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Hotel booking sites overcharge Bay Area customers
- PopAlongKid 2y agoThe article mentions that booking sites may come up with ways to neutralize the use of VPNs to circumvent geolocation-based pricing. I rarely book rooms in advance (most of my stays away from home are in motels on road trips), and I almost always prefer booking directly with the hotel when I do book in advance. I wonder to what extent fingerprinting the computer will defeat the use of VPN in this situation? I also wonder if/when AirBnB/VRBO may start doing a similar thing? But I guess that would involve the private property owner participating in the scheme.
- creer 2y ago> ways to neutralize the use of VPNs Probably - unfortunately - and so we can expect buying online to become ever more cumbersome. Great /s. Although diminishing returns might save us: the platforms will focus on "most buyers" and hopefully leave techies alone. But we can see in the youtube story that in some cases there is sooooo much money that even the techies will be beat back through pharaonic efforts.
- walrus01 2y agoAnother thought on that, if you use tmobile LTE data and tethering (or just book directly using LTE data on your phone, using firefox as a browser on android, with the user agent switcher extension installed to perfectly mimic a desktop useragent), it's near impossible for random websites to determine where you are at geographically. The CGNAT exit point for my tmobile service when roaming in Canada bounces around between IP space that geolocates to either chicago, texas or los angeles. Whereas if you use a residential cablemodem or DSL or FTTH connection in some specific city, where you're likely not behind cgnat and the ivp4 /22 or larger sized IP block you are "coming from" remains consistent on a multi year basis, 3rd party geolocation providers are much more likely to say "yep that person is in the SF bay area"
- scarface_74 2y agoWith T-Mobile, I get a different public IPv4 and IPv6 address every time I turn on and off airplane mode and it got my approximate location correct
- cortesoft 2y agoI will have to have my mother in law in Kansas book our hotels.
- Eridrus 2y agoI don't think it is actually in business' interests to stop VPNs here. Using a VPN, with the associated hassle, likely indicates the person is stingy and very price sensitive, so you want to keep giving them the cheaper prices relative to others.
- htrp 2y ago> Cavis explained that, “Partners also have the flexibility to create specific promotional rates, such as country rates or mobile rates, which are designed to offer discounts, not charge higher prices.” > The implication is that the expensive rate that San Franciscans see is the “real” price — while Kansas City and Phoenix travelers are getting a discount. Uber and their 'flash promos' come to mind here.
- creer 2y ago> designed to offer discounts, not charge higher prices. And some of this has always existed. Think of stores which always offer a coupon. Customers only pay full price if they are in a desperate rush or if they don't know. But the fact that it has always existed doesn't make it any nicer.
- jerlam 2y agoHotels generally dislike third-party booking sites, because they're just skimming off profits while offering a worse service, so they usually offer to match all third-party quotes. I wonder if a single computer with a VPN could generate screenshots of those discounted quotes for the sole purpose of price-matching.
- chatmasta 2y agoAt that point why even bother making it legit? Just use dev tools to edit the price you want into the page and send a screenshot to the hotel… “Oh, you don’t see that price too? Sorry Mr Manager, I guess it must be because you’re booking it from another location. Nevermind then, I’ll continue to book through this partner instead…”
- stevenwoo 2y agoI recall working as contractor in 2000s to a company that had one arm trying to compete in a used car market niche and they had a laptops pretending to be consumers in the usual ways crammed in in shelves that were scanning craigslist and other websites to repackage and resell the info to used car dealers. IIRC craigslist blocked naive dedicated scraping at the scale they were doing it so I assume but don't know that they needed to mix up the IPs in way that required that volume of laptops to do it nation/world wide. This sort of thing probably has been going on as long as the web browser have been commonly available.
- fooker 2y agoMost hotel chains won't price match due to agreements with third party entities that account for a majority of their bookings. One off hotels in popular supply constrained tourist destinations are the exception.
- bluGill 2y agoMost hotel chains are trying to stop those agreements. Some of the agreements are fairly long term, but chains are starting to see that agents rarely give them enough to be worth what they are paying and so the chain is no longer making such agreements.
- xkcd-sucks 2y agoI'm taking an introductory economics course right now, and was surprised to find out that even hardcover books are a form of price discrimination: The manufacturing costs aren't significantly higher than paperback, but "enthusiasts" will buy them at inflated prices. I'm starting to think that like 80% of product diversity is really just pricing discrimination in disguise.
