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Orbitz shows costlier hotel options to Mac users

online.wsj.com

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Re: Orbitz shows costlier hotel options to Mac users

#61

Post by benmanns »

abruzzi wrote: post #44

Inevitably, this will make people like me (Mac user that considers $50 a night overpriced) book through other sites. Does orbitz think I only price through them? Most people I know price at least a half dozen locations before deciding, so as long as everyone doesn't jack prices for Mac users, Mac user's business will naturally migrate to whomever doesn't try to screw us.

I don't believe they are increasing prices, but rather showing different, better quality hotels that are pricier to Mac users.

Re: Orbitz shows costlier hotel options to Mac users

#63

Post by hristov »

damian2000 wrote: post #60
ctrl_freak wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protip: many paywalls, including this one can be circumvented by using Google's URL redirection service: http://www.google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB... Simply use 'www.google.com/url?q=' and paste in the address of the article which has a paywall.

That's awesome, thanks .. how does it work? I mean why does it allow google to bypass their paywall.

Because google does not like to index pay-walled articles. They are either not indexed at all, or given a low score. This makes complete sense because Google wants their users to be happy and users are usually not very happy when they hit a pay-wall.

Online publications, on the other hand, really want their paywalled articles to be indexed by Google. You may remember Murdoch did a lot of complaining about this a couple of years ago. So now publications do a little trick where they make the whole article available to people coming from Google but offer a paywall to anyone else. This means that you can usually access the entire article if you are redirected from google.

Re: Orbitz shows costlier hotel options to Mac users

#65

Post by damian2000 »

hristov wrote: post #63
damian2000 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awesome, thanks .. how does it work? I mean why does it allow google to bypass their paywall.

Because google does not like to index pay-walled articles. They are either not indexed at all, or given a low score. This makes complete sense because Google wants their users to be happy and users are usually not very happy when they hit a pay-wall. Online publications, on the other hand, really want their paywalled articles to be indexed by Google. You may remember Murdoch did a lot of complaining about this a coup…

Interesting, thanks. It seems counter-intuitive that they would allow all users from google to see the full article, since that's where you'd imagine a lot of traffic would come from.

Re: Orbitz shows costlier hotel options to Mac users

#66

Post by jlcx »

benmanns wrote: post #62

Another curious statistic: according to the sales numbers on http://www.humblebundle.com/ , Linux users on average pay more ($12.50) for the choose-your-price bundle than Mac ($9.99) or Windows ($7.98) users.

I would guess that this is either related to user enthusiasm for more professionally developed games (explaining why Windows users aren't as excited), or a desire to support the creation of cool stuff and be part of a community around it.

Re: Orbitz shows costlier hotel options to Mac users

#67

Post by macspoofing »

damian2000 wrote: post #60
ctrl_freak wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protip: many paywalls, including this one can be circumvented by using Google's URL redirection service: http://www.google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB... Simply use 'www.google.com/url?q=' and paste in the address of the article which has a paywall.

That's awesome, thanks .. how does it work? I mean why does it allow google to bypass their paywall.

So that google doesn't knock them down in ratings or outright delist them.

Re: Orbitz shows costlier hotel options to Mac users

#68

Post by bigiain »

unreal37 wrote: post #43
mitchty wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be easy enough to compare prices on windows/linux in a vm on my mac though. And take note of the companies that do it. Something else to add to comparison services as well, aka does site xyz.com discriminate based on os/browser?

Important note: the prices are not different. Just that more 5-star hotels are shown in the search results to Mac users. If they were charging more for the same hotel, it would be evil not brilliant. :)

We were doing this back in early 2001 on this site:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010722191804/http://travelmall....

We tried both adjusting individual prices for Mac users (and didn't see any statistical difference from the price sensitivity for non-mac users, same as we didn't see statistically significant differences between older and newer Windows version users), and skewing the search result price range for Mac users compared to non-Mac users (and we certainly saw statistically significant improvements there in terms of average dollars per room-night). In the long run though, although we proved to ourselves it worked, the Mac userbase back then was so small that the overall bottom line effect wasn't big enough compared to the engineering and marketing effort to keep it working - I think it all vanished in the big 2004 rewrite of the site's back end.

Re: Orbitz shows costlier hotel options to Mac users

#69

Post by bigiain »

joshmlewis wrote: post #49

I'm cofounding a startup in the travel space and our cofounder has a lot of domain expertise and according to him it's illegal to show a rate lower on Expedia than say Marriott.com. There are exceptions as always, but for the most part this is true. Now I don't know if this applies to the opposite..I guess you could just add to a price but I still would think that's fishy. Anyway, just a little tid bit of knowledge.…

"Illegal" is not _quite_ the right word.

When I got out of the online hotel booking game (back in '08) - all of the major chains were starting to include terms like that in their contracts (or had been for a few years), and were leaning on all the wholesalers (Pegasus/Sabre/Gullivers/Octopus) to push and enforce those decisions on small players (like us) who booked through them. Our lawyers said there was a _strong_ chance that these contract provisions wouldn't stand up in court (here in Australia), but it was obvious to everyone that it wasn't worth getting into expensive legal fights with the suppliers of the "product" our business relied on…

Re: Orbitz shows costlier hotel options to Mac users

#70

Post by bigiain »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #22
dmfdmf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Econ, the latter is called differential pricing and there is nothing evil about it at all. http://www.pricingforprofit.com/pricing-explained/differenti...

That depends on your moral code, of course.

We knew that _downward_ differential pricing worked (in terms of increasing conversions) - a popup saying "Hi, you're a return visitor to our website, we can discount this room rate 10% if you book today) always increased conversions.

We sure as hell _experimented_ to see if the decrease in conversions by bumping margins (and hence prices) up was worthwhile in terms of total profit.

I'd happily make an argument that if the first is morally "OK" then so is the second…

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