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Can you buy the same ticket at a lower price if you buy it from another country?

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Re: Can you buy the same ticket at a lower price if you buy it from another country?

#41

Post by ajsnigrutin »

habitue wrote: post #37

Do travel agents have some benefit when travelling internationally or something? I have not heard about travel agents since the 90s. Maybe I'm missing some incredible deals? I kinda expected them to not exist any more

A friend of mine works in the public sector, and using an agent saves on the bureaucracy.

They need to find three separate providers/offers, and then choose cheapest option... so they call an agency, tell them where they want to go and when, what hotel, and that they need two more expensive options too,... so an agency calls other friendly agencies, tell them what (higher) price they need, and the public sector worker gets what they need with minimal work.

Re: Can you buy the same ticket at a lower price if you buy it from another country?

#42

Post by harry8 »

cwalv wrote: post #31
harry8 wrote: post #17

The theory of Price Discrimination, simple stuff, for anyone who isn't up on the econs 101 jargon, looks like it's here: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price_discrimination.as... Everyone including you will do it whenever you can when selling. The logical place surveillance capitalism is going isn't pretty. Will regulation protect consumers or will Goog, FB, Apple etc capture a good amount of everyone's consume…

> if don't think much of the questions it'd be interesting to know why you think that way. Mostly because you don't have to buy any of this. If it's that unfair, figure a better/cheaper way to do it yourself, otherwise quit complaining that the poor ppl have it so much better

It ain't the poor, it's those who have the biggest barrier to going anywhere else who will get slugged, and slugged hard. That segment of the market will pay loads. Flights from New Zealand to the Pacific Islands for Christmas are legendary. Pacific islanders in NZ do not constitute the rich. You don't care whether you go to the Solomon Islands for christmas or just after? Much cheaper. But what if there are empty seats on the plane you could have sold to regular holiday makers at regular prices? Airline ticketing is one example of this - we can take the principle to so many places! Uber can do it! Anywhere the vendor has market power against a market segment they (yes me and you as vendors) want to exploit it.

When the vendor know what's in your hand, your "I could walk" bluff is called and you get smashed. Every business including yours and mine wants to charge every single customer as much as they will possibly pay. Capture consumer surplus. Surveillance capitalism can help here.

Re: Can you buy the same ticket at a lower price if you buy it from another country?

#43

Post by 93po »

INTPenis wrote: post #12

Referrers that lower price on travel booking sites are a real thing. One trick I've noticed works sometimes is clicking on ads in online newspapers of your home country. So if you're in country A, but you're browsing the news website of country B, they might see where you're browsing from and offer up an ad for travel from/to your specific country A. This is meant for expats because the whole site and the ad is in th…

sounds like a good browser extension - auto-inject different data based on community feedback on which gives the best deals

Re: Can you buy the same ticket at a lower price if you buy it from another country?

#44

Post by 93po »

habitue wrote: post #37

Do travel agents have some benefit when travelling internationally or something? I have not heard about travel agents since the 90s. Maybe I'm missing some incredible deals? I kinda expected them to not exist any more

i think they're still popular for disney since there are a ton of options for packages and i think they can also provide better deals than booking elsewhere

Re: Can you buy the same ticket at a lower price if you buy it from another country?

#46

Post by netsharc »

habitue wrote: post #37

Do travel agents have some benefit when travelling internationally or something? I have not heard about travel agents since the 90s. Maybe I'm missing some incredible deals? I kinda expected them to not exist any more

I think they're still around, and they probably have the "on-the-ground" knowledge that's useful, maybe from feedback of their customers, or network of local friends (some small agencies focus on particular destinations, probably because they travelled there once and liked it so much they became an expert of the region, and big agencies just have partners in popular destinations). Compare that to if you check out a hotel on booking.com, the ratings are all exaggerated, even if you rate everything as crap, their scoring system will make your final rating about a 6.0 (don't quote me on that). Not to mention review-buying or faking.

As for flights, the last few times I tried booking from a booking como5any through Skyscanner where the price was 20% lower, I got all the way to entering my CC number and clicking "Buy now" only for the page to tell me, "Oops, tickets for this price are no longer available, do you want to buy for [price advertised on the airline website]?"... Hell fuck no!

Re: Can you buy the same ticket at a lower price if you buy it from another country?

#47

Post by [deleted] »

TylerE wrote: post #23
choeger wrote: post #16

Absolutely. I had a 25% discount offer for the same flight when booking through the American site vs. the European one. Unfortunately, they also asked for an invoice address in the states. So I opted out of that airline altogether. Just wait for the day when airlines buy hotel booking data and increase your price because you already booked a non-refundable room. Or they look into your messaging service or social netw…

Sounds like VAT? We do t have that in the US, so our prices are about 20% lower. You still get taxed, it’s just not rolled into the advertised price.

[deleted]

Re: Can you buy the same ticket at a lower price if you buy it from another country?

#48

Post by vinni2 »

muststopmyths wrote: post #8
AnonC wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate since this is not clear. Are you actually doing a round trip on SFO-XYZ-SFO but buying two half priced (or lower than half priced) tickets for XYZ-SFO-XYZ (date 1) and XYZ-SFO-XYZ (date 2) and not using one leg on each of those tickets ? Long ago I’d read that airlines don’t take this well.

Maybe buy a one way ticket once and then round trip in the other direction in the future

Except one way tickets are often exorbitant.

Re: Can you buy the same ticket at a lower price if you buy it from another country?

#49

Post by netsharc »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #41
habitue wrote: post #37

Do travel agents have some benefit when travelling internationally or something? I have not heard about travel agents since the 90s. Maybe I'm missing some incredible deals? I kinda expected them to not exist any more

A friend of mine works in the public sector, and using an agent saves on the bureaucracy. They need to find three separate providers/offers, and then choose cheapest option... so they call an agency, tell them where they want to go and when, what hotel, and that they need two more expensive options too,... so an agency calls other friendly agencies, tell them what (higher) price they need, and the public sector worke…

Huh, couldn't that be construed as a price-fixing conspiracy?

Re: Can you buy the same ticket at a lower price if you buy it from another country?

#50

Post by tcmb »

fwlr wrote: post #20
AnonC wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate since this is not clear. Are you actually doing a round trip on SFO-XYZ-SFO but buying two half priced (or lower than half priced) tickets for XYZ-SFO-XYZ (date 1) and XYZ-SFO-XYZ (date 2) and not using one leg on each of those tickets ? Long ago I’d read that airlines don’t take this well.

The poster lives in SFO and wants to visit XYZ for a week once a year. Rather than buy SFO->XYZ->SFO tickets (which are packages that consist of “a flight from SFO to XYZ on the 1st of April” and “a flight from XYZ to SFO on the 8th of April”), the poster instead buys XYZ->SFO->XYZ tickets (which are packages that consist of “a flight from XYZ to SFO on the 8th of April” and “a flight from SFO to XYZ on the 1st of Ap…

Couldn’t the price difference be due to booking so far in advance?
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