I have been thinking about a trip to Europe this spring and have been checking fares. After my searches, I delete cookies. I wonder how many of you travelers know to do this?
The airline search engines latch onto you when you look for fares. A cookie is places on your conputer so they know what fares you have seen. It is an effort to make you jump the next fare visible if you missed a good price while trying to decide.
It takes only a minute but you will see fresh fares and not be tagged.
The cookie thing is an urban legend...deleting them has no effect on the fares you see on your screen. Fares can change many times a day, but this is directly related to the airlines tinkering with their fares throughout the day, and not connected to a cookie. Both NG Travler, Consumer Reports have done studies on this, and they've sided with the travel sites, who are adamant that they don't play games with the fares.
If I am wrong, I am sorry. I did read this a while ago and believed it to be true. Just in case, I'll delete them anyway. Can't hurt.
I am not aware of any North American airlines which use cookies in that way. However, sites like eBags.com sometimes do as they run multiple affiliate promotions simultaneously.
If you are a Firefox user, there is a simple add-on called "Remove Cookies from this site" which gives you the option to right click on any page and delete ONLY the cookies for that site. Takes 1 second.
Pete
Cookies do give the site a record of your visit. It's not too far out to assume some sites may keep track of what you have been offered. It wouldn't be hard to do. I haven't seen any cases where I thought that might be true when searching airfares. As has been said, it's more likely you will return to the site a little while later and be unable to find the fare you saw because they have already sold more tickets and the price scheme has changed.
I delete cookies, history and temporary files regularly. I do it more as a routine security procedure and add a regular clean up of my computer. Whether it's necessary or not, I don't know. I do know my anti-virus occasionally picks up tracking cookies that my kids may have okayed while they were on the computer (when something pops up on the screen, they tend to push enter to clear it without first reading what they are doing).
