alt.hn

1/13/2025 at 2:18:48 PM

Hotel booking sites overcharge Bay Area customers

 https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/hotel-booking-sites-overcharge-bay-area-travelers-20025145.php

by ekelsen

1/13/2025 at 7:02:31 PM

The 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.

by creer

1/14/2025 at 7:35:04 PM

That exists, it's called "Linkensphere" and more generally an antidetect browser. They even have a marketplace for browser fingerprint profiles which include language, timezone, user agent, etc. But they're often used to look like real Americans to avoid fraud detection systems.

by costco

1/14/2025 at 10:39:23 PM

It's interesting that the name Linken Sphere comes from the DotA game. It's a piece of equipment that when equipped blocks one harmful spell from hitting your character. The analogy seems fit the anti-tracking as well, by preventing you from being tracked.

by ctchocula

1/13/2025 at 11:00:43 PM

Location 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.

by ikr678

1/14/2025 at 9:54:24 PM

Back 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.

by ClassyJacket

1/14/2025 at 11:08:08 PM

Hah! Fond memories of getting my first macbook air. At the time cheaper to fly to NYC and pick it up from the Apple Store (with the Edu discount of course) than to buy it in Ireland.

by dbspin

1/14/2025 at 8:39:57 PM

I’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.

by vrosas

1/14/2025 at 10:55:16 PM

Sometimes there are costs associated with operating within a particular country that a company might want to pass on to those particular customers. For example business insurance in the US can be pretty high in some sectors, or cost of compliance with some piece of legislation unique to that country.

It seems fairly reasonable to me to pass those costs on, though of course it can be hard to tell whether that is happening or whether you're just getting gouged.

by remus

1/15/2025 at 12:40:55 AM

I am talking about products and services where there is no local footprint, particularly digital goods.

The poster child for this was Adobe Creative Suite, which at one point in the 2010's, you were able to buy a return flight from sydney to LA, purchase the software, and fly home for less than it cost to buy domestically after exchange rates. They were hauled before a Senate committee and refused to give any answers.

https://delimiter.com.au/2013/02/14/farce-adobe-ceo-flatly-r...

by ikr678

1/14/2025 at 10:51:52 PM

I understand this is only a nitpick, but I'd point out that if you've spent any time in "deep china" you'll realize that there isn't connection to much of anything beyond the firewall. Even if you're in a western hotel, you will be hard pressed to connect to anything other than your in-country company VPN. Having a foreign phone helps a bit too with mobile data. The great firewall treats cloudflare, GCP, AWS and many other ip ranges as damage to be "routed around". Azure is a bit better, presumably because many computers still have to do windows update regularly.

by kurthr

1/15/2025 at 12:40:42 AM

You can usually find a couple of VPNs that work though. And even find a few holes to download the VPN software through. I was even able to watch YouTube during my last trip (one.....frame....at.....a......time....).

Though it's difficult for non-citizens to get many services, since ID seems to be required for everything from getting a phone to riding a train. Most places also don't take cash, so you have to have a working phone and one of the payment apps.

by IX-103

1/15/2025 at 1:28:46 AM

The exit nodes are outside of China though, no? So the web content doesn't look like from "deep China".

by yreg

1/15/2025 at 4:37:15 AM

I don't know what deep china is supposed to mean but back in 2018, my colleagues in Shenzhen and Beijing didn't have any trouble connecting to an Indian WireGuard VPN server.

by unmole

1/15/2025 at 5:19:38 AM

I don't really know either. Deep China to me means anything other than the coastal Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen megacites full of foreigners. Anything interior with less than 20M people, but still 5-15M like Hefei, Wuhan, Xi'an, Chengdu, Chongqing. Tiny cities like Ordos 2M? or even coastal cities like Fuzhou 8M? are even more challenging.

by kurthr

1/15/2025 at 10:01:35 AM

"Darkest Peru" is where Paddington Bear was born. I meant China at its most remote free of foreign, or western visitors, your pick. So as to be the most free of web traffic western expectation and consequently consideration.

Which is very interesting for China because we can marvel at the still large size and number of cities which see few foreign visitors. Leading to "tiny cities like Ordos 2M". Or what? dozens like that? Hundreds? And considering the size of the China "full of foreigners", that's an equivalently "authentic" China.

