Guess What? You Aren't Always Seeing The Lowest Price, Study Says

When you’re searching for a flight, there are dozens of travel websites ready to show you the best price. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look, right?

Wrong.

Turns out, you might get different results on some search engines based on a variety of factors, including whether you’re a member of the site, whether you’re using your mobile phone, and your history of clicks and purchases, according to a study from Northeastern University.

“In many cases, personalization provides advantages for users,” the study authors write. “However, personalization on e-commerce sites may also be used to the user’s disadvantage by manipulating the products shown (price steering) or by customizing the prices of products (price discrimination).”

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to detect when this is happening. In the study, the following sites engaged in notable personalization strategies:

• Cheaptickets and Orbitz offered reduced prices on hotels to “members.”
• Expedia and Hotels.com pointed a subset of users toward pricier hotels.
• Home Depot and Travelocity offered personalized search results for people on mobile devices.
• Priceline personalized search results based on the user’s history of clicks and purchases.

To collect data, researchers used both real and dummy user accounts to search a number of e-commerce sites and travel search engines, such as Best Buy , JCPenney, Staples , Newegg, Cheaptickets, and Travelocity, among others. On e-commerce sites, researchers searched for items such as “pillows,” “sunglasses,” and “flash drives.” On the travel sites, researchers chose 10 different cities around the world and searched for hotels and rental cars for both long-term and short-term date ranges.

While in many cases, price differentials were nominal, in others, results were substantially different. In one search, a site presented the nightly price for a Paris hotel as $633 to one user and $565 to another. In another search, a member of a site received a nightly rate of $194 for a Miami Beach hotel, while a non-member was quoted $209 per night.

“I don’t think it’s a huge surprise for people who are in the industry, but maybe consumers will be surprised,” says Kim Mance, a travel expert and editor of online travel magazine Galavanting. “We’ve seen a huge trend for personalization from the travel search engines, trying to function a little bit like a travel agent. I think it’s coming from a good-intentioned place.”

Although there is no surefire way to make sure you’re seeing the lowest price, there are a few strategies you can use to double check your search results before purchasing:

Try another browser. Clearing your cache and deleting your cookies can affect your search results, but it can also clear all of your saved passwords and form information in a browser you use all the time. Try opening a browser you don’t typically use (such as Safari if you’re a Chrome user, for instance) and search there first. When you’re ready to buy, search again with your normal browser.

Use your mobile phone. It’s also worth a quick search from a mobile device. “A lot of the travel industry is really pushing toward mobile booking,” Mance says. “Sometimes you’ll get triple reward points or $100 off of a fare and it’s only a mobile deal.”

Forget about site loyalty. Different travel search engines will likely give you different results, so try a few of them before booking. “Check Priceline and Expedia and Kayak,” Mance says. “If you spot a big difference, maybe that’s not the company you want to keep cookies stored with.”