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Orbitz shows costlier hotel options to Mac users
- badhairday 14y agoPaywall. :(
- orta 14y agoThe article is actually this long -- BY DANA MATTIOLI Orbitz Worldwide Inc. has found that people who use Apple Inc.'s Mac computers spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see. The Orbitz effort, which is in its early stages, demonstrates how tracking people's online activities can use even seemingly innocuous information—in this case, the fact that customers are visiting Orbitz.com from a Mac—to start predicting their tastes and spending habits. Orbitz executives confirmed that the company is experimenting with showing different hotel offers to Mac and PC ...
- kintamanimatt 14y agoIf you're running AdBlock you won't see the "click here to subscribe now!" pitch. The ellipses isn't the end of the article!
- ihsw 14y agoMaybe paywall sites should be banned from HN.
- prawn 14y agoMaybe best just to clearly disclose it somehow. I know it's not apples with apples, but should we ban patio11's potential $5 comprehensive ebook because it's not free or behind an email registration? Or (apples with a non-fruit) 'Show HN' efforts that are paid services?
- ComputerGuru 14y agoActual article text: Orbitz found Mac users on average spend $20 to $30 more a night on hotels than their PC counterparts. The Orbitz effort, which is in its early stages, demonstrates how tracking people's online activities can use even seemingly innocuous information—in this case, the fact that customers are visiting Orbitz.com from a Mac—to start predicting their tastes and spending habits. Orbitz executives confirmed that the company is experimenting with showing different hotel offers to Mac and PC visitors, but said the company isn't showing the same room to different users at different prices. They also pointed out that users can opt to rank results by price. Journal Community Orbitz found Mac users on average spend $20 to $30 more a night on hotels than their PC counterparts, a significant margin given the site's average nightly hotel booking is around $100, chief scientist Wai Gen Yee said. Mac users are 40% more likely to book a four- or five-star hotel than PC users, Mr. Yee said, and when Mac and PC users book the same hotel, Mac users tend to stay in more expensive rooms. "We had the intuition, and we were able to confirm it based on the data," Orbitz Chief Technology Officer Roger Liew said. The sort of targeting undertaken by Orbitz is likely to become more commonplace as online retailers scramble to identify new ways in which people's browsing data can be used to boost online sales. Orbitz lost $37 million in 2011 and its stock has fallen by more than 74% since its 2007 IPO. The effort underscores how retailers are becoming bigger users of so-called predictive analytics, crunching reams of data to guess the future shopping habits of customers. The goal is to tailor offerings to people believed to have the highest "lifetime value" to the retailer. Orbitz first confirmed Mac users' preferences in October and began working them into the complicated mix of factors that determine its search results. The effect isn't always obvious. In tests performed by The Wall Street Journal, search results for hotels in cities including Las Vegas, Orlando, Philadelphia and Boston were the same for both Macs and PCs. A New York search turned up more expensive hotels for Mac users, but only after the first 20 listed. Mac vs. PC Top hotels measured by booked-room nights by Mac and non-Mac users in selected cities in May: Mac users Las Vegas -- Excalibur Hotel & Casino New York -- Park Central New York Los Angeles -- Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel Miami -- Hyatt Regency Miami Chicago -- Congress Plaza Hotel Non-Mac users Las Vegas -- Stratosphere New York -- Park Central New York Los Angeles -- The Wilshire Hotel Miami -- Miami Beach Resort Chicago -- The Whitehall Hotel Source: Orbitz Other searches showed more significant differences. A Mac search for a hotel in Miami Beach for two nights in July displayed costlier boutique hotels on the first page of results, such as Sagamore, the Art Hotel and the Boulan South Beach, that weren't displayed on the PC's first page. Among hotels appearing in both searches, some pricier options (such as the $212 Eden Roc Renaissance and the $397 Fontainebleau) were listed higher on the Mac. Overall, hotels on the first page of the Mac search were about 11% more expensive than they were on the PC. Similarly, hotels on the first page of results for Baton Rouge, La., appeared in different order for Mac and PC and were 13% more expensive in aggregate for the Mac search. Rival travel sites Expedia Inc., EXPE -3.71% Priceline.com Inc. PCLN -2.30% and Travelocity, which is a unit of Sabre Holdings Corp., don't use a person's computer operating system when suggesting hotels, spokesmen said. Apple declined to comment. Neil Sazant, president of Sagamore, reacted with a mix of admiration and concern to the algorithm. "That's incredible, but I wouldn't want to miss out on PC users," he said. Mr. Sazant says about 15% of rooms at the 93-room hotel are booked through a mix of online sites like Orbitz and that appearing on the first page of results is important in those searches. Orbitz's chief executive, Barney Harford, has made data mining a priority. Shortly after joining the company in 2009, the former Expedia executive opened a small office in Sunnyvale, Calif., and recruited statisticians with backgrounds from eBay Inc. EBAY -2.32% and Google Inc. GOOG -1.89% for a new analytics team. Digging into the data, the team found some hotels were far more likely to be booked by Mac users. Nearly half of bookings on Orbitz for the Public Chicago—a high-end Chicago hotel that boasts features such as "lobby socializing"—come from Mac visitors, said Mr. Liew of Orbitz.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ggoodale 14y agoI posted the same article a few minutes earlier using the Google cache link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4159481 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4159481
- ctrl_freak 14y agoProtip: many paywalls, including this one can be circumvented by using Google's URL redirection service: http://www.google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304458604577488822667325882.html http://www.google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB... Simply use 'www.google.com/url?q=' and paste in the address of the article which has a paywall.