Anyway, Peru is fine if you prefer.

by creer

1/14/2025 at 10:21:29 PM

I still wanted to see what the price was for each test. Maybe the author didn't want to say which hotels IRL, so call them Hotels A-E.

by iforgot22

1/14/2025 at 10:31:57 PM

have been booking 3 weeks last fall for a road trip exclusively with "Booking". The more I booked, the higher the discounts became, going from 15% to a staggering 30% off. When sharing the location with my partner (via verbal communication and without us being on the same network) they got an even lower price for the same spot without her having gone through the same booking history (or barely any booking history).

by DyslexicAtheist

1/15/2025 at 5:16:02 AM

Booking is not listening through your microphone, if that's what you're implying. Else, what is it that you're implying?

by maeil

1/15/2025 at 4:43:41 PM

I'm not implying anything.

My point is pretty simple: Booking is offering a discount that only exists in the users head because they trust that after N purchases in a row this qualified them for getting an even better rate. But Booking can't really offer these things because they have already squeezed out the limit from the accommodation.

by DyslexicAtheist

1/14/2025 at 9:37:00 PM

Dynamic 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-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.

by janalsncm

1/14/2025 at 10:01:44 PM

> if consumers are willing to pay 1.5x, you are leaving money on the table by charging x

That’s the same argument for charging thousands of dollars for insulin. It’s also the same argument landlords are using to charge more to victims of the LA fires.

by darth_avocado

1/14/2025 at 10:12:53 PM

It's essentially predatory behaviour, exploiting those in need. I think anyone arguing in favour of 'pure' market outcomes is essentially arguing in favour of unethical behaviour.

by tmnvix

1/15/2025 at 4:01:16 AM

It isn't always exploiting dire needs. It can be a redistributive mechanism like progressive taxes, especially when combined with taxes on the profits.

by cma

1/14/2025 at 11:16:47 PM

Another way to look at it is charging what the market demand dictates. If you charge your normal rate, rooms will sell out and only the lucky ones who booked early will get a room. If you set a rate that leaves 5 or 10% of rooms vacant, someone who needs a room can get one (though it will be expensive).

I've seen this advocated many times here for how cities should set parking rates. It never seems to be called predatory in that scenario.

by SoftTalker

1/15/2025 at 11:01:15 AM

Time pressure and space requirements are a concern with parking, and also the government built the infrastructure (roads, sidewalks, etc.).

It’s not really a good comparison and doesn’t seem predatory at all.

But also if you consider it predatory then you wouldn’t want to advocate or defend the expansion of the practice into other areas.

by ericmay

1/15/2025 at 4:52:36 PM

I don't; I consider it the market working.

During COVID, I'd have preferred to be able to buy a roll of toilet paper for $5 than to have the price unchanged but the stores totally sold out for weeks.

by SoftTalker

1/15/2025 at 5:29:19 PM

I think as a society we have largely decided that in cases of acute shortage we don't want to raise prices and cause further problems. If toilet paper is $5/roll maybe instead of paying surge pricing for it, people just start stealing it off of trucks. What actually occurred was people hoarding toilet paper for no reason, since there wasn't actually a shortage. It was a manufactured "shortage". Maybe had we enforced some sort of reasonable buying scheme we wouldn't have had any problems at all. You can see this in the bourbon market to some extent, actually.

In Ohio rare bottles are sold at retail pricing and you join a lottery to be able to purchase one. Secondary prices are $1,000 for a $100 bottle. We could just let people who are willing to wait to be first in line buy bottles and then sell them at higher prices - that's market efficiency, but we've decided that kind of sucks and instead we've decided to enact a lottery instead and open the bottles so you can't resell them as easily. Most people are pretty happy with the results. It's not efficient but that's ok.

I think parking falls under a similar purview, except that the government is heavily involved in parking schemes. As an example, the promotion of the usage of gas-powered vehicles and the automobile industry, which require us to go to war and things to secure supplies. There's very little that is efficient about that market and the usage of the vehicles is extremely subsidies, you're only noticing the immediate cost when you go and have to pay pricing for peak/off-peak hours. Other goods and services are more efficient and/or less necessary, so there's different pricing schemes that we like as a society.

