Our favourite travelling you tubers take turns at espousing the benefits of a VPN. They push the benefit of watching you home country tv streaming. That's disingenous for the UK as neither BBC nor NOW work via VPN. It seems they all watch only Netflix.
More importantly they claim massive air fare discounts by relocating. But never illustrates examples.
has anyone here tried this and do you have any tips?

BBC and NOW block known VPN providers...but if you happen to find one they don't block, they can work.

I suppose some airlines probably offer different fares if purchased in different countries, but I don't know specifics and I would think you'd also be charged in that country's currency.

Indeed, which is why these you tubers only ever mention Netflix. I'm sure the new Netflix process of sharing accounts will prevent this.
Currency isn't an issue as I use a Revolut card, so I've recently paid painlessly in Hungarian Florint, Norwegian kroner kroner and Aussie $.
I'll guess the vloggers are making claims that can't be substantiated

I can't speak for the international airlines, but one of the airlines I worked for did give "locals" discounts, but it was based on the address you put in, which needed to match your ID at the counter, and it was a substantial discount. No VPN would have helped you in this case.

Even Netflix blocks VPN addresses known to them. Vloggers use Netflix because it's one of the better known streamers. I mean if you mention iplayer to most people outside of the UK, I'd say less than 5% of the people you talk to would known it's a BBC service. Honestly, (and I've said this in the forums on multiple occasions) a VPN is really only useful if you want to mask your location, and it is really only useful if you use it as part of a solution. Most people who use a VPN (and those who do not) are leaking identity information like crazy. I only use them to mask where I am and who I am (if I need to). No other real purpose.

I've had more luck with iPlayer than Netflix over VPN--NordVPN works most of the time for both but I've had far fewer failures with iPlayer. VPN blocking is a game of cat and mouse and just like in real life, the cat never catches every mouse.

I have never seen a significant airfare difference with VPN that wasn't either a locals-only airfare that would require local ID (eg domestic flights in Argentina) or an airline that loaded an exchange rate wrong and cancelled the tickets later.

You used to be able to get away with a bit of arbitrage on subscriptions by VPNing to cheaper countries, but most of the big providers have wised up and require payment methods based in that country. Otherwise we'd all be paying INR 119 (about USD 1.50) a month for Spotify.

VPN is great for checking your E-ZPass account from outside North America, getting some stupid webshop to charge your American card in USD for a shipment to Arizona even though you're sitting in Kazakhstan, and (usually) beating geoblocking, but it's not going to save you any money on flights.

My primary use of VPNs is to securely access my home or clients’ private network(s). Although, I do use them for the above reasons too. You shouldn’t be leaking identity info if you have your tunnel configured properly. I don’t use public wifi without tunneling my data. If you tunnel through s known ASN, you’ll likely find it blocked by most major location dependent or governed services. Even with major VPN providers, I find I can often disconnect/reconnect and get routes out through a non blacklisted ASN

Oh, it's not usually the VPN that is at fault about leaking information. But the problem is still between the chair and the keyboard. You connect to a VPN, but then sign into your gmail account as well as FT and FB and use Google.ca instead of .com or DDG or whatever else. Then you go to BoardingArea to read a few articles and whatever other travel forums you may frenquent. By that point, your profile should have been updated with at least some information including that you may be using a VPN.

Used properly, great. But again, so many people leak out information without knowing it. I've been known to use a commercial VPN or two while out and about. Mostly to ensure the MITM doesn't know what I'm reading (don't really care if they know where I was visiting the last few times but the VPN blocks that bit of info). Messed with the analytics a bit (queue up 100+ random videos on Youtube and let them play while you sleep and watch the suggestions they make for you when you wake up).

As for blacklisting ASNs, often the ASNs aren't listing the actual VPN provider, just the provider of the exit point. M247 is a very common one. While they host VPN providers, they also host for others (and that's the part that's annoying sometimes)

From a US/EU perspective, it's often cheaper to purchase plane tickets when flying from the EU to US (and back); however, it's the one-way from US to EU that usually costs a lot (money or miles) unless you travel to EU multiple times per year and can nest tickets.

Actually, FT blocks my commercial VPNs endpoints it seems. 😂. Sure, if you sign into a service, they know who you are. But for me, the main reason I�m using a VPN, is to stop the hotel/coffee shop/public wifi from snooping on me (not the intended service I�m trying to reach).

FT does that. Not sure why though. But FB or Google follow through for most people. Just most people don't realize it.

I disable all third party javascript by default. Have to opt in any that I want to see. FB and Google are def not on the whitelist (unless I happen to be using their services directly). I really don't mind ads, but I do mind when websites sub them out to nefarious companies (ala Amazon, FB, Google) who's sole mission is to track me everywhere.

When a user-comment heavy site blocks commercial VPN endpoints, it may be because the site wants to interrupt user attempts to limit snooping by the site’s owners, managers, privileged actors and partners.

I actually sent FT feedback on that a few years ago. They were nice about it, basically said it's their hosting provider who does that. They offered to try to work with me to whitelist the address I was coming from, but it was one of the large VPN providers, so as I explained to them: there's no way to reliably do that since they have hundreds, if not thousands of endpoints.

I do find it a bit ironical that a *travel* website blocks known VPNs. For many of us, a VPN is a must when using public wifi.

Given Cloudflare�s use by some larger and smaller sites haven�t been rejecting what FT rejected/rejects at the same time as Cloudflare�s use on this site, there seems to be something about FT that comes with more VPN blocking than typical for Cloudflare-using sites.