Yes that’s my general experience as well.
Isn’t Skyscanner the best to check cheapest fares?
10 years ago, I worked reservations at an airline and had to explain this to customers all the time. The airline was not “tracking” and raising the prices. Airline seats are priced in batches (known in the industry as “buckets”) and there are only so many seats in each batch. Sometimes there are only 2 to 4 seats in a bucket, sometimes 20 or more. Once the number of seats in that bucket are sold, you are automatically moved to the next higher priced bucket. While a customer is contemplating whether to purchase the ticket he just looked up, that seat at that price is pulled out of inventory so that someone else doesn’t buy it while you are still considering it.
If your whole class is pulling the same itinerary and the same flight at the same time, you are pulling those seats out of inventory, so the slower typists are getting the higher price. Had you all cancelled your seats, the Professor could have pulled the same website back up (after about 15 minutes or so) and found the flights available at the original, lowest price, even on the same computer he pulled it up on earlier.
Revenue Management is the name of the department full of math geeks that play around with the buckets and decide how many seats to allocate to each price point. They move the number of seats available at what price around all the time based upon what other airlines are charging and how booked up the flight is, but not because Sally in Poughkeepsie looked at it in Google Flights three effen times and still hadn’t pulled the trigger.
It still exist. That’s called Dynamic Pricing in todays terms…
I see this happen when I look for hotels too, it’s so frustrating.
Thanks! Everyone said more or less the same. Well too bad
This is about Europe so yes
Ooooooo. How long ago and was the website skyscanner?
Clearing cookies has done nothing for me. Neither changing location.
Changing the language however did. Weird
Yeah I’d switch it off before payment
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Skyscanner typically has better prices internationally. There’s a cool little chrome plugin called travel arrow that fires open a Skyscanner window with the parameters you’re searching on google flights so you can easily compare the price.
No doubt. About 3 weeks ago, I looked up YYZ-BCN/CDG flights on my PC on Skyscanner and google flights with various dates. After about 30 mins of looking up various dates, I reverted back to the the initial search and guess what, prices went up to about $70. I logged into Aeroplan account, searched the same initial flight, and prices was about $100 cheaper. I was quite surprised, I must say.
The last time was 9 months ago. I use the airlines website.
Then the page would redirect to one for your region. At least thats what happened when I tried to do this years ago.
Ahh interesting. Useful to know!
Also useful to know!