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Correct. This is a bug. In the low-cost airline business, your competitive advantage is being the cheapest. Everyone is racing to the bottom. Stripping out fea

Correct. This is a bug. In the low-cost airline business, your competitive advantage is being the cheapest. Everyone is racing to the bottom. Stripping out features in order to offer a few dollars more off your tickets than your other low cost competitors. The competitors are usually scraping each others' sites to see what the lowest prices are so they can beat it by being cheaper on particular flight routes or dates. So I think what was actually happening here is that Whizz was trying to control that by raising their price $10 for the scraper bots. The competitors would now scrape Whizz and see a higher price than Whizz actually had and would lower their price to that and stop. Customers who compare all the low cost airlines (most low cost flyers will do that already) will see Whizz is always a little cheaper and purchase from them. Whizz also ends up creating an artificially higher floor (which means more profits instead of racing prices lower). The problem, is that in the process of Whizz's website trying to determine scraper bots from normal users, a bug in that detection method lead real users with ad blockers from being treated like scraper bots and seeing the higher fee. This is a bug not a feature.

madjam002 4y ago
If this is intentional to throw off price scraper bots, why is the price only raised £10 on the final screen of checkout when the card details form is shown, after entering personal details, creating an account, entering address, going through seat selection, insurance, car rental, etc. Not to mention a CAPTCHA is filled out during checkout anyway, so they know the user is likely to not be a bot. The price stays at e.g £100 from the point of searching for flights, all the way through checkout until scrolling down to the card details form, at which point it is discretely raised to £110.
- hhmc 4y ago
  > entering personal details, creating an account, entering address, going through seat selection, insurance, car rental, etc. Not to mention a CAPTCHA is filled out during checkout anyway Perhaps the state of the art in competitor price discovery does actually do all these steps (probably via mechanical turk rather than automated)?
- aendruk 4y ago
  Plausibly just the final step is what scrapers checked. Or plausibly just the final step misidentified the customer; the captcha did its job on the marketing site but the final price authorization comes from a different system.
cavisne 4y ago
Rather than for scrapers I suspect this is for booking aggregators. Wizz and other low cost airlines try and avoid these aggregators as they charge huge commissions and can keep them by threatening to take away a chunk of bookings, Wizz even mentions this on page 4 of their annual report. This is probably to prevent any of these aggregators building a manual integration to enable booking, then hitting them up later for a commission once they have captured a share of bookings (similar to the strategies Postmates etc took at the start).

madjam002 4y ago

If this is intentional to throw off price scraper bots, why is the price only raised £10 on the final screen of checkout when the card details form is shown, after entering personal details, creating an account, entering address, going through seat selection, insurance, car rental, etc. Not to mention a CAPTCHA is filled out during checkout anyway, so they know the user is likely to not be a bot. The price stays at e.g £100 from the point of searching for flights, all the way through checkout until scrolling down to the card details form, at which point it is discretely raised to £110.

hhmc 4y ago
> entering personal details, creating an account, entering address, going through seat selection, insurance, car rental, etc. Not to mention a CAPTCHA is filled out during checkout anyway Perhaps the state of the art in competitor price discovery does actually do all these steps (probably via mechanical turk rather than automated)?
aendruk 4y ago
Plausibly just the final step is what scrapers checked. Or plausibly just the final step misidentified the customer; the captcha did its job on the marketing site but the final price authorization comes from a different system.

cavisne 4y ago

Rather than for scrapers I suspect this is for booking aggregators. Wizz and other low cost airlines try and avoid these aggregators as they charge huge commissions and can keep them by threatening to take away a chunk of bookings, Wizz even mentions this on page 4 of their annual report. This is probably to prevent any of these aggregators building a manual integration to enable booking, then hitting them up later for a commission once they have captured a share of bookings (similar to the strategies Postmates etc took at the start).