- damian2000 14y agoThat's awesome, thanks .. how does it work? I mean why does it allow google to bypass their paywall.
- hristov 14y agoBecause google does not like to index pay-walled articles. They are either not indexed at all, or given a low score. This makes complete sense because Google wants their users to be happy and users are usually not very happy when they hit a pay-wall. Online publications, on the other hand, really want their paywalled articles to be indexed by Google. You may remember Murdoch did a lot of complaining about this a couple of years ago. So now publications do a little trick where they make the whole article available to people coming from Google but offer a paywall to anyone else. This means that you can usually access the entire article if you are redirected from google.
- damian2000 14y agoInteresting, thanks. It seems counter-intuitive that they would allow all users from google to see the full article, since that's where you'd imagine a lot of traffic would come from.
- macspoofing 14y agoSo that google doesn't knock them down in ratings or outright delist them.
- maciek_kon 14y agocool, just turned it into a bookmarklet http://paywall-killer.blogspot.com/ http://paywall-killer.blogspot.com/
- spitx 14y agoAs much as I dislike being asked to pay up to access WSJ content, I am consistently surprised that the paper has managed to retain its readership even in these increasingly hard times for publishing in general. At one point you got access to Barron's free with a WSJ signup. I guess they figured they didn't need to sweeten the deal anymore. I still remember, several years ago, when NYT declared it had hit its target paywall numbers to sustain operations and announced it didn't see a need to continue with the paywall model only to later fumble (and decide on the 10 articles cap). Buffet has recently bought some 63 newspapers. He suggested that the dominant model of free access is unsustainable.
- kintamanimatt 14y agoI wonder how Linux users are profiled.
- excuse-me 14y agoWe have park benches available now. Note: - Guests may be required to construct their own bench
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- fleitz 14y agoThey're redirected to the habitat for humanity site where you can find plans to build your own hotel, and possibly enlist some volunteers to help.
- jbigelow76 14y agoRedirected to Airbnb of course.
- kintamanimatt 14y agoI assume only Ubuntu users are so redirected. Arch --> Ikea. LFS --> a forest.
- zalew 14y agoDebian --> a commune
- newtonapple 14y agoThey're redirected to this: http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/torvaldsnvidia-640x424.jpg http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/torval....
- aurelianito 14y agoThey are redirected to the couch surfing site.
- Kelliot 14y agoGood business model. Exploiting the higher disposable income / lower intelligence of mac users for profit is awesome =)
- jewbacca 14y agoI see you're a new user: this type of comment is, by consensus and executive decree, not welcome on Hacker News. If you don't have something genuinely novel to contribute to the conversation, please do your part to keep the noise low.
- aklofas 14y agoI completely disagree with you. An average mac developer who frequents this site is just as intelligent as other developers who frequent this site :)
- eridius 14y agoAre they simply showing pricier offers, or are they showing the exact same offers but with the prices raised? The former is annoying but not inherently evil, but the latter would be terrible.
- earl 14y agoThe former, and it seems to vary by location. from the article: [...] search results for hotels in cities including Las Vegas, Orlando, Philadelphia and Boston were the same for both Macs and PCs. A New York search turned up more expensive hotels for Mac users, but only after the first 20 listed. [...] A Mac search for a hotel in Miami Beach for two nights in July displayed costlier boutique hotels on the first page of results, such as Sagamore, the Art Hotel and the Boulan South Beach, that weren't displayed on the PC's first page. Among hotels appearing in both searches, some pricier options (such as the $212 Eden Roc Renaissance and the $397 Fontainebleau) were listed higher on the Mac. [...]