- creer 2y ago> 80% of product diversity is really just pricing discrimination in disguise Very good and yes: Think of it from the manufacturer / seller perspective. Why shouldn't it be? If the goal it to optimize profit or return (and it is), then anything less would be a waste of opportunity. Even kickstarters go to great effort to think up ways to "justify" "bonus offers". This is often one of the great failures of new ventures not to try and offer versions or features that SOME customers would love to pay for. Except not pricing discimination in that these prices apply to everyone (who doesn't know the discount code). Just "differentiation" and "price point". Offering a different price to someone who "calls" from San Francisco, Kansas City or Mumbai is a different issue, and less palatable.
- rlpb 2y ago> Offering a different price to someone who "calls" from San Francisco, Kansas City or Mumbai is a different issue, and less palatable. The interesting thing about this statement is that expecting a fixed price for anything is a relatively new phenomenon. It isn't very long ago that the price for pretty much everything was individually negotiated in some physical market, and nobody expected to pay the same price as everyone else.
- creer 2y agoThat's a good point. Anyone has experience with haggling over the web or email - for stuff that's listed on web sites? Besides stuff that's deliberately not priced on the web like enterprise software?
- thegrim33 2y ago
- creer 2y agoThe article is refreshing in its research and writing: the research is crude, testing just a very few alternatives - just enough for something to write about. And that's okay, this is not a scientific paper. And then the author collects a few quotes and does not dilute things too much. Good job. I propose another workaround alternative that doesn't exist yet. A "multi-browser" which lets you browse and visually diff the web from different points of view. See the web from deep china, europe, Kansas City, San Francisco, Chrome, Firefox, daytime and nighttime, incognito, logged-in, etc all at once (modulo some time spreading for opsec or something) so we can get back to peace and what matters: booking a bloody hotel room or reading a magazine article without making a project of it.
- ikr678 2y agoLocation based price discrimination has it's own affectionate nickname here, the 'Australia tax'. When I travel it is often cheaper (hundreds of dollar cheaper, even after currency conversion) to book parts of a trip from a UK or US based device, than from an Australian one, directly through the airline or hotels website. Same for digital goods -even for services that do not have a business or support presence locally ie no local overheads, we still get charged a premium.
- vrosas 2y agoI’ve done that from the US as well. Book the ticket from the destination country’s website (google translate is perfectly fine, typically) and pay in the local currency using my no-fx-fee credit card.
- ClassyJacket 2y agoBack before Creative Cloud was a subscription, to get Creative Suite in Australia, it was cheaper to book a flight to America, a hotel for three nights, buy Creative Suite there, and a flight home, than to just pay the markup Adobe gave us as punishment for being Australian.
- dbspin 2y ago
- DrNosferatu 2y agoThey do it because they can: Booking.com operates as a de-facto monopoly.
- meta_x_ai 2y ago[dead]
- iforgot22 2y agoBooking.com has nothing. The article names 4 competitors, besides booking directly on the hotel's website.
- DrNosferatu 2y agoFacts say otherwise[1] - so much so that, sometimes, they even get a slight slap on the wrist: [1]https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/spain-fines-bookingcom-448-million-euros-abusing-dominant-position-2024-07-30/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/spain-fines-bookingco...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- DrNosferatu 2y agoBooking.com was just on the local news again - a few thoughts: 'iforgot22' is literally wrong by around half a billion dollars [2]. It's bizarre that initially stating a world-widely reported, simple fact needs "proving". And, results in downvotes like there were insults to someone's mother... And it's also sad to see such irrational ideological biases at HN. [2] - https://www.ft.com/content/03e5eb20-ec91-485e-b0e4-ed49b4dc2848 https://www.ft.com/content/03e5eb20-ec91-485e-b0e4-ed49b4dc2...
- iforgot22 2y agoThis article is about Bay Area (USA) customers, and you're commenting about Spain, which is a different market. It's not nice to jump to accusations like "irrational ideological biases." For what it's worth, HN doesn't even let me downvote, and I wouldn't anyway.
- jp42 2y agoI had theory long time ago that booking hotel or airlines tickets from mac used to be more expensive than windows. Many of my friend also experienced as well. Its just theory so don't know if others had similar experience.
