[1] This is what it really is, lets be honest.
For example, we can charge black people more (based on
zip-code demographics) to discourage them from flying
first class.
The airlines currently price discriminate primarily by separating the relatively price-insensitive business travelers from highly price-sensitive leisure travelers. This is why you'll generally see lower fares for round trips that span a weekend: if you're traveling for work you generally don't want to spend your weekend off away from your family.
This is insanely naive. Do you really think that rich people don't pay a premium for "exclusivity"? And who, pray tell, do you imagine they are trying to exclude?
[0] http://www.wired.com/design/2013/08/how-segregated-is-your-c...
[1] http://jezebel.com/5985110/new-york-fashion-weeks-models-are...
[2] http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/macy-hit-class-action-sh...
[3] http://valleywag.gawker.com/harvard-study-black-people-get-s...
[4] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1934432
[5] http://valleywag.gawker.com/racial-profiling-newest-trend-in...
[6] http://qz.com/149342/the-uncomfortable-racial-preferences-re...
[7] see p. 4, http://ccrjustice.org/files/Report-CCR-NYPD-Stop-and-Frisk.p...
Actually, stock exchanges like NYSE are accused of front-running, the SEC has been investigating for a few years already.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000087239639044398920... Or if you prefer a 50 minute documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFQJNeQDDHA
"opaque and manipulative" indeed.
Most airlines forbid it in their contract of carriage. There's also no guarantee that you'll keep your stopover city—you could get rerouted through another hub and would have no recourse.
Just before the holidays, I was trying to get a flight from LAX to SLC. I tend to fly Southwest, but was finding the fares higher than usual -- generally I can get something in the $250-$300 range, I was seeing $350ish.
I was offered a ride to Sacramento, so I checked SAC -> SLC and found I could purchase that flight for $200. I booked it.
There are no direct flights from SAC -> SLC on Southwest, though. Mine, as it turned out, stopped over in... LAX.
Suppose there are three cities: City A, City B and City C. And for simplicity's sake, suppose that City B is the hub for the airline.
Let's say B and C are major business destinations with a lot of business traffic between them. Business travelers are less price-sensitive since they're not personally paying the fare (they just have to stay within corporate travel rules), and more concerned with things like flight length and schedule.
But City A, on the other hand, isn't really a major business destination. People who want to go from City A to other cities are likely on personal/tourist travel, and those passengers do one and only one thing: punch the origin and destination cities into a travel-search engine, and pick the cheapest ticket. All other considerations are null.
Now, suppose that you are the airline employee in charge of maximizing revenue. Getting money out of the B -> C route is easy -- you just need to know a bit about corporate travel policies. If most companies auto-approve any ticket under $500, for example, you could set the fare at $499 and, so long as the flight is short and at a good time of day, you'll get business travelers paying it.
But what about pricing for trips out of City A? They need to connect at your hub in City B, but again you have to remember that price is the only consideration that matters to those passengers. So you set the fares out of City A as low as you can manage while still being profitable (and it may even turn out that B -> C has to subsidize the routes out of A a bit).
The result is, often, that A -> B -> C is cheaper than B -> C.
Similarly, for some city pairs, A -> B -> C will be cheaper than A -> B, which creates an incentive to buy the A -> B -> C ticket, not check a bag, and then just walk out of the airport in City B. This is "hidden city" ticketing (because it's "hiding" the fact that your real destination is the connection point), and airlines will usually penalize (through revocation of frequent-flyer accounts, etc.) passengers who do this.
†http://www.kayak.com/news/a-new-way-to-find-deals-on-flights...
tldr - lucky "hacker"
It's quite possible that nothing nefarious is going on.
eg, Find a flight you like on AA? Try and book it on QF or BA and the price might be substantially different, even though you end up sitting on exactly the same plane.
I just did an example flight search to fly later this week (Jan 24-30 round trip) from SLC to OAK, a route that both DL and WN fly direct. Kayak shows me fares from $492 on US and B6 changing planes in Phoenix or Long Beach (doubling distance and quintupling flight time) and direct flights from $532 on DL.
Kayak doesn't show me any WN prices in the USA, but might have some sort of pilot program or contract to show them outside the USA. Iflyswa.com shows direct flights from $526.
Meanwhile ITA Matrix (matrix.itasoftware.com, made with secret alien technology [0]) shows flights on US for $318 which violate the rules for domestic connection times and cannot be booked. It's strange that those flights are shown since Matrix is usually very reliable.
Going directly to US's website reveals fares of $440 for flights with a connection in Phoenix.
So what's the lesson here? Check the WN site directly instead of depending on search sites. Check both ITA Matrix and Kayak if you're depending on search sites; they don't have the same flights listed. Sometimes you need to check individual airline websites even though it's a pain because they have better flights and prices than search sites have; there's no reliable way to know when that's the case.
I can't stress the first point enough. When you buy anything, or if you need to negotiate a price, do your research, and know what it should cost. It's especially true when booking flights, because you don't want to see a price, think it might go lower, and miss a great deal. If you know the fair value, you can recognize a good offer when you see it, and book instantly.
Kayak and TripAdvisor will give you unpriced WN flights in their search results. You still have to check WN directly for prices, but it's useful for seeing what's available.