- dmfdmf 14y agoIn Econ, the latter is called differential pricing and there is nothing evil about it at all. http://www.pricingforprofit.com/pricing-explained/differential-pricing.php http://www.pricingforprofit.com/pricing-explained/differenti...
- InclinedPlane 14y agoThat depends on your moral code, of course.
- dmfdmf 14y agoWhich in turn depends on your view of Man.
- bigiain 14y agoWe knew that _downward_ differential pricing worked (in terms of increasing conversions) - a popup saying "Hi, you're a return visitor to our website, we can discount this room rate 10% if you book today) always increased conversions. We sure as hell _experimented_ to see if the decrease in conversions by bumping margins (and hence prices) up was worthwhile in terms of total profit. I'd happily make an argument that if the first is morally "OK" then so is the second…
- unreal37 14y agoI also find this fascinating. As someone involved in creating recommendation systems for web sites based on various user behavior signals, I can see adding a "what type of browser do they use" and "what type of OS do they use" intelligence in the future to further segment users. Mac ownership must be a proxy for "household income". Brilliant.
- excuse-me 14y agoSeems reasonable - next time you are at the dentist check out the Yachting and golf magazines. They aren't advertizing Timex on the back cover.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mitchty 14y agoWould be easy enough to compare prices on windows/linux in a vm on my mac though. And take note of the companies that do it. Something else to add to comparison services as well, aka does site xyz.com discriminate based on os/browser?
- MichaelApproved 14y agoMuch easier to use an user agent switcher plugin while in incognito mode.
- mitchty 14y agoTrue, but user agent switching won't get around someone testing for browser features and ignoring the agent string.
- raverbashing 14y agoplease explain how would you go about detecting linux/windows/mac without agent string (with the exception of detecting Safari/Konqueror/IE) Screen size? Fonts?
- vishaldpatel 14y agoDoes this means that Linux users get the best deals? Or maybe it's Windows users with cracked copies of Windows.
- dave1010uk 14y agoWhen the Humble Indie Bundles are on sale (where consumers can pay what they want), the stats showed the average Linux user paid more than Mac or Windows users.
- jasonlotito 14y agoI don't think that necessarily carries over. For the most part, all the Linux users I know contribute more simply because they want to encourage other developers to create games for Linux. It's a point of price, they can point at, and say "Hey, Linux users spent more then Windows or Mac users."
- rsanchez1 14y agoWell, Orbitz certainly understands its audience. If you're willing to overpay on laptops, hopefully you're also willing to overpay on hotel stays.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- hnalien 14y agoFull Article - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304458604577488822667325882.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230445860457748...
- uptown 14y agoDear Orbitz - I'm done using you. -Love Your Ex-customer
- benmanns 14y agoAnother curious statistic: according to the sales numbers on http://www.humblebundle.com/ http://www.humblebundle.com/, Linux users on average pay more ($12.50) for the choose-your-price bundle than Mac ($9.99) or Windows ($7.98) users.
- jlcx 14y agoI would guess that this is either related to user enthusiasm for more professionally developed games (explaining why Windows users aren't as excited), or a desire to support the creation of cool stuff and be part of a community around it.
- dave1010uk 14y agoAdditionally (ceteris parabus) a Linux user would be richer as they have not spent money on an OS (except the odd RHEL user). However I doubt this makes a statistical difference.
- binarycrusader 14y agoBut you left out the counter-balance: far more revenue is generated from Mac and Windows users in total. So while Linux users are willing to pay more, there's far less of them willing to pay at all.
- ernesth 14y agoFar more revenue is generated from Windows. Mac is a very distant second. The camembert says something like For each 6$ from windows users, there are 2$ from mac users and 1$ from linux users...
- brackin 14y agoAs a Mac user I hate this but I do think you should (on applications at least) use different models for each platform. Angry Birds monetizes differently on Android and iOS. This isn't a justification for Orbitz' behaviour though.
- aresant 14y agoAnother interesting one is when Capital One showed different rates by browser types by using a demographic study of wealth based on browser via http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/11/do-different-web-browsers-bring-different-demographics http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/11/do-different-we...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- unfasten 14y agoThe Capital One example actually turned out to just be normal split testing, not based on the visitor's browser. HN discussion thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1861037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1861037
- kika 14y agoThe real question is who paid for this article - Parallels or VmWare :-) Kidding.