- ahartmetz 2y agoThere were news about that really happening a decade or so ago.
- bityard 2y agoYes, here's the article: https://web.archive.org/web/20141113121420/https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/03/if-you-use-a-mac-or-an-android-e-commerce-sites-may-be-charging-you-more/ https://web.archive.org/web/20141113121420/https://www.washi... It would be an amazing miracle if sites weren't still doing this.
- divbzero 2y agoSo I should really be booking from a logged out incognito browser on my Linux machine with VPN to a less wealthy region.
- lisper 2y agoSounds like a business opportunity.
- mywittyname 2y agoThen sell a the detection of such behavior back to the site owners.
- dageshi 2y agoI imagine they'd think you were a bot and you'd end up in a captcha loop.
- 2y ago
- yumraj 2y agoI wonder if this happen while using Costco Travel or AmEx travel etc.? What about travel agents? Do they also get price discriminated against depending on where they are? This can lead to startup ideas as in book-from service which scans all the zip codes and helps book from the cheapest one.
- scarface_74 2y agoMy wife and I travel a lot as a hobby. The first rule is never use a third party portal for hotels or flights
- sanj 2y agoSame. I feel so strongly that I built a site to help with finding those prices. https://directbooker.com https://directbooker.com
- dewey 2y agoWhat's different than just using any other aggregator and just not clicking the "book" button on their side then?
- shellfishgene 2y agoWhere do the prices on your site come from?
- aliasxneo 2y agoI agree with this for _purchasing_ things, but not aggregating. I use a lot of these services to aggregate results and then visit airlines/hotels independently to see if the price is reasonable.
- walrus01 2y agoIn some places in Canada there's many airports that are served by literally only two airlines. Air Canada and Westjet. It's certainly possible to use a 3rd party booking site to try to find a 'cheaper' price to go to/from those places, but as you'll see when you get your search results for a flight, there's basically no competition. Go directly to the Air Canada or Westjet websites themselves and the prices will usually be the same or slightly better.
- aliasxneo 2y agoSure, of course aggregation makes no sense when there are only two options. But we recently traveled internationally to an extremely populated place with literally hundreds of hotels, and these aggregation services were invaluable in deciding where to stay.
- briandear 2y agoGoing to play devils advocate here: San Francisco has a very high cost of living so is this any different than charging people different tax rates because of their income? Geolocation is a sloppy proxy for income, but statistically, a person in San Francisco makes a lot more money than a person in Kansas City. (I don’t agree with the practice, but I am also opposed to progressive taxation as well.)
- saagarjha 2y agoBecause it’s not taxes. If everyone were to charge you progressive rates for things you wouldn’t be rich, you’d just be the same as everyone else.
- elevatedastalt 2y agoIsn't that something socialists would actually champion?
- saagarjha 2y agoIf done uniformly, sure, because the money would end up flowing to the government in the end. The problem is that it’s not done uniformly; it’s just making some booking site CEO richer.
- cozzyd 2y agoThe government isn't a for-profit enterprise so I'm not sure it's exactly equivalent (if the hotels were using the extra money for charity it might be more similar). But I guess I don't have a problem with student discounts at pizza places so I don't have a huge problem with price discrimination in general (other than that it might be applied unfairly).
- Hilift 2y agoSan Francisco hospitality is on death's door. The SF Hilton Union Square owner (Park Hotels and Resorts) had to turn the note over to the bank and walk away from a $750 million loan due to they aren't able to make interest payments. They limped along during the pandemic due to there were funds to house certain people. Now that area there aren't that many visitors. For nearly all SF hotels the "revenue per available room" (RevPAR) is terrible. The commercial real estate vacancy is also high, about 34%. Before the pandemic, Hilton in an area like SF their business model was 80% business travelers. That obviously changed for the entire industry, but in SF the homeless right in front of hotels injecting/smoking hard drugs and defecating in public are a huge hospitality buzzkill. What customers remain have to absorb the increased costs.
- walrus01 2y agoI would venture a theory that at least some smart people at 3rd party booking websites (expedia/booking.com type things) are making use of RFC8805 geolocation data published by peoples' last mile ISPs, for the netblock they're coming from, in addition to whatever 3rd party geolocation data feeds they're buying from services such as maxmind. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8805 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8805
- sleepybrett 2y agoparasitic middlemen
- seydor 2y agoIf we were back in the time of travel agents, would it be OK for them to charge more because they are in the area?