The main problem with economics as a field is that it assumes "good" and/or rational behavior. But markets and the economy are just one aspect of society. We intentionally make trade-offs all the time because we like the results, even if they aren't efficient.

by ericmay

1/14/2025 at 10:25:34 PM

Is the pure market outcome not that someone creates a competing insulin company? Patents and the buying practices of Medicare (both government interventions in the market) would seem to be the two biggest blockers.

by jahewson

1/14/2025 at 10:32:58 PM

Yes. The pure market solution to "overcharging" people seeking housing is that people with available housing (near Palisades) go stay in Nebraska for six months, and sublet their existing available residence for $10k/mo.

But politicians in California have forbidden the market from functioning in such a way -- so those with housing (possibly) available chose not to offer it because the price isn't worth it.

by polski-g

1/14/2025 at 10:54:29 PM

Exactly - and it sounds harsh at first but consider that a family of four put up in a hotel for a month is going to cost a figure close to that and the insurance company is paying for it.

Plus the timescales involved go beyond “emergency” to actually effecting the market. LA is down 5000+ properties for the next 3+ years - a genuine reduction in supply that will drive prices upwards.

Price caps don’t limit demand and instead cause supply shortages, which we should expect to see in LA.

by jahewson

1/14/2025 at 10:18:42 PM

Either all selling is predatory or none of it is.

I’m in the former camp- it’s predatory and our prosperity is built on it.

by unsupp0rted

1/14/2025 at 10:28:30 PM

"Either all or none" is a very questionable heuristic for anything.

It is possible that price gouging after a natural disaster is predatory, while action pricing for one-of-a-kind memorabilia is not.

by brookst

1/14/2025 at 10:23:17 PM

Supply demand dynamics only work for optional spending and in market segments that have real competition.

by darth_avocado

1/15/2025 at 1:45:35 AM

I don't believe it is unethical at all. If you have one of something, who do you sell it to? The highest bidder? The first bidder? The person you like the most? Why is one more or less ethical than another?

by chrismcb

1/15/2025 at 3:11:29 AM

I think you are underestimating the depth of information such an automated system would have. This is Uber surge pricing but for everything.

What I am concerned about are the emergent effects of this. Invariably, everything will be more expensive. Whether a single transaction is unethical is kind of missing the point.

by janalsncm

1/15/2025 at 1:37:14 AM

> It’s also the same argument landlords are using to charge more to victims of the LA fires.

Not entirely the same. LA is currently missing homes and experiencing a surge. Of course the proper solution is to (re)build houses.

by yreg

1/15/2025 at 12:12:21 AM

I don’t agree with it, but yes you’re right. The economy is running a giant, heartless optimization algorithm.

by janalsncm

1/14/2025 at 10:07:07 PM

I dont like the idea that person A and person B will be given 2 different prices for the same commodity. It is discrimination.

by RobRivera

1/15/2025 at 3:58:15 AM

It is more egalitarian to sell the same commodity to a poorer person for less money, and a richer person for more money. This can be generalized to “selling to a person able and willing to pay more for a higher price and a person less able and less willing for a lower price” (as long as it is not lower than the COGS).

Price discrimination does not mean anyone is getting hosed. A simple example is someone that wants to go through the trouble of using coupons at grocery stores. A person with less time and more money might choose convenience, or a brand name product. A person with less money can still buy using a coupon, or buy generic.

Obviously, that doesn’t mean a richer person is obliged to pay more. But it’s not evil to attempt to maximize the take based on differing buying power / desire.

by lotsofpulp

1/15/2025 at 10:09:32 AM

As the article shows however the discrimination is always also against less tech-savvy (or less educated) people, who often are also not rich, for example older people. My parents would almost always pay more for online shopping products than me because they don't know the best way to search for prices, or can't tell which shops are trustworthy.

by shellfishgene

1/15/2025 at 5:33:53 PM

Less savvy people are always going to get worse deals. My mom does not read English, so she did not take advantage of coupons on newspapers, even though we were poor.

The game has obviously changed quite a bit, but I specified “able and willing to pay more” for this reason.

Two factors coincide for a buyer to make a decision to purchase something, ability and willingness. The seller does not benefit if they drive away people who are not able to pay more with too high prices, and if they give discounts to people who are able and willing to pay more, but savvy enough to figure out how to get the discount.

So a seller will enact hurdles for the savvy to see who is willing to do more work to get a discount, or they can sell under different labels to sell to both people paying lower prices and higher prices, under the guise that it is a different product.

