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

travel.stackexchange.com

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

#51

Post by dymk »

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…

Can confirm, my workflow for booking hotels now is find something on booking.com/hotels.com/kayak, then google search for the exact same hotel and follow links quoting lower prices to booking.com/hotels.com/kayak.

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

#52

Post by autoexec »

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

> Mostly because you don't have to buy any of this.

Maybe nobody has to buy an airline ticket, but I'm not convinced that's true. Worse, is that while you can look at the places where we know this pricing model is being used right now and think it won't impact you, the goal for many years has been to push this to everything you buy everywhere.

The only thing holding them back is that most consumers feel that this is abusive and discriminatory. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3

Still, it's being tested all the time, including in grocery stores. They want to use your personal income level, your personal buying habits, all of the information they can get about you, and use it to set a different price for you than the next person, but also to offer some goods and services only for certain people, hold certain policies only for certain people etc.

Right now, you might be able to dismiss this when it comes to airline tickets or hotel bookings, but what we're heading toward is a caste system, several really, where "you don't have to buy any of this" will need to apply to food and toilet paper and "your kind aren't allowed to buy this" is right around the corner.

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

#53

Post by bruce511 »

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

Travel Agents are still a thing, although there are quite a lot fewer of them than there were in the 90's.

If you know where you are going, where you are staying, when, how, etc then you can pretty much do all that yourself online, no need for an agent [1].

But if you want advice, then agents can be useful. Say for example I want to visit Barcelona, a place I've never been. An agent can help me plan that (when to go, where to stay, what can/should I do etc.) They're like an intelligent Google. They'll also likely know some hacks to make it cheaper if I'm flexible enough. They can do a lot more than just purchase tickets for me.

[1] I needed an agent once. I was flying from the UK to USA on United. I live (and my CC is based in a country United doesn't fly to directly.) United _requires_ me to use the "web site of the country matching my credit card". Except they don't fly to my country, so no web site. I could book online, but no way to complete the purchase. I ended up using a travel agent in London (which is where I _was_) to make the booking for me...

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

#55

Post by alkonaut »

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

For complex things they are well worth the added cost. For example if you need to book a complex chain of flights with different airlines, then you might be looking at 4-5 different sites, maybe an airport hotel booking etc. Add some time zones into the mix and it's several hours of work. If you do it yourself these are all individual bookings, and you run the risk that when you completed half the steps, something goes wrong and the next step is no longer available but it's too late to switch to plan B which was through another city.

A travel agent can basically set up a complex chain of things and then book it all in one go. They'll also handle the fallback scenario if something goes wrong. And if you are on your destination and it turns out the complex chain of flights back home is no longer available, then they'll sort out a whole new itinerary. For 90% of trips it's probably not all that useful, e.g if you fly just 1-2 legs or stay in just 1 hotel.

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

#56

Post by gambiting »

smcl wrote: post #34
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…

Could be due to the added consumer protections and rights you get within the EU - regulations on how the airline should treat you when they cancel flights or when they arrive late etc?

Those apply to every passanger regardless of where they are from - as long as the flight departs from or arrives to an EU country you get full protection as passangers.

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

#57

Post by autoexec »

htag wrote: post #26
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…

This type of price discrimination isn't powered by surveillance capitalism. Using the example in the first answer on the stackexchange, this is nothing more than selling the same ticket at a different price to someone walking up to a United counter in USA compared to someone walking up to a United counter in AU. Surveillance capitalism powering price discrimination sounds scary, but there seems to be few examples of…

> This type of price discrimination isn't powered by surveillance capitalism.

Yes it is. That's why people who book flights using an Apple computer will pay more (https://www.imore.com/mac-users-might-be-paying-more-pc-user...) they're pricing based on their best assumptions about your income level.

Their dream is that they'll be able to just use facial recognition, or grab your ID from your cell phone, or force you to sign up for an account with them so they have all the info they need to pull up your credit history, yearly income, the size of your household, a list of your recent purchases, and whatever else they can get from data brokers all just to make better guesses about your wealth and how much money they can squeeze out of you rather than just using your IP address or your useragent, and that's in the works (https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/11/17/a-special-p...) but until they can shift public perception away from viewing that sort of thing as being discriminatory and exploitative, or until everyone in an industry is doing it too (airlines and hotels) it's still seen as too risky. see https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3

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

#58

Post by amichal »

bunabhucan wrote: post #19
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.

This is a common hack with business travel where prices of flights including a Saturday stay are much cheaper (aimed at holidaymakers) than weekday flights (business travel). If you know you will need to travel to XYZ every second week M-F for two months then you buy one two month return SFO-XYZ-SFO and then buy the rest of the flights as 11 day flights back from XYZ Friday to the Monday of the following week (XYZ-SF…

Used to do this. Weekly round trip tickets from CA to the US and a longer round trip ticket the other direction surrounding them (or 2 one ways? Don't remember) The airline (Air Canada) got really mad at me and claimed there was a T&C violation. Wasn't my idea but the travel office at my company. Ended up missing a flight while they argued about it.

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

#59

Post by gambiting »

aubanel wrote: post #35
rhtgrg wrote: post #4

Recently I paid to book better seats on an Air France flight and since the website was a hot mess (specifically the payment portal) I tried various VPNs to try and get through. To my surprise, prices were significantly different (about ~20% variation) depending on country, and it was most expensive in...France. This was on a flight that had already been booked from the US long ago.

I heard this is a common practice for cars: a french car will be sold at cheaper prices outside France. Home country adds a premium on car prices because they count on nationals to have a slightly higher willingness to pay for local brands.

Uhm, it's not directly comparable - cars have different specs in each country and it's very rare you can spec them 1:1 exactly. As an example - you'd find that the starting price of cars in Poland is much lower than in say, UK, but if you compare the spec the "base" model in Poland is missing a lot of equipment that's just standard in the UK to keep the cost down as much as possible.

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

#60

Post by autoexec »

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…

You're wrong that everyone would do it. I wouldn't. Lots of people find the practice to be dangerous and abhorrent, but you're right that corporations are salivating at the thought of the profits they could pull in by further exploiting our personal data and you're right that once they start only regulations will stop them.

This is absolutely one of those situations where we should really start thinking about what kind of world we want to live in and where we are actually headed.

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