So we took a family vacation recently and we had to drive halfway across America and what creeped me the fuck out was how we were getting such different prices on different phones while looking at the same hotel room on Priceline. For example I would look for a hotel in Chicago and find a room for a $180, then my cousin is also looking for a room on his phone and I look over and the same hotel room is $50-$70 cheaper. This kept on happening in every city we went to, like there was such a huge fluctuation between the prices one person would get on their phone and what someone else was getting. We noticed that the people with higher end Samsung phones were getting a much lower rate than those with cheaper phones. Have you ever experienced such price discrimination and is there really anyway to protect yourself from it? And do you think it’s ethical for companies to charge different rates for the same product? Should there be some legislation to protect consumers from this seeing as how AI is just going to make it easier for companies to price gouge consumers to the max.
I work for one of the companies in the Priceline group and I can categorically say that this is not something we do. We do differentiate for logged in users vs not logged in and for different levels of our loyalty program. The hotels can change their prices on a whim though and many hotels update their prices multiple times per day depending on availability and other factors so it may just be a weird coincidence (you may be correlating an effect with something that isn’t actually the cause).
I just tried this yesterday and I was still getting different prices for the same hotel on desktop and mobile, it wasn’t as bad as when we were on vacation where every single person in the car was seeing a different price for the same search criteria we put in. About 70% of the hotels had the same price yesterday but the other 30% ended up being almost $50 more expensive when I looked on desktop. So I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all and I actually encourage you to try searching for the same thing on different devices to see what I’m talking about.
We do offer “app exclusive” rates but they are supposed to be labelled as such (this is basically because we save a ton of money when people have our apps installed because we don’t end up paying it all to Google for PPC and can pass on some of the savings).
Are you certain in these conditions that everyone is looking at the exact same property for the same dates, same number of people, all logged in, same level in our loyalty program etc? All sorts of things can trigger different prices but the one thing that absolutely doesn’t is the type of mobile device you are using. We just don’t differentiate between types of mobile devices.
Same city, same search filters, different prices for different people 🤔