- abruzzi 14y agoInevitably, this will make people like me (Mac user that considers $50 a night overpriced) book through other sites. Does orbitz think I only price through them? Most people I know price at least a half dozen locations before deciding, so as long as everyone doesn't jack prices for Mac users, Mac user's business will naturally migrate to whomever doesn't try to screw us.
- cglace 14y agoAre they trying to screw us or trying to predict what they think we want?
- benmanns 14y agoI don't believe they are increasing prices, but rather showing different, better quality hotels that are pricier to Mac users.
- _delirium 14y agoIt's only the default sort, though, which I already usually think of as an attempt to either guess my preferences, or game some kind of referral system on their part (even if I don't normally assume it's based on OS choice). If you want to sort by objective factors like Price or Distance, you can still do that fine, which is what I normally do.
- citricsquid 14y agoIf they believe Mac users are happy to pay higher prices they most likely also believe Mac users are less prone to shopping around.
- GoodIntentions 14y agoI bet they are right too. I think mac users have demonstrated they are for the most part willing to pay more for something they perceive as offering a better experience. You can't make that choice if you're some broke dude surfing from a 400 dollar *nix box, so I think it is given that average mac users are less price sensitive - the more cash you have, the more your time is valued imho. FWIW, posting this from a slackware box with my mac cooling in the next room. So by all means, show me the cheap stuff first :)
- joshmlewis 14y agoI'm cofounding a startup in the travel space and our cofounder has a lot of domain expertise and according to him it's illegal to show a rate lower on Expedia than say Marriott.com. There are exceptions as always, but for the most part this is true. Now I don't know if this applies to the opposite..I guess you could just add to a price but I still would think that's fishy. Anyway, just a little tid bit of knowledge. Edit: Turns out they prices weren't different, just showing pricier results first.
- bigiain 14y ago"Illegal" is not _quite_ the right word. When I got out of the online hotel booking game (back in '08) - all of the major chains were starting to include terms like that in their contracts (or had been for a few years), and were leaning on all the wholesalers (Pegasus/Sabre/Gullivers/Octopus) to push and enforce those decisions on small players (like us) who booked through them. Our lawyers said there was a _strong_ chance that these contract provisions wouldn't stand up in court (here in Australia), but it was obvious to everyone that it wasn't worth getting into expensive legal fights with the suppliers of the "product" our business relied on…
- jerednel 14y agoIt probably violates the contract that the OTA has with Marriott. Hotel chains typically offer a best rate guarantee that states that you cannot find a lower rate anywhere else - and if you do, they'll match it and provide an additional benefit (free night, $50 amex). OTA's eat into margins of the hotels because they get a good size c omission from the bookings - no hotel chain would negotiate a contract that let an OTA undercut them.
- joshmlewis 14y agoI'm cofounding a startup in the travel space and our cofounder has a lot of domain expertise and according to him it's illegal to show a rate lower on Exedia than say Marriott.com. There are exceptions as always, but for the most part this is true. Now I don't know if this applies to the opposite..I guess you could just add to a price but I still would think that's fishy. Anyway, just a little tid bit of knowledge.
- joshmlewis 14y agoI'm cofounding a startup in the travel space and our cofounder has a lot of domain expertise and according to him it's illegal to show a rate lower on Exedia than say Marriott.com. There are exceptions as always, but for the most part this is true. Now I don't know if this applies to the opposite..I guess you could just add to a price but I still would think that's fishy. Anyway, just a little tid bit of knowledge.
- ghaff 14y agoNot that familiar with most of the hotel examples shown but, for Las Vegas at least, both the hotel examples shown are pretty low-end Strip Casinos. (i.e., at least this example isn't about significantly different classes of properties)
- w1ntermute 14y agoScreenshots for those of us stuck behind the paywall: http://imgur.com/a/VtNRf http://imgur.com/a/VtNRf
- zhoutong 14y agoDoes this violate the copyright of WSJ? I hate the paywalls, but posting the screenshots seems wrong to me.
- bmunro 14y agoPaste the article title ("On Orbitz, Mac Users Steered to Pricier Hotels") into Google. The Wall Street Journal article should be the first result. Click on it. You should be able to see the whole article. The WSJ appear to give you the full text when the referrer is google.
- wilhow 14y agoDoes linux users get a lower price?
