© Carolm/Pixabay
If you search for tips on how to buy cheaper plane tickets on Google, you may come across sites that advise you to use private browsing. Indeed, according to popular belief, cookies allow airlines or booking sites to know your online searches and to know that you are very interested in a flight, which would encourage them to take advantage of this to inflate prices.
But, this is false
“There is a lot of bad travel advice out there. But what always makes me cringe is when people insist that deleting your cookies will cause flight prices to drop”, writes Scott Keyes, the CEO of the Going platform, specialist in good deals, in a blog post.
“If airlines manipulated prices according to of your research, we would be the first to denounce them and let you know. But that’s just not happening”, he also wrote.
Elsewhere, in an article published this week , our colleagues at Gizmodo relay the work of economists from Berkeley, Yale and the University of Chicago, who studied the algorithms that set the prices of one of the main airlines in the United States.
Why this myth persists?
According to this study, the prices of plane tickets vary depending on reservations, but do not depend on the interests of the Internet user. “Your search behavior almost certainly doesn't affect anything”, explained Kevin Williams, one of the economists who did the American study.
If the myth persists, it is because it is possible for an Internet user to see different prices when using private browsing. However, this difference would not be due to the absence of cookies, but to price volatility. Scott Keyes explains that the price of a plane ticket can increase in just a few minutes between searches.
- On the web, we can read advice suggesting using private browsing to get cheap plane tickets
- But this is a false tip, according to a good tips specialist
- A study carried out in the United States also showed that the browsing history or cookies have no impact on prices
- On the other hand, plane ticket prices are very volatile and can change in a few minutes< /li>
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