A similar thing happened to me the other day as well (oddly enough, also in Australia).
I was buying a ticket for a football game, but just to make sure there wasn't a better seat I clicked the back button on my browser to go back to looking at seats. Suddenly I saw that the same seat had gone up by 10% in price.
Anyway, I pressed the forward button to see if the new price would apply, but it didn't. So I somehow avoided paying an extra 10% because their confirmation page was cached, but not the seat selection page.
Why? What does browsing incognito give you? Surely it doesn't give you cheaper flights. Rates are not raised because you've been browsing them for awhile
> Rates are not raised because you've been browsing them for awhile
That's exactly what they do. If you're browsing for plane tickets and you're a bit undecisive (like me), don't be surprised if the prices go up by 200% for that specific day you wanted to book. Going incognito and in some cases returning after a hour will bring the prices back down.
Debunked by what exactly? Can you prove/guarantee it's not happening?
While I don't have any other evidence than my pretty specific anecdotal experience to prove it's true (in addition to what friends in the airline industry told me), it is common knowledge that price discrimination is a pretty fundamental aspect of airline pricing so this "myth" is not that inconceivable.
It's impossible to prove that this is impossible, because you can always claim that I wasn't targeted for some reason. I have however tested it myself several times and never found any difference when looking at the same site cookieless and cookied—at the exact same time.
That being said, a lot of people have done testing of this and found no evidence of repeated cookies specifically leading to higher prices. Here are some of the links I've found:
I'm not disputing that price discrimination happens. Just that by far the biggest determinant of it is time, as airlines constantly publish and unpublish different fare buckets.
In fact, what I suspect is happening when people see lower fares is just caching. All OTAs heavily cache prices in search results and then only fetch the updated price once you drill into results. I could easily imagine a scenario where the prices has actually gone up, but users in incognito (who haven't drilled down yet) see the old, outdated price.
The notion of specific price discrimination on specific users by cookies doesn't make sense though. For one thing, I don't see how it could possibly work technically. Information on airline prices flows in direction—airlines are constantly telling aggregators the latest prices/fare buckets, which the aggregators then display to users. Aggregators don't make a request to the airline for pricing every time you search, so how would they even know to update your price based on previous activity?
I've done this with 2 browsers looking for a car on the same site and they will have different prices. I generally never log in on chrome anywhere and only use it for twitch so it was a lot cheaper than my firefox that's logged in everywhere. Like $150 on a $300 ticket.
I was buying a ticket for a football game, but just to make sure there wasn't a better seat I clicked the back button on my browser to go back to looking at seats. Suddenly I saw that the same seat had gone up by 10% in price.
Anyway, I pressed the forward button to see if the new price would apply, but it didn't. So I somehow avoided paying an extra 10% because their confirmation page was cached, but not the seat selection page.