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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?

#181

I travel to my home country once a year to visit family, but have it set up so that my origin for the round trip is the home country (ie XYZ-SFO-XYZ rather than SFO-XYZ-SFO). The ticket is generally half the cost, which adds up when you're traveling with family. I can only do this because I consistently travel to that same place every year, otherwise I wouldn't be able to swap the origin. It also requires you knowing…

I know that the company did this in the past. E.g. employees often flying from Perth to Frankfurt they did the following: First trip PER-FRA Then the office in Frankfurt booked FRA-PER-FRA round trips. Back then the max time between the first and last flight was 12 months. The ticket was on a fare where rebooking was free. So whenever the next trip was required the return-leg of the trip was changed and a new return…

I’ve run into this before - last year I was booking flights domestically in Peru paying in soles because it was half the price of booking in USD. I managed to get two of them booked but ended up having to pay the third via a travel agency in USD because the LATAM site simply stopped accepting my USA credit card. I can’t know whether it was some arbitrary security measure or whether their system caught on to me trying to game it and denied me because of it, but they denied both my USA credit card numbers as well as my debit cards.

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

#182
post #67

I've been flying internationally 10-15 times a year for ~10 years. Different routes and destinations each time. I've spent a lot of time searching for hacks like this that let me save a few bucks on flight tickets. Sometimes it works. Sometimes you find that a flight is cheaper depending on which country's website or currency you use to book. Flight tickets are priced dynamically using a variety of factors to determi…

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Remember oil companies came up with the concept of a carbon footprint

They want you focused inwards

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

#183
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So who's going to solve tomorrow's climate problems? A well-raised kid is one of the better ways to improve the future. Also, the way the human brain's reward system works, lots of people will say: I have no kids, now I can take an extra far-away holiday.

> So who's going to solve tomorrow's climate problems? All the kids that are being born anyway. But it's hypocritical to both have a kid and then malign me for using 1 millionth of the CO2 the decision to have a kid results in.

"Having kids is bad" makes sense as a rule of we assume it kids will have the same footprint as us. But that sounds like another way to admit defeat.

I don't have kids. I'm in my thirties. I really struggle with this idea. I fear that this notion is part of why I will run out the clock on my window to get kids.

All I see is finger pointing when everyone needs to rise to the occasion. I'm falling in that trap myself.

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

#184

It can work, but rarely. The international flight price has been very well globalized. What used to work very well is to rent a car through a foreign website. I live(d) in the US and was planning a trip in California for a few weeks back in ~2015. By going through a major car rental company's UK website, I literally halved my cost. I didn't have much luck with this trick last time I travelled though, unfortunately.

It can also happen to work via the phone if it doesn’t online. I was trying to book a one way rental from Bergen to Oslo a few years ago. Avis Norwegian and USA website showed some insane price, but when I called up Bergen airport Avis they quoted me something less than half the price.

Side note if you ever find yourself up that way it’s hands down the most beautiful drive I’ve ever done in my life and I’ve been driving in Iceland, Switzerland and other parts of Norway several times

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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You are a climate masochist. I recommend emotionally disengaging from topics that cause you grief and that you absolutely can not impact. The thought of personal CO2 emission reduction behavior having any kind of measurable impact on the climate is laughably naive. I recently had to figure out the cheapest flights I could find to keep my star alliance frequent flier status, which I was at risk of losing because covid…

That's like saying you shouldn't worry about reducing your personal wasting of food because it doesn't solve world hunger—like when choosing not to fly often there's a small impact that is very much noticeable on a larger scale if more people did it.

Even if the industries, the western world, developing countries forced to use coal plants for cheap energy (and you can choose many more actors that play a larger part in causing the climate crisis) contribute to the problem more than you as an individual, at least you're not actively making the world a worse place.

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t take CO2 behavior instruction from people who have children. I can fly international 365 days a year for decades. But my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have 0 carbon footprint because they’ll never exist. Conversely, eat bugs and recycle coke cans if you want, but that’s a fraction of a fraction of a drop in the bucket if you’ve had even one kid.

