Originally Posted by
jsloan
....
No, they never tried it because it's fundamentally impossible.
Actually, it's super easy to do with POST data, cookies, etc. "A simple matter of programming," as one of Adobe's founders once said to me. The fact that your United main page often displays previous searches demonstrates that United is already tracking and using the data for something at least.
Originally Posted by
jsloan
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..
That's a straw man. They don't need to change the inventory displayed to 3rd parties, just the price displayed to me. It might be worth the chance that I won't check elsewhere and will just pay the higher price. We already know that United does routinely display different individual prices, BTW -- whenever someone enters a US Olympic, Veteran, Student, or Passplus code. Same fare bucket, different price.
Originally Posted by
jsloan
Also, anytime this myth comes up, nobody ever 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.
It may well drop too. It's just that nobody asks questions about it then.