No. 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 mentioned) is not available in the US as a business choice. Kayak also heavily caches the fares (everyone does to make performance better) and inventory changes a lot especially in close by dates. Seeing cached prices of a cached price means the actual price can change a lot from searching to booking. Note the final price is <i></i>only<i></i> determined when you hit a booking page, everything before that is cached and might be fairly stale. Of course they can be errors in pricing since the fare rules are crazy complicated and often the difference in fares might be all the taxing entities. Each country, county, city, airport and cow pasture might affect the final price so it's possible that a country where you are booking might affect this (our customers are mostly in the US) but I doubt it.<p>tldr - lucky "hacker"
Like someone else said, it’s because it’s a Southwest flight… Southwest isn't shown on the results of the big airfare search engines (kayak, expedia, orbitz) when searching from the United States because it refuses to pay those websites' fees.<p>Looks like you’ve found out that they are shown on Canada based version of the Kayak site. Most likely because the fee arrangements are different or because Southwest is willing to pay them, probably to get exposure to markets that wouldn't otherwise know about them because they don't have a marketing presence there.
Looks like the cheap flights were on WN (Southwest) and the expensive flights were on DL (Delta).<p>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.<p>Kayak doesn't show me any WN prices in the USA, but might have some sort of pilot program or contract to show them outside the USA. Iflyswa.com shows direct flights from $526.<p>Meanwhile ITA Matrix (matrix.itasoftware.com, made with secret alien technology [0]) shows flights on US for $318 which violate the rules for domestic connection times and cannot be booked. It's strange that those flights are shown since Matrix is usually very reliable.<p>Going directly to US's website reveals fares of $440 for flights with a connection in Phoenix.<p>So what's the lesson here? Check the WN site directly instead of depending on search sites. Check both ITA Matrix and Kayak if you're depending on search sites; they don't have the same flights listed. Sometimes you need to check individual airline websites even though it's a pain because they have better flights and prices than search sites have; there's no reliable way to know when that's the case.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.lisperati.com/logo.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.lisperati.com/logo.html</a>
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.<p>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 the cheap flights will return.
The 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 them from flying first class. We could, if we wanted to, require PII prior to bidding on tickets. Imagine if the NYSE priced publicly traded equities in this manner? The irony of cutting out the middle man to reduce costs, is that at some stage, we may be paying an intermediary (broker/marketmaker) to anonymize our order flow to get "fair" prices.<p>[1] This is what it really is, lets be honest.
This has nothing to do with the VPN, unfortunately.<p>The price difference comes from Southwest's price being different than Delta's. Southwest flights wont show up when searching Kayak's USA site, but they do show up on international Kayak pages. It sounds like that's because they don't want to pay the brokerage fees for flights booked through the USA versions of Kayak/Expedia/Travelocity -- but I'm not sure of that.<p>Interesting experiment though!
Does source IP address make a difference when searching fares on ITA Software's Matrix[1]? To my knowledge, ITA Software is where Kayak and many of the other booking sites get their data, so it's normally what I use when searching for flights. Since they don't actually sell tickets, I've always assumed I'm seeing "neutral" results, but now I'm curious.<p>[1] <a href="http://matrix.itasoftware.com" rel="nofollow">http://matrix.itasoftware.com</a>
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.<p>"opaque and manipulative" indeed.
I'm from Australia. My wife and I regularly use Expedia and other US travel websites to book <i>Australian</i> 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...
Startup idea:<p>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.<p>It could of course be extended beyond airline travel...
While 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.<p>I haven't used it that much in North America recently, but it seems to be the same dynamic.
"BTW, I use the VPN to mask my internet traffic… sorry NSA"<p>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.<p>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 experimented with this a few months ago using free Amazon Windows EC2 instances. The thought being that with EC2 instances I can come from far more IP end points than a specific VPN offers. What I found is many ticket/event sites ban connections from EC2 IP ranges. Sites like Kayak, TicketMaster, even Healthcare.gov drop incoming EC2 connections during the TCP handshake. I imagine this is to stop third party scrappers or ticket scalpers. I have no idea why Healthcare.gov blocks it.
The difference is southwest. I think Southwest is not offered as an option on the US side but apparently is if booking from outside the US.<p>I just checked Southwest's website and the same flight is offered for $255.00 round trip.
I do not work for Kayak. However, I believe that this may be due to the sale's city of the ticket. This is typically to encourage discounts in specific cities. When tickets are issued one aspect of the ticket is that it has a "sales location"
Flight price quotes can take the currency and sales city as input. You get to play with both those options in ITA matrix.<p>What you saw is probably based on those inputs being changed.
You don't need a VPN to do this. You can just go to Southwest.com. I always check their website after I check Kayak because they don't list Southwest's flights.
This sounds quite familiar to the manipulation Orbitz did in 2012 based on the user's reported operating system:
<a href="http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/06/25/orbitz_displaying_higher_priced_hotels_to_macs_than_pcs" rel="nofollow">http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/06/25/orbitz_displaying_...</a>
> (BTW, I use the VPN to mask my internet traffic… sorry NSA)<p>Unfortunately, that's not true and will even draw attention.<p>This XKeyScore slide is crazy: <a href="http://hothardware.com/newsimages/Item26839/Xkeyscore1.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://hothardware.com/newsimages/Item26839/Xkeyscore1.jpg</a>
Kayak is not the only one, in India I have seen MakeMyTrip did not show couple of direct flights which I found on Cleartrip .<p>I would like to know if using VPN has a impact on large sites like Amazon(I have seen the price change there too)
Flight 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.)<p>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.
I just did this for a CheapoAirFlights.co.uk flight to Saigon from London. Booking from a US IP cost a few hundred more, but I fired up the VPN and it worked fine.
OTAs have all kinds of weird tricks raising and lowering prices to get people to book sooner rather than later. Instead of realizing that providing good service with a nice clean interface is the way to go they use these cheap tricks. Agoda, Booking.com and many other OTAs all do this sort of thing. Sometimes it's as simple and clearing your cookies to get a lower rate.
How much do fare change by location? Is it only a US vs. Canada things or are prices dependent on the US location from which the search is being made? It would be interesting to create a price map of various fares searched from different states in the US...
there is working a trick for long distance flights. I used it a few times to get cheaper tickets:<p>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 this out). If you get a cheaper price buy it and call the airlines to tell them you will miss the first flight, and have them correct the check in location to your departure city. I was able to save $100 travelling from europe to east coast last time I did this.
<i>BTW, I use the VPN to mask my internet traffic… sorry NSA</i><p>That's okay. I'm sure the minor inconvenience of not seeing the data flow directly to your local IP is more than made up for by the data collection at both sides of that VPN...<p>To be serious, I wonder if they apply extra scrutiny to VPN providers, and use traffic analysis to build correlations between TCP connections. The extra effort might be justified by a higher class of data going across the connections.<p>Then again, it's probably easier to just use some form of evercookie injected into TCP streams on the fly...