For every child you don't have I'm going to have two.

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is from 10+ years ago, and it was a travel agent (Orbitz.com) charging more for hotel nights (increasing their cut). The hotel itself never charged Mac users more, and I have never seen or heard of Hyatt/Marriott/Hilton/etc websites charging based on which operating system they think the query is coming from. I have yet to see proof that airlines or hotels or car rental companies directly put out different price…

> I have yet to see proof that airlines or hotels or car rental companies directly put out different prices to customers based on the device being used, or even anything else. That's much less fair, but try this which explicitly states that airlines in the US set prices according to a customer’s personal information. https://catalaconsulting.co.uk/why-hotel-personalized-pricin... and note this source in particular: h…

> That's much less fair, but try this which explicitly states that airlines in the US set prices according to a customer’s personal information.

No, it does not. Your catala consulting link is about what hotels could do, and it is nothing more than what you learn about price segmentation in microeconomics 101.

>https://www.duettocloud.com/press-releases/duetto-gamechange...

This is a valid link, but still not about hotels in the sense that most people use for tourism/visits friends/family and work.

It is about casinos using technology to automate how to entice their whales, which they already did using “comped” rooms and upgrades and whatnot in exchange for gambling.

I have yet to see evidence that an airline website presents different prices to customers based on the device they are using (the original claim), nor do mainstream hotels like Hiltons/Marriotts/IHG/Wyndham/Choice/Accor/etc.

They very well might in the future. And in some broad sense, currently do via benefits for frequent customers via rewards programs, but as of now, there is no automated pricing system that drills down to the individual level.

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long term do you think this strategy is for the human kind? Does it span more than one generation?

IMHO a voluntary reduction in human population by a few billion through reduced birth is a perfectly viable, sustainable long-term strategy; all the drawbacks and criticisms appear when someone wants to encourage that with various means (i.e. not fully voluntarily) or when it's posed as some solution to things which need a faster reduction than possible this way, e.g. climate change won't be prevented even if we went…

It doesn't even have to be voluntarily in the sense of "making a decision to". More like voluntary in the sense of "have no specific need to".

In the most developed countries, children are now more of a burden than a gain, which is why women are having fewer of them every generation.

Not only because they're expensive, but because they are often born unhealthy (physically, mentally, or both) and are a large, often unrecoverable blow to most careers.

Since we don't need children to work on the farm or to let us move in with them when we're old (er, less than previous generations, anyway), it becomes purely a "nice-to-have" decision.

And then if somebody does voluntarily have children, they don't have much of a leg to stand on when lecturing others about their impact on climate change.

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t take CO2 behavior instruction from people who have children. I can fly international 365 days a year for decades. But my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have 0 carbon footprint because they’ll never exist. Conversely, eat bugs and recycle coke cans if you want, but that’s a fraction of a fraction of a drop in the bucket if you’ve had even one kid.

I don't understand this argument. Children are individuals as well that would have their own carbon budget. Not to mention the threat of demographic collapse is serious among almost every developed country

Yeah the argument may or may not make sense depending on how you count and it's really dependent on which assumptions you pick.

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

#190
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So who's going to solve tomorrow's climate problems? A well-raised kid is one of the better ways to improve the future. Also, the way the human brain's reward system works, lots of people will say: I have no kids, now I can take an extra far-away holiday.

> So who's going to solve tomorrow's climate problems? All the kids that are being born anyway. But it's hypocritical to both have a kid and then malign me for using 1 millionth of the CO2 the decision to have a kid results in.

Yes, but those kids are now more likely to be raised by people who are not aware of the problems, or deny them. "Well-raised" is a key word in my previous comment.

While I think we need to find a way to limit the number of humans and think it's a perfectly fine decision for people to not have children, I will continue to criticize anyone who uses CO2 excessively whether they have children or not.

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