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How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight
61–70 of 127 posts
Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight
#62The price descrimination that the airlines do is so opaque and manipulative, this is exactly why one needs to be cognizant of the technicals. We are really only a single logical step removed from a pretty bad place (read: racist/sexist/elitist, etc) with this teqnique to dynamic pricing and (essentially) ... front-running.[1] For example, we can charge black people more (based on zip-code demographics) to discourage…
Airlines are masters of dynamic pricing via algorithms which they constantly tune. I've written some AirAsia scraping code in Java + Selenium web driver that runs every hour on a VPS - I use it just to discover the best time to buy holiday flights. Have noticed that prices for a particular route often change several times a day.
Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google bought out itasoftware so I'm not going to assume that it's completely neutral, but I have consistently seen the best deals come through that. I don't even bother using Kayak anymore as the "calendar" function on itasoftware is so much more useful for someone like me with a relatively flexible schedule on most of my trips. I can't confirm, but I assume from personal experience that kayak increases prices on fl…
I've had this anecdotal experience as well. How is this legal?
Of course it is legal. In the same way as it is legal to set the sale price for (most) things at any (arbitrarily high, or low) value - airline ticketing takes place in a free market.
This means sellers can offer tickets at any price they want, and it is up to the purchaser to signal whether they think the price is appropriate by buying the ticket (or not) at some price. The alternative is government interference or regulation of the airline ticket industry, setting fixed prices, which would not be good for the industry.
Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight
#64Startup idea: A site that uses a bunch of VPNs in different countries to look for flights on the big search sites. Whichever is cheaper is presented as the one to buy. It could of course be extended beyond airline travel...
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Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight
#65No. I work for an OTA (not Kayak). First of all airlines file their fare rules and OTAs don't change the prices, and generally airlines pay around $10 to us to book a RT fare so there is little room to discount. Kayak is a meta which means all they do is present prices they are given from their partners (either via a feed or scrape) and then send them to the partner who shares the fee. Southwest (as others have menti…
I've suffered with cached prices before.
Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight
#66Flight metasearch sites have contracts with airlines and OTAs for specific markets, so you're likely to see different inventory if you visit a Canadian site instead of a US site, for example. Seeing different prices on the same inventory is much less likely (disregarding taxes and exchange rates.)
Like others have said, Southwest inventory doesn't often appear on sites like Kayak because they want customers to book directly. That cuts out the commission to Kayak and conditions people to look for flights on southwest.com in the future.
Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight
#67Looks like the cheap flights were on WN (Southwest) and the expensive flights were on DL (Delta). I just did an example flight search to fly later this week (Jan 24-30 round trip) from SLC to OAK, a route that both DL and WN fly direct. Kayak shows me fares from $492 on US and B6 changing planes in Phoenix or Long Beach (doubling distance and quintupling flight time) and direct flights from $532 on DL. Kayak doesn't…
> So what's the lesson here? Check the WN site directly instead of depending on search sites.
Kayak and TripAdvisor will give you unpriced WN flights in their search results. You still have to check WN directly for prices, but it's useful for seeing what's available.
Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight
#68Just tried this myself and it definitely makes a difference. Thanks for the tip.
Ditto. Tried the same thing, and a United flight went from $400 to $356 on Kayak.
Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight
#69I'm from Australia. My wife and I regularly use Expedia and other US travel websites to book Australian domestic flights - even after our exchange rate conversion it still works out cheaper (often we save one or two hundred dollars). Australian airfare taxes are insane. The only downside is when things go wrong it is expensive to spend ages on hold while making an international call...
Well they do advertise here in Australia
Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight
#70While booking flights in Europe I frequently toggle through kayak.de, kayak.it, lastminute, and kayak.com. Doesn't require a VPN, it's just that Kayak works through partners and the partners are country specific. You can often get better deals on one site or another, depending on the partner selection.
I haven't used it that much in North America recently, but it seems to be the same dynamic.