Most common though is to slightly tweak a product so that you are not selling the same exact thing at different prices, so the person paying more feels like they got more for more money.

by lotsofpulp

1/14/2025 at 10:13:17 PM

In theory this discrimination will be discovered (as in, see article) and if people don't like it they will select for companies that do not have (or have less) such discrimination.

If all businesses discriminate then there is an opportunity to compete using no discrimination as an edge.

Just as, for example, if a business decided (if it was legal) to only allow people of a certain race to enter, I would like to think that most members of that race would be disgusted enough to boycott that business and the business will rightly fail.

Finally, people already effectively pay different amounts for all sorts of things due to varying amounts of tax paid.

The private sector can't detect or profit from your tax paid so they use where you live and other signals like whether you're using an iPhone etc. as a proxy for your income/wealth.

by shric

1/15/2025 at 5:18:19 AM

In theory, that is true. In reality, there's a thousand reasons why it's not in the world of digital (and many non-digital) services in 2025.

by maeil

1/15/2025 at 12:25:27 AM

People really take Adam Smith way too seriously. He lived at a time when the economy was made up of independent artisans not people working for large multinational corporations. If markets were really so good at regulating themselves why were any government standards necessary at all?

The reality is, every product has an asymmetry of information, and the more complex it is, the higher the asymmetry. And you can’t determine the quality of a product until you buy it. And determining quality takes time, which is a limited resource.

> the business will rightly fail

In reality, what stops bad behavior is regulation because in reality, people do not have infinite time and infinite information to assess each thing they consume.

by janalsncm

1/15/2025 at 4:58:33 AM

> In reality, what stops bad behavior is regulation because in reality, people do not have infinite time and infinite information to assess each thing they consume.

Reputation is much easier to destroy and bad behavior is much harder to hide today than 50 years ago due to the easier spread of information.

There is still a huge spectrum of business behaviour that is not violating regulations. In the aggregate businesses who please their consumers more will thrive compared to those that don't.

by shric

1/15/2025 at 12:48:11 PM

Adam Smith is often used as symbol of laissez-faire capitalism but was explicitly a proponent for regulation in situations where the market failed, such as this one imagine.

What you probably mean is that people take the concept of the invisible hand too seriously. Which was a relatively minor point in the book, and has somehow been magnified to the point of absurdity by the economic and political trends of the last 40 years.

Adam smith is way more reasonable than you’d think, given how he’s portrayed in the modern era.

by whymememe

1/14/2025 at 10:39:26 PM

>Just as, for example, if a business decided (if it was legal) to only allow people of a certain race to enter, I would like to think that most members of that race would be disgusted enough to boycott that business and the business will rightly fail.

We literally have federal laws outlawing this because it was, in fact, a selling point to exclude other races. Are you unaware of the history, or just hoping that racism has successfully been ended in the United States?

by BobaFloutist

1/14/2025 at 11:03:36 PM

1964 was 60 years ago.

by jahewson

1/14/2025 at 11:15:25 PM

So you think if the law was removed from the books people would simply choose not to have racist public establishments in 2025?

by BobaFloutist

1/15/2025 at 1:51:17 AM

Most businesses struggle to stay afloat without adding racial discrimination.

I suspect almost all such businesses would die quickly.

So yes, there would be such public disgust and stigma that even those patrons who valued such a business would hopefully hesitate to expose their bigotry.

by shric

1/14/2025 at 10:17:30 PM

The prices might seem fair to each, until they learn what the other was charged. At that point the sellers likely pays a price in terms of reputation.

by tmnvix

1/14/2025 at 10:10:13 PM

> In fact in a fully optimized system, once consumers have all of their wants and needs met, they will have zero dollars left over.

What are your parameters for optimization here? If the point is to maximize extracted revenue then this is a reasonable outcome but we could optimize for any number of targets. We could optimize to make the best use of resources, we could optimize for best consumer reviews, we could optimize for the ideal buyer/seller price that makes both entities in the transaction walk away with the best deal for each of them.