IATA designators for commonly-discussed US-based airlines:
* AirTrain: FL
* Alaska: AS
* Allegiant: G4
* American: AA
* Delta: DL
* Frontier: F9
* Hawaiian: HA
* JetBlue: B6
* Southwest: WN
* Spirit: NK
* Sun Country: SY
* United: UA
* US Airways: US
* Virgin America: VX
Some of the travel sites using ITA's QPX API to drive their booking engine get prices from these other airlines via direct feeds or web scraping, but as pointed out here, they can be quite selective in what they're willing or able to show
It's still ludicrously easy to trip up the flight comparison services up with edge cases like the short domestic Yangon-Mandalay route, where ITA finds nothing, most booking engines offer ridiculously expensive flights connecting in China or Bangkok, whilst Innovata Quicktrip (which you should use when you're convinced there are direct flights the big sites aren't showing you) shows multiple direct flights a day with 6 different local airlines, provided you don't mind their clumsy twentieth century booking operations.
TLDR: Use Quicktrip (which doesn't give direct prices) to check if there are budget airlines or local airlines also flying on direct routes that the big search sites might not be showing, and try these unlisted airlines' websites direct if they seem more promising.
I can't confirm, but I assume from personal experience that kayak increases prices on flights as you search for the same flight multiple times.
Matrix lets you specify the the "sales city" (the last field in the advanced search options), which allows you to check out price discrimination by location.
The other one is clear your cookies before booking. Places create fake demand by disappearing the cheap flights on you if you shopping around. If you clear your cookies the cheap flights will return.
But if you're in Croatia you can get flights to London $200 etc... geofenced deals marketing deals to try and coerce people into taking holidays.
A site that uses a bunch of VPNs in different countries to look for flights on the big search sites. Whichever is cheaper is presented as the one to buy.
It could of course be extended beyond airline travel...
The downside is that things may be cheaper because they weren't subject to some type of import tariff that you may be on the hook for from customs when it arrives in the US.
>BTGuard
>
>mfw
oh hackernews..
even if you're not, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryp...
Did you try using Skype? Or Google Voice? Or similar? They are much cheaper than actually placing an international call, at least in the US, it is only like 3 cents a minute (US)
When I lived abroad I called home with Skype (this was before Google Voice) and I could talk as much as a wanted for only a couple dollars here and there, actually cheaper than my phone bill now.
As if using a VPN made you NSA-proof. Every time I see phrases like this I force myself not to think the person is a fool but it's hard.
People need to realize that ensuring security and privacy isn't fixed by installing just some tool and be done with it. Worse, they will do this and trust they are immune (and then the damage will be worse).
Unfortunately, that's not true and will even draw attention.
This XKeyScore slide is crazy: http://hothardware.com/newsimages/Item26839/Xkeyscore1.jpg
when you are buying long distance flight tickets, pick a city close to where you will depart (this will add an additional flight transferring from your departure city). When you get multiple transfers there is a possibility that the offered price will be cheaper (I confirmed this with an agency when I initially figured this out). If you get a cheaper price buy it and call the airlines to tell them you will miss the first flight, and have them correct the check in location to your departure city. I was able to save $100 travelling from europe to east coast last time I did this.
How the tell if you're not being ethical:
If every single person does it, does the system break down? If the answer is yes, then stop.
Looks like you’ve found out that they are shown on Canada based version of the Kayak site. Most likely because the fee arrangements are different or because Southwest is willing to pay them, probably to get exposure to markets that wouldn't otherwise know about them because they don't have a marketing presence there.
You can get the same effect with other GDS products also, try rental cars for one. The other crazy thing is that different geographic markets are generally responsible for their own revenues, so you can have different promotions, and yield management strategies depending on who is trying to hit their numbers.
The price difference comes from Southwest's price being different than Delta's. Southwest flights wont show up when searching Kayak's USA site, but they do show up on international Kayak pages. It sounds like that's because they don't want to pay the brokerage fees for flights booked through the USA versions of Kayak/Expedia/Travelocity -- but I'm not sure of that.
Interesting experiment though!
I was coming from a US IP. I wonder, if I had been coming from a British or Canadian IP, if I would have been redirected to the corresponding site.
†http://www.kayak.co.uk/flights/BOS-DEN/2014-01-31/2014-02-07
††http://www.ca.kayak.com/flights/BOS-DEN/2014-01-31/2014-02-0...
protip: don't let them know you have a mac book pro
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230445860...
I think the lifehack movement started that train of thought. I'm not really sure.
I haven't used it that much in North America recently, but it seems to be the same dynamic.
I just checked Southwest's website and the same flight is offered for $255.00 round trip.
What you saw is probably based on those inputs being changed.
I would like to know if using VPN has a impact on large sites like Amazon(I have seen the price change there too)
Like others have said, Southwest inventory doesn't often appear on sites like Kayak because they want customers to book directly. That cuts out the commission to Kayak and conditions people to look for flights on southwest.com in the future.
That's okay. I'm sure the minor inconvenience of not seeing the data flow directly to your local IP is more than made up for by the data collection at both sides of that VPN...
To be serious, I wonder if they apply extra scrutiny to VPN providers, and use traffic analysis to build correlations between TCP connections. The extra effort might be justified by a higher class of data going across the connections.
Then again, it's probably easier to just use some form of evercookie injected into TCP streams on the fly...
