Smarter Travel writer Ed Perkins reports that "Major airlines might soon employ a new technology called dynamic pricing to assign different fares to different types of air passengers without their knowledge."
The author offers the following suggestions for ways to dodge tricky airline pricing tactics:
How can I avoid a dynamic pricing gouge?
For now, you will have to search airfares for any trip at least twice.
Start by logging onto the airline’s own website, and see what dynamic pricing has in store for you. Then do the same search through a metasearch system like TripAdvisor (SmarterTravel’s parent company) or Google Flights, without logging in to anything or identifying yourself in any way. For even more isolation, you can also search an airline’s site using one of the private search services, such as DuckDuckGo or Ixquick’s StartPage.com. Or if you’re a real geek, you can establish a virtual private network (VPN). These options will effectively hide your identity from any website you visit.
February 28, 2018 at 11:10AM
