Book flight tickets on SnowHaze

When planning your vacation

Imagine the following scenario: You want to fly somewhere and need a ticket. Therefore, you’re searching for airline tickets online but don’t buy it, yet. However, when you go back to the same page to buy it, the price has gone up. Does this sound familiar to you? I think everyone has been in that exact position. I will tell you why this happens and how you can protect yourself against it.

Why are flights always more expensive when I book them?

Airlines have long used dynamic pricing. Sophisticated algorithms calculate the current price of a ticket based on many factors. These factors may be general ones like supply and demand, time of booking, etc. Dynamic pricing allows airline companies to maximize their revenue. There’s also another player, and that’s your personal data. This may include income, device type, country of residence, and whether the algorithm thinks or knows that you’re interested in a specific connection. Therefore, the flight you’re looking at right now, probably isn’t at the same price on my device.

If you don’t protect your personal data when looking for airfares, the airline can infer your interest in a specific connection and your general behavior when buying tickets. Once you made the decision to buy the ticket, it is unlikely that you will change it again. With this knowledge, the airline can easily raise the price. Most often, this happens when looking at or booking flights in an app or in a browser that doesn’t guard your personal data.

But wait… Couldn’t the opposite happen, too? Shouldn’t I be able to book some flights cheaper?

In theory, it’s true that you should be able to profit from dynamic pricing. However, the prices only go down for connections that the algorithm thinks you’re not willing to pay for as much. The algorithm tries to charge you the highest price for which you are still willing to buy the ticket. And the quality of the algorithms increases every day. Thus, while in theory it is possible to take advantage of dynamic pricing, ever-changing and very odd behavior is needed to trick the algorithms – something most humans just cannot naturally do.

How can I book cheaper flights?

While there is a long tradition of dynamic airfares, we will in the future see it even more often in other industries, too. While it is theoretically possible for the customer to profit from dynamic pricing, the vast majority won’t. The reason is simple: dynamic pricing and the underlying algorithms were not designed for the profit of the customer.

Flights will most likely be cheapest for you when the airline does not know beforehand that you’re interested in this connection. Therefore, I recommend using a browser that protects your personal data – like SnowHaze – to book flights. Another possibility is to use two separate devices altogether; one for searching flights and another one for actually booking them.