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How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight

josecasanova.com

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Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight

#101

Post by 001sky »

Grue3 wrote: post #98
001sky wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No incentive to keep black people out of first-class. They do have an incentive to price discriminate: charge people more who would be willing to pay more. Likely outcome: lower fares for economically disadvantaged groups. This is insanely naive. Do you really think that rich people don't pay a premium for "exclusivity"? And who, pray tell, do you imagine they are trying to exclude? [0] http://www.wired.com/design/20…

Half of your citations are Gawker. Do you work for them or something? Why would you link to Internet equivalent of the trashiest British tabloid?

Half of your citations are Gawker

The links to original research are trivially available.

But if this type of comment makes you feel special, no worries.

http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/14-054_e3c04a...

http://kentbrew.github.io/profiling-atherton/

Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight

#102

Post by 001sky »

ry0ohki wrote: post #97
001sky wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No incentive to keep black people out of first-class. They do have an incentive to price discriminate: charge people more who would be willing to pay more. Likely outcome: lower fares for economically disadvantaged groups. This is insanely naive. Do you really think that rich people don't pay a premium for "exclusivity"? And who, pray tell, do you imagine they are trying to exclude? [0] http://www.wired.com/design/20…

His point was that Kayak, who is simply a lead generator has no incentive to do so, not that discrimination doesn't exist in the world.

who is simply a lead generator

The busines model of lead gen is $/per Y. Y is typical a matrix, with quality as the main variation. In plain english, high quality leads are worth a premium. The business of assessing quality, at scale, is through indirect statistical techniques (ie, loose correlations of observed characteristics to perceived quality). "Not Black" is a piece of observed data that loosely correlates with higher quality for many high-net worth customers in the following market segments: ebay, air-bnb, fashion, dating, and real estate. The nexus of {fashion, dating, real-estate} is pretty strong if you consider the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Alternatively, you are talking the more important parts of a hierarchy of needs pyramid. Or put another way, this is the stuff rich people are most likely to "irrationally" throw money at. Expensive clubs, fancy cars, and flashy homes. Precisely the target market for 1st class travel, which is not business class (obviously).

This is a devils advocate position, but its worth thinking through. It (was) not meant to be just a "shock and awe" type of analysis just to get a rise out of people.

Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight

#103

Post by cwp »

rjd wrote: post #28

I've been doing this for years. After I noticed most places are cheap to get to but flights are expensive back. I noticed the same business model was in place from the other direction. So just fake the country of origin and you get cheap to and back. The other one is clear your cookies before booking. Places create fake demand by disappearing the cheap flights on you if you shopping around. If you clear your cookies…

So you book two one-way tickets? AFAICT, that's usually not cheaper.

Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight

#104

Post by aestra »

aaronsnoswell wrote: post #57

I'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...

>expensive to spend ages on hold while making an international call

Did you try using Skype? Or Google Voice? Or similar? They are much cheaper than actually placing an international call, at least in the US, it is only like 3 cents a minute (US)

When I lived abroad I called home with Skype (this was before Google Voice) and I could talk as much as a wanted for only a couple dollars here and there, actually cheaper than my phone bill now.

Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight

#105

Post by smackfu »

cynwoody wrote: post #51
blazespin wrote: post #27

I've often hacked Kayak by booking flights to other destinations with a stopover at the place I want to go. It's bizarre, but yes, they're sometimes cheaper. "opaque and manipulative" indeed.

Kayak has a feature they call Hacker Fares™†. † http://www.kayak.com/news/a-new-way-to-find-deals-on-flights...

Those are nothing special, they are just buying two one-way tickets on different airlines because they are cheaper in a particular scenario. Airlines don't care if you do that.

Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight

#106

Post by xpop2027 »

gtirloni wrote: post #95

"BTW, I use the VPN to mask my internet traffic… sorry NSA" As if using a VPN made you NSA-proof. Every time I see phrases like this I force myself not to think the person is a fool but it's hard. People need to realize that ensuring security and privacy isn't fixed by installing just some tool and be done with it. Worse, they will do this and trust they are immune (and then the damage will be worse).

I'm aware it is not NSA proof.

Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight

#107

Post by aestra »

pera wrote: post #6

changing your user agent also works in some websites (not sure about kayak though) protip: don't let them know you have a mac book pro

They don't give you higher prices with a Macbook Pro, they might just suggest higher priced things.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230445860...

Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight

#108

Post by dclowd9901 »

ubernostrum wrote: post #82
coin wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is "B6"? Can you just spell out the airline name instead?

B6 is the IATA designator for JetBlue. People who travel heavily, or otherwise spend a lot of time talking about airlines, often use these to refer to airlines rather than writing out the full names over and over. IATA designators for commonly-discussed US-based airlines: * AirTrain: FL * Alaska: AS * Allegiant: G4 * American: AA * Delta: DL * Frontier: F9 * Hawaiian: HA * JetBlue: B6 * Southwest: WN * Spirit: NK * S…

Yeah, definitely appropriate abbreviation for the airplane nuts at Hacker News. It's an interesting TIL, but for future reference, @WildUtah, I'd wager less than 1% of the population knows anything about airline designations.

Re: How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight

#109

Post by aestra »

emrekzd wrote: post #77

there is working a trick for long distance flights. I used it a few times to get cheaper tickets: when you are buying long distance flight tickets, pick a city close to where you will depart (this will add an additional flight transferring from your departure city). When you get multiple transfers there is a possibility that the offered price will be cheaper (I confirmed this with an agency when I initially figured t…

This is called abusing customer service.

How the tell if you're not being ethical:

If every single person does it, does the system break down? If the answer is yes, then stop.

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