But there's this persistent notion in the current business zeitgeist that the only metric worth optimizing is profit maximization and it's one that we should reject. Companies need to make a profit and workers need to take home a salary and that's fine, but we get to build the world that we live in. Living in a world where we care about quality of life and equity in transactions is much more interesting to me than living in one where all we care about is the velocity of extraction from anything that isn't nailed down.

by coldbrewed

1/15/2025 at 12:43:48 AM

I agree with you 100% on the “should”. Companies should behave well. However, they are still profit maximizing machines, so one way to get what we want is to change the system of rewards and punishments such that profits are maximized while we still maintain a livable planet.

What I’m suggesting is to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior.

Every time a company is hacked, they pay into an annual pool. Every company which isn’t hacked receives money from that pool.

CO2 emissions are taxed, which goes into a pool. This pool is used to pay companies that scrub emissions.

I’m wondering if these incentives can work to increase life expectancy, decrease child mortality, eradicate diseases, etc.

Without better incentives there is no reason not to burn down the planet for a dollar. Of course it is not a panacea, it still requires some social trust.

by janalsncm

1/14/2025 at 10:15:41 PM

I would guess that most dynamic pricing won't work in a competitive market. By "competitive" I mean that there are a large number of buyers and sellers and something close to perfect information (namely that buyers know the prices goods are being sold at).

by tshaddox

1/14/2025 at 10:23:28 PM

Likely true, but the point made in the article (near the ned) is that consumers generally don't have that information and vendors go to considerable lengths to obscure it.

by anigbrowl

1/14/2025 at 11:19:01 PM

Also, it needs to be framed properly. I propose to name it: value based pricing.

How much value does this room provide you? If you can pay 2x, then it implies value you get is also 2x.

Third degree price discrimination is not as catchy. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-are-dif...

by earnestinger

1/15/2025 at 1:44:03 AM

I'll disagree with your assessment about having zero dollars left over. Not everyone will want to spend everything they have But also a lot of people are willing to pay 1.5x for something until they find that others aren't. Yes there are somethings I don't mind paying now for, so someone else can pay less. But there are other things that I'll refuse to pay more for if someone is paying less.

by chrismcb

1/14/2025 at 9:49:25 PM

Since 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?

by MichaelZuo

1/14/2025 at 10:03:57 PM

Not 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.

by bluGill

1/14/2025 at 10:08:34 PM

I 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.

by ChrisMarshallNY

1/14/2025 at 11:35:58 PM

Aren’t you forgoing some other wants? Such that it’s not been satisified to the maximum feasible extent.

by MichaelZuo

1/15/2025 at 12:27:42 AM

A complete list would be long and get into private things I don't talk about

by bluGill

1/14/2025 at 10:09:53 PM

This bug can be mitigated via inflation.

by junipertea

1/15/2025 at 1:33:49 AM

That makes it worse as I have to budget enough money for the worst [best?] case life.

by bluGill

1/14/2025 at 10:13:46 PM

>If consumers are willing to pay 1.5x, you are leaving money on the table by only charging x.

What about other businesses that are willing to charge x-1?

by gretch

1/14/2025 at 10:17:31 PM

That assumes a perfect market. No information asymmetry between buyers and seller. No collusion. All buyers and sellers on equal ground.

by alistairSH

1/14/2025 at 10:22:16 PM

What? Really? Please read my comment, you will see that I have not assumed a perfect market.

If I sell bagels for $2 each, and then I go down the street and see another bagel shop selling for $1.90 each, I might try to offer mine for $1.80 (if I have margin to spare).

It’s really that simple and something that demonstrably happens in the real world every day.

by gretch

1/15/2025 at 12:52:43 AM

In reality people don’t have infinite time to find the bagel which optimizes value per dollar, they just want a bagel and coffee. Most people wouldn’t walk 2 blocks to save 20 cents even if they knew a bagel of absolutely equal quality could be found there. And bagel shops aren’t that common. The next one might be a 15 minute drive. That’s basically one cent per minute.

To bring it back to dynamic pricing, you wouldn’t know what either shop will charge you until you’re there. In fact they could charge the same person different prices at different times.

by janalsncm

1/15/2025 at 2:57:16 AM

In reality, pretty much every study of business ever shows that consumers are price sensitive. And you sound like someone who has never ran a cafe.

