Cookies Cost $$$$

Steven,

There was also a rumor that if you used an Mac, the airlines would shaft you too. Apparently since Macs are more expensive than PCs (but also better) they feel you you can afford to also get shafted.

happy trails.

Re the MAC rumor:
I have yet to see a difference in prices on air sites between my MAC and when I've checked on a PC. And it takes more than a cookie to reveal the compute type.

But on the cookies note, cookies and history are something you should clear after every session. Not only does the build-up eventually slow down your browser, but do you really want any site that you go to be able to look at everywhere else you've been? If this is okay, then no one should be complaining about the NSA doing this also, at least that's for national security.

I always clear my cache after visiting airline sites. I tested this on United before... searched for a flight, got a price, then came back to the site later (without clearing the cache) and the price was up,up, up. Cleared the cache and, lo and behold, the price was back to the lower original I found. I do this now for all air travel sites.

A good way to get around this is to use "Incognito" (Chrome), "Private Browsing" (IE) or their equivalent in other browsers. It is a mod of the browsers that don't load cookies and cache.

On Google Chrome, you can start an Incognito window with CTRL + Shift + N

Unfortunately, there are many legitimate websites that will not function properly if your cookies are not enabled, and browsing on a site will be considerably slowed without a cache to make it easy to go back and forth.

I can't understand why Chrome does not have the option to set to clear cookies, cache and history every time it is closed, except that Google seems to want to be aware of what everyone does.

@Larry: BINGO!!! ...."Google seems to want to be aware of what everyone does. "

"Google seems to want to be aware of what everyone does. "

Well, of course it does. It's free to us but makes its money from selling advertising and they can ask more from the advertisers if they can target users that are likely to respond to the ads. They're not the only ones out there targeting consumers like this.

The whole "clearing your cookies" thing is an urban legend. Both Consumer Reports and National Geographic Traveler have researched it, and they side with the travel sites: cookies have nothing to do with price differences. It's simply a result of the airline's load management software constantly tinkering with fares throughout the day. It happens with or without cookies being enabled.

Urban legend or not? I will provide the following that happened last month, and you may judge:

I was not on Kayak or Ita (where it would make sense that cookies would not matter) but at faredepot, having gone there from finding their price at Momondo. I will leave out that I should have been dealing directly with Lufthansa for my ultimate purchase, but most of my options were split airlines and not available from the airlines directly, so I was spending a lot of searching time on the small sites.

I had been following this for weeks, and was now ready to make the purchase. But there was some confusion in what I was doing, and accidentally closed my Tab for this. I immediately went back to the site, same parameters, this took maybe 60 seconds. And all the fare possibilities were up a solid 5% or more. I now quit the Browser altogether, which dumps my cookies, history and cache. Reopened, and redid the same search. Again, about 60 seconds. And was presented with the same price information that I initially had as I was trying to purchase.

To me, it is highly doubtful that these price changes in this short a period were coincidental and not a manipulation by this site. I noted this behavior often on several individual sites during my 3 weeks shopping this. Some of these sites even give you a "sorry, this is no longer available at this price" when you attempt to purchase immediately after seeing a price. At the same time, I also noticed that these fares that were available from airlines directly were not fluctuating while this was happening.

There is a reason that web sites you visit plant information onto your computer.

As an aside, another reason I will not deal with the above site or similar sites again is they did a bait-and-switch. Through the purchase process they showed my selection. I did not look closely at the e-mail confirms as they came in, and did not notice until two nights later when I went to confirm my flight arrival number in Berlin to our host that I found that rather than the direct 1 hour connection from Dusseldorf at 7:10AM, they had put us on a flight two planes and an additional 3+ hours later. They had not even been offering this combination on their site, so it was not my error. Needless to say, it was too late to correct this. If I had taken a screen shot of my purchase screen I would have gone straight to my credit card bank, but why would I have done this? It's not a killer, but it was not our desire to sit at Dusseldorf airport after an overnight flight for an additional 3 hours until 10:15 with little to do when we had been planning to be walking around Berlin at that time.

Myth or not, I will continue to clear my cache. Life goes on.

I am not sure if it is the cookies or the device but we have been searching airfares and have found some interesting differences in prices for the same flights. I have been using my laptop and my husband our home PC and/or our iPad. When searching open jaw flights the price changes for the return flight depending on the arrival location on both devices. (When flying into Rome and out of Paris the flight home from Paris was more expensive then when flying into Barcelona or Brussels and home from Paris -same flight number and same date as previous search). We have been playing with arrival and departure cities and the flights can change by almost $100 - (there are 5 of us) for the same exact return flight depending on where we fly in. When added to the lower prices of flying into different cities it really adds up - by adjusting our itinerary we have brought down the costs of flights from over $1,800 per person to $1,350 for peak season travel. We are still searching for that elusive $1,200 to Europe and back fare that we have heard about! We will book as soon as the itinerary is nailed down.

Also, I consistently clear my cache between every search session (each morning) and I have consistently found lower fares then on the iPad where we often forget to clear the cookies. We are searching side by side at the same time. This is the first time we have searched for flights to Europe and we are quite surprised at how often the prices jump up and down.

@travelmom - prices can change due to the various taxes and fees used by different airports. They are different depending on whether you are arriving or departing. I will give you an example - I booked a trip where I was going to either arrive in London or depart from there. I used airline miles, so only had to pay taxes. It was $5 to arrive at Heathrow, but it was around $250 to depart from there. It was a no brainer to arrive in London and depart from where we will be at the end of our trip.

OK, alemdaer10, we know that you love sports and agree with everything, as obvious in your other posts.

What is it specifically that you are agreeing with?