and switch.

    @Ruth–good for you for calling–many people wouldn’t think of this, particularly nowadays when the airlines discourage phone reservations through extra fees. But still, it seems a bit fishy that you can see the fare but can’t book it online. No conspiracies can be proven as long as the airlines hold their fare algorithms as closely guarded traded secrets.

  • SirWired

    I thought the way online fare systems worked was by querying a database of prices that is updated several times a day for the initial price display. The airlines do not update the database in real-time, so if a fare is sold out, the online systems (including the ones used by the airlines themselves) may not know it until it comes time to actually ticket the reservation, which is when somebody finally actually makes a query to the reservation database, which has the “true” list of available fares.

    While setting up the quote database to be updated in real-time from the reservation DB would not be impossible, it would be complicated and expensive, and have zero financial benefit for the airlines.

    What WOULD make sense would be if a website got information that a particular fare was sold out, they went ahead and updated their own database with the new information. That would prevent all these conspiracy theories.

    Alternatively, a law stating that a fare must be valid for “x” minutes after an initial quote (assuming the flight did not completely sell out in that seat class) would spur some useful action.

  • bgirl

    Ever tried to order a Dell computer online? Same thing happens.
    Get a good price, then compare models and you’ll never get that first good price again. Parallel computers is the only way you will be able to order at the best price. Don’t tell me this can’t be done with airline tickets.

  • David Z

    This is a fairly simple.

    Heh, how some people wish that to be. But chances are, even if some airlines or travel vendors explain how and why, inevitably some people will still complain.

    C’est la vie…

  • Carver

    @Richard

    Actually, that’s not how a cookie works. There is nothing random about the data that a cookie stores beyond the session id. It may seem like gooblygook to your untrained eyes, but to someone experienced in cryptography, the seemingly random string contains specific informatrion about you and your browsing session.

    For example, many websites, including AA.com will store your userid (with your permission) so that you don’t have to enter it each time you log on to the website.

  • David Young

    Mr. Bob Flood needs some lessons in statistics. Not all things generate a “bell” curve. Consider this: Initially posted HIGHER prices will be less likely to have customers go all the way through the booking process, so the “opportunity” to display a lower price at the end is much lower. Fewer people go to the end.

    Also, one would reasonably expect lower fares sell out and thus result in a higher “final” price. But how often do you just happen to be in the process of booking a higher fare when the airline computer system opens up more lower-priced seats?

  • http://www.claws-and-paws.com/ Douglas Muth

    As someone who writes web apps for a living and works with cookies on a daily basis, “Richard”‘s explanation hits the nail on the head.

    Something that folks also don’t seem to grasp is… the enormous amount of data that the airline industry works with. tens of thousands of flights with hundreds of passengers from hundreds of airports. Each and every day. And when you have such a large dataset like that, and have differing seat prices, classes of airfare, non-revenue passengers, deadheading crew, etc., it all gets very very complicated and is far from trivial to solve.

    As far as “caching” thing goes, I believe I can explain that in more detail. Given the volume of data that’s dealt with, and the time it can take to make a query for a specific flight (a few hundred milliseconds is “too much” if you want a snappy web app), it makes perfect programming sense for Travelocity to cache the results the results of queries that it makes to Sabre or any other online booking system. That conserves bandwidth and gives the customer better performance. That said, sometimes stale caches become an issue, or a set of earlier screens queries one cache (which has one set of data), while a set of later screens may query a different cache. And if it happens to have stale data, we have a price mismatch. (Of course, this is all speculation from me, me being on the outside here)

    Sometimes bugs happen in software. It’s a fact of life.

    As for why nobody says anything about prices going down, I’m betting that if the average person notices the price going down on their plane ticket, they’re not going to bring it to the attention of the airline. They’re going to book that ticket in a New York Minute and count their blessings. :-)

  • Lisa S.

    I think this post explains exactly why customers believe the BA should have honored its $40 fare to India, which was really $500 once all the taxes and charges were paid. If you can’t count on an airline to honor the flight you found when you speedily go through the different screens to book the fare, then you should at least be able to expect an airline to honor the fare it allowed you to purchase. Maybe the disappearing fare has nothing to do with cookies, but it certainly does indicate a lack of transparency, honor, and trustworthiness.

