As vacation season is fast approaching, some of you may be
using travel deals brokers such as Travelocity. Here's a neat trick that I
suggest you should all try next time you run your quotes.
This other day I was catching up on some Reddit comedy,
okay...maybe not "this other day" since it was a few months ago and I
just remembered it now but it's probably still happening. Apparently third
party online travel agencies keep track of your visits and quotes, and then use
it to bump up the prices you see on the screen. The more you look up a
particular trip or flight schedule on their website, the more their prices will
increase to mimic a shortage of seat situation (or to simply motivate you to
purchase before the prices go up again). To be honest I have never tested out
this theory but thinking back, I did notice that when I looked up my New
York trip last year, the more I checked the prices for that scheduled week, the
higher my quotes became over the period of a month. This could be due to an actual
shortage of seats, but test it out anyways if you are shopping for a vacation!
All you have to do is look up the same trip using a different web browser or by
using incognito mode in Google Chrome. If the prices are indeed lower in the
other web browser, you will have proven that it's true!
It will not cost you anything to test out this theory, so if
you're shopping for a trip then test it out... maybe it can save you some money
-TT
