Originally Posted by
porciuscato
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 home page often displays previous searches demonstrates that United is already tracking and using the data for something at least.
I was not suggesting that it's not possible to track user behavior. Of course it is.
Originally Posted by
porciuscato
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.
Yes, you're right about the special fares, but those are still coded as fares in their system. It's just that they're unpublished, so they don't show up in the GDS.
So what you're claiming is that UA would write logic to bypass the lowest-fare display if you've repeated a search recently, and display a higher, unpublished fare instead?
If they think somebody will pay the higher price, why not just display the higher price? Why offer a lower price for the first couple of searches, and then increase it? Why take the risk that somebody's going to look on some other site and you're going to get called out for this?
Originally Posted by
porciuscato
It may well drop too. It's just that nobody asks questions about it then.
Sorry, I don't believe that at all. If
anybody found that they could get lower airfare by building up a search history, it would be all over the Internet: "One weird trick that airlines don't want you to know!" The blogs would eat it up.
Originally Posted by
threeoh
I don't think United or any other major U.S. airline is doing this, but I do agree it is technically feasible. They wouldn't have to manufacture a new fare or anything, they would just have to sell you one fare bucket up in price, like sell you a W fare even if the fare inventory is S2.
But, I don't think they do this.
Correct, that, at least, would be technically feasible, as long as nobody were paying attention.
In my experience, they have certainly done this in the past. One way to avoid it is to clear cache and cookies, as OP noted. But you can also easily test this by using different browsers (I currently use three).
So what you're telling me is that UA's engineers are clever enough to write an entire secondary layer on top of their fare engine in order to try to track people who make the same search multiple times...
... but too stupid to consider using any additional information they have at their disposal, such as your IP address?