- nemomarx 2y agoI mean they do have more money in the bay area generally you can charge what the market afforfd
- janalsncm 2y agoDynamic pricing is the future of everything. If consumers are willing to pay 1.5x, you are leaving money on the table by only charging x. In fact in a fully optimized system, once consumers have all of their wants and needs met, they will have zero dollars left over. (Expensive end of life care tends to have similar results today.) NPR did a piece on it last year which to me came off a bit too cheerful. https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1197958433/dynamic-pricing-grocery-supermarkets https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1197958433/dynamic-pricing-gr... Using only time of day is fairly primitive, though. We can do better. With facial recognition, we can probably personalize prices to the penny.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoSince human wants are unlimited, isn’t it by definition that they will have zero dollars left over if they actually tried to satisfy as much as they feasibly could?
- bluGill 2y agoNot really - I want security which is why I always keep a reasonable amount of emergency savings. Not to mention my retirement funds that provide security for the future when I can't work. Ideally I'll die just as I spend my last dollar, but it is highly likely that I will have money left over.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI have a child that is severely disabled, and will probably never be able to support herself. SSI is a joke, and the incoming Cruelty Administration is likely to make it worse. I’d like to think that I can leave something to her, so she won’t wind up spending the remainder of her life on the streets. I’ve seen that happen, frequently.
- junipertea 2y agoThis bug can be mitigated via inflation.
- jessepasley 2y agoWhat's the difference between this and remote work pay being based on local cost of living?
- rsanek 2y agogreat parallel. i think people are angry about both.
- iforgot22 2y agoI've heard this before but haven't seen it myself. Seems very easy to test. Edit: "I compared hotel room rates for five different sites: Kayak, Booking.com, Trivago, Expedia and Hotels.com. The tests were all performed on Dec. 11, 2024, within a two-hour span, and involved searching for a hotel room in Manhattan For Valentine’s Day weekend, Feb. 14 to 16, 2025." Haven't used those before, so that could be it. Also suspect that it's very specific to the hotel and won't show up for mine. Anyway I'll try it.
- iforgot22 2y agoOk I tried this using a MarsProxy in Phoenix. Went to Booking.com, looked at prices for Berkeley, CA hotels. It wasn't any different from my Los Angeles pricing. But there are a ton of potential ways they might have caught me anyway.
- m101 2y agoAs with discriminatory pricing in airlines, the benefits of discriminatory prices will flow, in part, to those who pay the lowest prices (and in part to shareholders).
- xbar 2y agoGoodbye booking sites.
- MrPatan 2y agoYou mean "hotel booking sites offer discounts to non-bay area customers", surely?
- teractiveodular 2y agoThere's one important factor this experiment is not controlling for: inventory. If user A gets deep enough into the purchase flow, the hotel will place a hold on their room for 10 or so minutes, and that room will not be available when user B does a search. If pricing is dynamic, and for these hotels it obviously is, user B may well be shown a higher price regardless of geography. This applies even if the experimenter is not going any further than checking top level prices, because other people are booking actual hotels and thus impacting prices all the time.
- bufferoverflow 2y agoThere's no such thing as "overcharging". Market pays whatever market is willing to pay. These sites can charge a million dollars per booking if they want, as long as there's a person willing to pay. This isn't some crazy situation without competition, like charging US military $50 for a can of coke.
- franga2000 2y agoAren't all the big hotel booking sites owned by the same company?
- bufferoverflow 2y agoNo. Booking.com, Priceline are owned by Booking holding Expedia, Kayak are owned by Expedia Group TripAdvisor is owned by Liberty Media Airbnb is private.
- lazylizard 2y agotheres 2 kinds of hotels? hotels that overcharge bay area customers, and hotels that overcharge other customers?
- SergeAx 2y agoCurrently, I have a habit of checking the price on the hotel's website. Oftentimes, I could get a better deal with "member login" (mostly just Google OAuth) or promo codes posted on the front page. However, many hotels use external systems for booking and payment handling. I wonder how long those systems will take to start offering the same tricks as big platforms.