While watching the Twitter stream from #Multimania this morning I saw a photo from Aral Balkan (@aral) of a presentation showing a tweet from Andrew Sampson (@sampsonian) about Ryanair and the cost of a trip.
This wasn’t the usual Ryanair complaint about being charged £5 for two bits of bread, or £30 to print out a boarding pass. This was something much more sinister.
Ryanair Exhibit A - Image from Aral Balkan (@aral)
Andrew’s tweet read:
“Ryanair exhibit A. Looked up fare yesterday, total £123.00. Returned today and fare is £237.00. Flushed cookies. Fare back to £123.00.”
What this means is that Ryanair has purposefully tracked when Andrew’s visited the site, looked at a specific fare and not made a booking. Usually this sort of thing is done for targeted advertising across other sites, but Ryanair it seems has something else in mind. The next time Andrew visited the site to look at the same fare he had look at previously, Ryanair had hiked up the cost. I assume this is to get a customer to worry that the cost will go up further and book a trip there and then.
Being a web savvy guy, Andrew reset his cookies and went back to the Ryanair site to find that his proposed trip was at the original cost of £123. This in my opinion goes way beyond the use of cookies for more relevant advertising and is a blatant misuse of data. For other consumers who aren’t as switched on as Andrew, it means paying almost double the price for no reason whatsoever, aside from having visited the site and looked at fares the previous day. It’s perhaps the closest thing to daylight robbery you could find online.
While I’d like to think that Ryanair are the only ones doing this, unfortunately, I’m sure they’re not alone. I’m going to do some investigating to see what might be occurring with cookies and other travel sites. Stay tuned….
This is particularly interesting because of the EU Cookies Directive deadline which is fast approaching (May 26). Whilst companies only need to show that they are taking steps towards regulating their cookie usage, nobody actually seems to be doing anything about it. Let’s see if Irish based Ryanair is any different. What makes me doubtful is that even government sites will most probably miss the deadline, so where is the urgency for businesses to meet it?
eDreams have done this to me every time i search a flight deal. u have to book first time viewing or u will never find the same price.
It’s called “dynamic pricing”, it’s evil, but it’s not new.
“Dynamic Pricing” adjusts the price according to demand and availability – that’s not unreasonable, its a perfectly valid model.
Incrementing the price each time a user does a search? That’s something else entirely – deeply naughty.
So far as the EU cookie legislation goes, Ryanair will assert (for as long as the laywers can prevaricate) that the cookie that cranks the price is “essential to the functioning of the site”.
Me? I use “In Private” browsing (or the equivalent thereof) to check Ryanair prices (assuming no other practical option for a given journey).
It is not fair to say Dynamic Pricing is only according to demand and availability. That is mixing up two distinctly different economic principles.
The airlines (all of them) have for many years used the concept of “pay what you can”. Its an economic principle that maximizes profit without being unfair. People that are willing (and able) to pay more are charged more and people that can not pay more essentially are sponsored by the first.
The thing is; nobody wants to be the one paying more, so its a bit hidden and the logic behind the changing of pricing is not that obvious.
Companies have traditionally been able to pay more, so if you take a return flight and stay somewhere from monday till friday then airlines typically charge more. Simply because companies *can* pay more.
I won’t go into the economics, but the bottom line is that Sav is right, its nothing new. Just a fresh implementation of an old concept.
Saw this exact practice on Ryanair site many years ago (maybe 2005?). price went up when checking second time one one browser/computer but still showing old price when checked on another computer. deleted cookies and price returned to normal. pretty sure they weren’t the only ones doing it either. Other airlines and travel sites (hotels etc.).
I’m presuming the model you describe is not in relation to this article Thomas, as how the discrimination between someone who can afford to pay more, vs the person who can’t, is determined by a cookie that records the previous price generated, baffles me somewhat. What this article describes is a practice that could be described as underhand at best, and that’s the point we should stick to?
Urban Myth? http://blog.getinvisiblehand.com/2011/04/08/ryanair-manipulating-prices-with-cookies-it%E2%80%99s-an-urban-myth/
I’m not sure I’ll call Ally’s link conclusive, but it should be noted that Sampson’s tweet is from 22 March 2011. Could be they’ve long since stopped that practice.
I think the train companies do this as well, virgin the trainline, redspottedhanky, rail easy always best to clear cookies or either incognito browse via google chrome. Very sneaky sneaky
The experiment carried out in Ally’s link might not be conclusive – don’t you think the Ryanair site might be suspicious of someone who’s looking up 52 different flights in one day? It might have been better to ask 52 different people to look up a flight, and then check back the next day to see if it has been hiked up.