  • Brian

    Whenever I am researching airfare, car rental, or hotels; I always remove all cookies and do so every few searches while on the same website to avoid having the price dramatically increase. Before, I never thought much about cookies while on a travel site. When the difference is as much as $ 20-30, it is significant. Many thanks to Chris Elliott’s story about the customer who wanted to reserve a car on Hotwire and had the price of the car jump before he removed the cookies. That taught me what cookies can really do and now I have seen the result.

    As for the travel companies, they just want to make even more money without actually disclosing their unfair business practices. This way, it’s almost impossible for the consumer to prove anything. We, as consumers, just need to pay very close attention to what we buy.

  • http://www.travelswithcarole.blogspot.com Carole Terwilliger Meyers

    Call it whatever you want, I do believe some of the airlines are using something to assure that the consumer pays a higher price by the time they book. I’ve had it happen too many times to believe otherwise. I, too, have decided next time I book to use a different computer than the one I do the research on. However, I can see from your comments, that if the higher price is built in to the purchase process, I’ll be paying more or not buying at all.

  • http://www.vagabondinglife.com Greg

    As a travel writer, I have seen first-hand evidence of this when booking flights.

    Several years ago, while still working for IBM, we conducted an experiment on a flight to Bangkok that I was watching. I was quoted a price after checking from my office, then once at home that same evening, I was given a LOWER price by the exact same travel site on the exact same flight.

    I called a buddy that was still sat in the office to re-run the query and sure enough, he received the higher price – while simultaneously I was given a better price at home. Cookie? IP Address? IBM owns that entire class A IP range, were they being given higher prices simply based on their name?

    If I had just taken the first price I received at the office without checking at home, I would have overpaid by $200. Why? To suggest that corporations (such as airlines and ticketing sites) are above leveraging IT to make a better profit is pure naivety.

  • Mark K

    I have seen LOWER prices on the final page before purchase many times while booking flights directly on the CO site. Mostly I get the prices I originally saw when booking directly with an airline (plus taxes which are NOT part of the initial price display).

    I almost always get HIGHER prices when going thru the booking at the travel web sites like Orbitz and Travelocity. I know they keep search history for you because I can visit them days later and a pop up appears asking if I found my ticket to wherever it was I was looking the last time I was on and offering me great prices to that destination that disappear before I can book them.

    I don’t consider $20 a significant price change when I am booking a single ticket for my use. $200 starts getting significant. But when you figure all the flights that get booked in a day, $20 each does add up to a significant amount if the travel sites and airlines are really bumping prices

  • Randy

    As a computer scientist by degree and a technical manager responsible for the development of numerous websites for both the federal government and private industry – cookies are able to store virtually any information about your browser session. Typically this includes things like site preferences (language, geographic location), personal information (name, address, account numbers), web pages visited, etc. While the content of a cookie might appear to be a series of random characters to the naked eye, it actually means something very different when it is processed by a web server.

    As for travel websites upping prices, I’ve had this happen to me numerous times. Usually this would occur when I spent a fair amount of time on the site exploring different flight options to the same destination – at some point in the session the low price(s) I saw earlier in the session would mysteriously increase. When this would happen I would close the browser session and start a new one. After clearing the browser’s cache, cookies, history, and temporary internet files I’d navigate back to the website and see the lower prices again. If I selected the flights I wanted in a straight forward manner I’d get the lower price at check out, but if I spent the time again to look at numerous flight options the price would increase again. Close the browser, restart and clear everything and the low prices are there again. I could demonstrate this behavior very consistently.

    If you are running Firefox you could utilize the built-in Private Browsing option (Tools -> Start Private Browsing) which will prevent you browser from storing any information about your session.

  • John

    Randy, simular to you I am a IT professional who travels frequently, this is real and I have had it happen to me recently. As a co-worker was getting fare 50% lower than the cost that I was getting on a typical route that I fly. I went to another computer and I was receiving the lower cost also. I clear cache and cookies (including the airline site that I have in my favorites) and “magically” may fares are back to normal…If it is on your computer, It can and will be tracked…What a mess…

  • Pingback: Surfing For Cheap Flights? Delete Your Cookies! | travelfootprints.ca

  • http://ofallthingstrue.blogspot.com Harry

    This article is quite accurate in recounting experiences which several customers including myself have seen. Airlines may not admit it but hopefully there will be a whistle blower from the pricing department who will spill the beans one day!!

    meanwhile, if you want to use your miles in a smart way, check out the listed blog

  • http://opodo,tapportugal,ebookers cristina

    The same happened to me, I payed 12 pounds more for the same ticket some hours later

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