Does searching daily for prices up the price?
 

So here's the story. I am looking for 3 tickets from ewr-pty from 12/25-12/30. First time I check tickets were $500 each. I needed to wait to get the ok from my work so I couldn't book right away. At the time only 6 seats were shown as occupied on the flight. Checked again later in the week flight jumped to $560. Finally after I get my approval from work jumped to $700 (been that way for the last 2 weeks)! All the same time no more seats on both the coming and going flight have been booked as I have been looking at the seating chart. What has changed? Is it possible my stored cookies influenced the price due to my frequent searches????

:confused:

Perhaps, but not proven. Clear out your cookies and do other searches mixed in.

Interesting question. Would love to know the results once you clear your cookies, cache, etc.

I've had this happen to me several times on flights to Asia - but I couldn't prove that the system was upping the price because of repeated searches... The UA flight search tool is so flaky that some times it will show my direct flights and other times it will only show connections???? Can't figure out what it is doing but I have used multiple browsers, both logged in and out, and can't seem to get repeatable results that would show a pattern...

What is the business purpose of upping the price on people who shop for tickets? If anything, there is a business incentive to do the reverse.

Have you done an independent check? What does searching via kayak or obritz or other show for UA?
Suspect it will show the same results.

I've seen prices fluctuate... maybe on certain sites it does but I haven't seen any evidence of this on the DL or US websites...

Given the way fares and bucket availability are distributed through GDS channels, such per user fare manipulation would be trivial to detect. I can't imagine an airline would risk potentially millions in class action lawsuits to play such games. Check third party sites like ITA matrix if you really believe there is an issue.

Note that if you are searching for 3 tickets, you need to be sure you always search for that number as there may be fewer than that number of seats available in a fare bucket. Searching for a single ticket may give a different price than 3 tickets if there are only 1 or 2 seats left in the bucket as it will push the fares into a higher bucket. Looking at the number of seats open on a seat-map is completely meaningless. You are searching during a very high demand time for flights and airlines are hesitant to sell too many seats at too low of a price as they know those seats will command higher fares based on past sales history.

I tried kayak, cheapoair, orbitz, expedia etc and they are all $700 now. I hear what you are saying LBJ but however the same availability has been available the whole time that is why I think it may mean something. I have cleared cookies and the cache still getting the same prices. I appreciate all the feedback :)

I think someone who needs the flight and they see the price rise and rise will get nervous and pull the trigger before it gets too crazy expensive

Through my own experience, I have been convinced that cookies play a factor in pricing, one way or the other. On several occasions, I have searched for competing flights on AA and UA simultaneously and seen the prices creep up on both sites over the course of minutes, only to reset cleanly once the cache is cleared. Call it conspiracy theory, but I believe my eyes.

I find it a little hard to believe that UA's system is "advanced" enough to do something like this when it fails at some of the most simple tasks.

Guaranteed not to be true, given the way ticket pricing works. This is a pure myth.

Also note the OP's "way" of checking if seats are bought is seat maps - which is noted over and over again to not be accurate for this level of load factors.

Yes. And it's all controlled by the black helicopters silently circling overhead.

nb: I have caught massive price drops by checking fares regularly, such as the L fare SFO-HNL I recently picked up after the cheapest fare dropped more than 50% over a few hours.