The Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm
mobocube.com
The Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: The Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm
#2Well spotted... although it seems a little generous to call this an algorithm :-)
Re: The Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm
#3PAWNed
Re: The Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm
#4Since the price is not proportional to the number of passengers, I assume there are only x seats at the displayed price. Still misleading but not es "evil" as otherwise.
PS: I kinda take the word "algorithm" in teh lheadline as link bait. Without it, I would have never klicked the link.
Re: The Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm
#5I just tested it myself and can't confirm it. I started by searching for a flight for one person and got a few offers which said "3/4 seats left" and if you hover over the image you'll get the alt text "x seats left for that price".
It actually looks like a neat feature which shows you how many seats are left in the cheapest fare group that applies to your settings.
EDIT: I just did some more testing, searching for different person counts, and it does exactly what I thought.
When you get "3 seats left" then you can book for 3 persons for the cheapest price, and whenever you add a 4th person, the price is higher than four times the 1-person price
Re: The Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm
#6There's this super-budget airline in Australia, Tiger Airways, so budget that they skimped on training pilots and got shutdown for some time.
Anyway, their website at some point had two hidden features: if you tried to book in a group it would charge you more per person (because you're depriving them of "credit card surcharge") AND just checking the price of a certain flight a certain amount of times (showing interest in that flight) would raise the price by some increment for every other customer on the website automatically.
Re: The Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm
#7It basically shows the number of seats left in the same fare-basis. The problem is with the communication, and not the supposed "algorithm".
Re: The Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm
#8Pretty inane article and mildly paranoid conclusion. If it had said "x seats available" it would have been grammatically correct but too long for a button. And yes, "algorithm" was geek linkbait.
Re: The Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm
#9This is why I've completely and utterly screened out "limited special offer" anything these days. I will not be conned into not shopping around (which is why they do this, obviously), and I don't buy things unless I need them at the time. Occasaionaly I'll lose out when there genuinely was limited stock available and it was a good price, but overall I'm probabbly better of and certainly less rushed.
All retail (web or bricks-and-mortar) and services advertising is lies pretty much at this point. A colleque gets an SMS from the local Bannatynes gym that he used to be a member of telling him about a limited time "rejoin" offer that has limited places. He has had the same message at least once a month for the last twelve months so basically both the calim of limited places and the claim that it is a limited time offer are basically lies. Or the DFDS sale "you'll never see these prices again!!!!!". The list is endless.
By being dishonest in these ways, some in the retail and services industries are pushing people like me (people with enough money to not mind that they might sometimes pay a little extra in order to avoid being lied to) away.
Having said that, the example given here isn't actually lying (they don't say "only X seats available") though it is misleadingly presented, either accidentally or the site is being deliberately disengneuous, and if that is deliberate than it is little better than a lie.
Re: The Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm
#10Hi,
My name is Hrush. I am one of Cleartrip's founders and I'd like to clarify how things actually work.
Firstly, the "X seats left" feature is not an 'algorithm' at all. It is a simple count of the number of 'seats remaining' at a specific price point for a specific flight departure.
In the example illustrated in the post, there is only a single seat left at a price point of Rs. 34,255. This does not mean that there is only one seat left on the flight, it means there is only one seat left at that specific price.
When the search was repeated for 2 travellers, the price per person increased to 35,746, and then increased to Rs. 37,008 per person when the search was done for 4 travellers.
Airline pricing is based on 'fare classes' or 'buckets'. Buckets typically work like this:
1. Each bucket is allocated a fixed number of seats.
2. Each bucket is associated with exactly one price point
3. When there are no more seats available in a bucket, seats from the next highest bucket are displayed and so on
At Cleartrip, we work hard to give our customers the best prices. We never have and never will engage in the "fake scarcity tactics" that this post accuses us of.
I'd also like to point out again that we have a tool tip on the button that clearly reads that there are 'X seats left at this price'.