- mratzloff 14y agoIt wouldn't surprise me. I've suspected for years that they do differential pricing, but I got confirmation a few days ago. I just bought tickets to Las Vegas on Friday. I got through the checkout process (choosing a flight and a hotel) and then they said there was a "problem" and kicked me back to the beginning of the process. I went through it again, choosing the exact same flights (with the same number of seats available) and the prices were 20-30% higher. The available seats were identical (I was buying for a same-day flight so there were only a handful remaining and it was easy to see that they were the same). I went ahead and bought since it at was the last minute, but I made a mental note not to ever bother coming back. It's happened so frequently to me on this and other aggregators like Travelocity that it may even be intentional. Perhaps they display competitive prices so they will be chosen by people who are comparison shopping (either manually or through a site like kayak.com). Then once you've asserted your willingness to buy by moving through the flight selection process they randomly restart you with higher prices on the (probably likely) belief that you have already mentally committed to Orbitz.
- natrius 14y agoThe innocuous possibility is that prices change several times during the day of a flight, and price changes for incomplete orders cause bad system behavior and a strange user experience.
- derda 14y agoIt is also possible, that they show you a cached price first and one step before the confirmation they check back with the airline if they price really is the same. In your case the airline might have increased the fare, for whatever reason, shortly before you started your booking process.
- mratzloff 14y agoThat's definitely possible. I just have a hard time giving any company involved (airline or aggregator) the benefit of the doubt...
- masklinn 14y ago
- jermaink 14y agoOS discrimination
- jijoy 14y agoWhy do wsj doesnt show full article , when I am going to that link from hackernews ? It shows full article , if go there from google search results
- suprgeek 14y agoIt is important to read the article carefully: WRONG - Mac users see higher prices for same hotels than Windows users RIGHT - Mac users are sometimes also shown hotels that are costlier than their windows users "...so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see."
- starship 14y agoRegardless, it never ceases to amaze me how controversial pricing discrimination is. Especially since most people have taken Econ 101: pricing discrimination eliminates dead-weight loss, which should be a good thing right? Nope, instant controversy.
- thefever 14y agoPricing discrimination is controversial because it shifts most of the surplus away from consumers. A lot of people come out of econ 101 thinking any more efficient solution is inherently better, but efficiency is only one factor to consider.
- gjm11 14y ago> most people have taken Econ 101 Er. Um. No, most people have not taken Econ 101. Most graduates have not taken Econ 101. Most graduates in quantitative disciplines have not taken Econ 101. Most people with economics degrees have taken Econ 101. A modest number of other people have. Some more have learned the basic concepts by means other than taking Econ 101. These are probably not the people complaining about price discrimination. In any case, being surprised when people are upset because they think they're getting inferior treatment and saying "oh, but they should think of the gain in overall economic efficiency" seems like a sign of, well, not having taken Psych 101.
- yo-mf 14y agoAnd everyone has taken Psych 101...
- 14y ago
- gurkendoktor 14y agoAmazon also shows costlier suggestions to customers who have bought costlier products before. Orbitz is doing what they can with their comparatively limited knowledge. The ironic thing about this is that many airfare websites have a German version with curiously higher prices than the US version, and that Apple's computers themselves are more expensive in Europe. (Sadly I'm never sure how much of this can be explained with taxes.)
- yo-mf 14y agoOne interesting insight that was edited from the final article; Linux users tend to not book hotels, but prefer building campgrounds from scratch.
- yo-mf 14y agoYou know which Mac users are NOT seeing those higher cost travel options? Apple Store employees...
- ajays 14y agoIt's not like someone at Orbitz sat down, rubbed his/her hands with glee and said with an evil laugh, "ha! I will rip those Mac users off!" In all likelihood, someone used the browser type as a feature in their model. It so happens that Mac users are (or were) younger, slightly more financially successful and like to splurge a little (e.g., the Mac itself, when comparable Windows laptops are significantly cheaper). Hence the model learned that it can show more expensive hotels to users with that specific browser type.
- doh 14y ago"I don't understand the Orbitz debacle. First, they're not charging Mac users more than Windows users for the same hotels / services. All users, regardless of OS, have access to the same set of options at the same prices. This is ad targeting, not price manipulation; they're (essentially) showing Mac users different advertisements -- for higher-priced options. You're free to not click on the ad; if Orbitz chose wrong, they're losing money (by wasting ad space on their page)." Rest here: https://www.facebook.com/tudorb/posts/10100307597913113 https://www.facebook.com/tudorb/posts/10100307597913113