Originally Posted by
porciuscato
I was looking at a few fares today. After poking around and trying different times, I noticed that a RT that I thought was priced a few moments earlier at $275 had increased to $360. Hmm. So I deleted my cookies and cache for the last hour and voila! The $275 fare was back.
Perhaps you searched using "Break from Business" on one search and didn't on the other?
It's also possible that one machine in their fleet had stale inventory data. That shouldn't happen, and might have corrected itself during the purchase process, but it's more likely than the idea that your cookies influenced the results.
Originally Posted by
porciuscato
I thought the airlines had tried this trick of upping fares by tracking cookies before and stopped because of the bad publicity.
No, they never tried it because it's fundamentally impossible.
UA's inventory and fares are both published to third-party systems. There's nothing that they can do to make the published inventory differ depending upon one customer's cookies. Now, inventory does change all the time, and it's certainly possible that it changed while you were searching. But it would have changed for everybody, not just you.
Also, anytime this myth comes up, nobody every explains why prices supposedly always go
up. It seems to me that there's just as good of a business case to drop the price by a few dollars to try to push someone who might be onto the fence into a purchase.