Gaming online booking systems (Dynamic Pricing)

Transportation, Travel and Trips
1
I’ve been trying to book a couple of flights and a ferry trip recently and noticed how these online booking systems are getting too clever to the point where I’m seeing the price increase within the same session sometimes!

So I’m just wondering if there is a way to actually game these systems to ensure you don’t get ripped off by these systems detecting that you are serious about booking and that you can afford to pay more and hence increasing the prices!

In some ways this is effectively a new level of bargain hunting, where high tech distributed systems would be used to request prices at unfavourable booking times to artificially reduce or keep prices stable at favourable times.

A quick google for “Dynamic Pricing” would reveal a few papers from universities where professors and PhD students have been at it for a while, plotting and scheming to help businesses maximise their returns.

A masters or PhD thesis is in the works here, and gaming these systems could apply in many fields beyond online booking systems including stock and derivatives exchanges.

Thoughts? Or maybe you have some tips on how to trick these online booking systems?

Examples:

- a friend of mine working in a similar field suggested using the private browsing mode to avoid cross platform sharing via third party cookies. The idea here is that these platforms know that people are more likely to shop around before they book and would collectively increase the prices.

- another idea is to always specify that it’s a pleasure trip and never tick “business” as the reason for travel. The reason for this is that this helps the systems immediately by putting you in a higher pricing segment as they know businesses book last minute and are more likely to pay more or more likely to book flexible tickets.

2
I think that part of the reason for prices increasing during a session is to create a sense of urgency - “look the price went up, other people must be buying, we had better buy before the price goes up again!”

Always worth creating a private browser session when booking. Even better on a different computer. I heard that some sites push prices up depending on the device you are browsing on i.e. Mac/iPhone vs Windows/Android although I haven’t seen this myself.

My favourite is hire car websites. I have loyalty cards with a couple of the big firms and the quote is usually 50%+ more expensive if I am logged on as a frequent customer vs a clean/private browser. Presumably most gold card holders are business customers and just in a hurry/not price sensitive. I make the booking then ring the helpdesk to add the loyalty number - sometimes they ask me how I got such a low rate ;-)

3
Many people believe that airlines will jack up the price if you make a request for the same thing. By planting cookies they can see what you asked for previously and can charge you more because you probably have come back to buy.

It is doubtful that the airlines are actually doing this. The amount of data that they would need to store in that cookie is very large (Origin, Destination, Day, Time, Time of Departure, etc) well exceeds the 4096 bytes maximum allowed for all cookies. (Depending on the browser).

Of course the cookie could simply point to a record stored on the airline's site, but again we are looking at incredible data storage requirements.

Then there are two types of airline booking engines. The Low Cost model has one price for one flight and as seats sell (or not) they change the prices. At a single point in time there is only one price for a seat (plus extras, of course). As seats are sold the price will change reflecting demand.

The network model is much more complex. On each flight they will offer a range of prices. Not only for the cabin (First, Business, Economy) but also depending on the conditions the passenger is willing to accept. In First class there might be three fares, one fully flexible, one allowing a change at a fee and one not allowing changes or refunds. In Business perhaps all of the above with a couple more with advance purchase and minimum / maximum stay conditions; and in Economy perhaps a dozen with similar restrictions etc.

Of course the network airlines won't sell all of their First seats at the lowest First fare. They will allocate availability based on historical demand. As an example on a flight with 8 First Class chairs they may show availability for 8 seats at the fully flexible fare; 4 at the second level; and 2 at the lowest fare. As each are booked the availability for the the other fares are adjusted accordingly.

So while you are on-line with a LC airline you can actually see a price increase (or more rarely a decrease) as bookings take place. When booking with a network airline prices can change as well as seats are taken up by other punters. If someone else books the two cheapest First fare the availability will change to 6 at the fully flexible; 4 at the second level and zero at the cheapest level.

It isn't like your booking experience is unique. The rest of the world is also able to get online and go for the seats on the flights you want.

I won't go into overbooking, that is even more complex ...

4
It's tempting to believe that they do this sort of thing, i.e. increasing the price during your session, although I have to say that any time I've suspected it I've accessed, or asked side someone else to, the site from a different computer/IP and found that the last cheap seat, for example, really had been booked by someone else in the meantime.

I'm not saying they don't do it, just that I've never been able to confirm it.

If you do see a price increase during the session, then a quick check as described should be able to show it, but if you don't have another device handy, try disconnecting from the site, deleting cookies, then starting over. Also try to avoid logging in with your user name or email until you need to actually make the booking.

5
I’ve been trying to confirm the theory too but not able to. So it’s probably just that someone else might have just booked the last cheap seat.

If they are able to increase prices based on booked tickets they should be able to do it based on a proxy process like “increased demand” or paid for reservations. I see a lot of “pay €30 to secure the price for 24 hours”! The cheeek!!

6
the number of cookies you can store is unlimited. plus there are ways to store data other than cookies where the data is unlimited. claiming it is not possible because of a technical storage requirement is incorrect.

7
Latest today is a car rental company. Looked at the price with my IPhone and I get one price and look at it again 10 minutes later from my laptop at work and it’s 10% cheaper!!! Same currency same everything! Only difference is IP address and device I suppose.

I guess they figured, IPhone customers have got mug written all over their face and they can afford to pay 10% more!

8
Clear cookies, switch browser and check prices as a logged-in and not-logged-in customer. Websites should definately charge you more if you use the Internet Explorer browser :-)

The cruise ships do different pricing by country, so we booked as Portuguese but wierdly got the contract in Spanish.