But by all means, maybe you cracked the code. You should open your store and make a lot of money from these customers who aren't sensitive to price. Don't waste your time theory crafting about it on the internet!

by gretch

1/15/2025 at 11:11:46 AM

Wait but then if they make a lot of money all of their suppliers will have to dynamically raise their prices! Once the coffee beans and cups arrive you’ll find out how much they cost.

by ericmay

1/14/2025 at 10:17:26 PM

Indeed. Price discrimination is a market failure. It's only possible when a seller has market power.

by tshaddox

1/14/2025 at 10:12:05 PM

There's an argument that it is unwise to fleece your customer so hard they don't come back again.

by surfingdino

1/14/2025 at 10:16:26 PM

You can just buy or kill your competition via subsidizing your pricing. There's no appetite to legislate this anticompetitive behavior.

by roboror

1/15/2025 at 1:10:50 AM

If that were a winning argument there would be a lot less fleecing happening. In reality there may be only one ISP, one airline with flights to where you need to go, two major smartphone OSes, three wireless carriers, one grocery store nearby, etc.

Vendor lockin is also a thing. Even if AWS is more expensive, the cost to move elsewhere can be prohibitively high.

by janalsncm

1/15/2025 at 11:19:39 AM

It’s a winning argument still. Don’t mistake it with lack of competition in a market. Even ISPs have a limit on fleecing customers before people get really fed up with it and nationalize their business or provide funds for competitors.

We tend to look at these things through a static lens “two major smartphone OSs” and not over longer periods of time, which is a problem in framing discussion. When Ford built their car there was approximately just one car (one OS). If you paused time there you’d apply the argument you’re making to Ford. But over the longer arc of time you’d have been incorrect.

by ericmay

1/16/2025 at 12:19:37 AM

or get this…companies can respect their customers! Maybe that would even increase company brand and reputation.

The companies that do this will win long term in my opinion. People aren’t stupid.

by lurking_swe

1/14/2025 at 10:45:44 PM

This is a rather capitalistic and self-centered way to think about pricing. Under our current paradigms, a "fully optimized system" would behave in the way you described, but I would argue that it is optimizing for the wrong things (same as the larger system). To me, a "fully optimized system" would be one that is capable of providing products & services at an equal price to all people. It wouldn't care about who can afford to pay more because it doesn't require the additional profit. Instead, it is efficient at a predictable and stable price point.

Those who politically advocate for "equality of opportunity" should favor a future where this is how things work, not one where everyone ends up with $0 spending money. In fact, the latter is exactly the opposite – equality of outcome.

by ssalka

1/15/2025 at 12:38:48 AM

Taken to the extreme conclusion, governments can potentially charge different tax rates to different individuals based on their inability to sue or inability to fight back. They may completely forego the notion of income based tax brackets . /s

by netc

1/14/2025 at 8:09:42 PM

My wife and I travel a lot as a hobby. The first rule is never use a third party portal for hotels or flights

by scarface_74

1/14/2025 at 8:45:32 PM

I mostly agree with this, but with two exceptions. First, I've had surprisingly good experiences with booking.com (no affiliation, just a satisfied user). And second, if you're booking a cruise, it's actually better to book through an agent. The cruise lines all have deals with agencies that forbid the cruise lines from undercutting the agents. If you find the right agent, they will give you kickbacks on their commissions so you actually end up paying less than you would booking direct.

by lisper

1/14/2025 at 9:00:40 PM

Booking.com is great in discovery phase, when you want to find out what's available at certain date at certain location. After that you can book directly if you want, but surprisingly it can be even more expensive that way in some cases. Or terms can be worse, for example for cancelation or whether you have to prepay.

by grujicd

1/14/2025 at 9:11:39 PM

Yes, exactly. The first time I used booking.com it was because I was trying to book a particular hotel in an under-developed country and the hotel's web site wasn't working so I had no other option. I then had to cancel the reservation because covid happened, and I expected to have all kinds of problems, but it all went smoothly. So I started using them more often, tentatively at first, but now with full enthusiasm. I have yet to have a bad experience with them. They seem to be one of the good guys, which is one of the reasons I'm advocating them. We who value having good guys on the internet need to support them when we find them.

by lisper

1/14/2025 at 9:19:03 PM

Have to agree. Die hard Airbnb user for years, then recently using booking.com more and more as it's clear and obvious what you are paying for (in most instances), and no insane "we're not a hotel, so change the sheets, wash them and put the rubbish out in these specific bins" list of exit rules.

Accidental discovery, but have to say they've helped far more than hindered (especially with last minute bookings in distant lands).

by _puk

1/14/2025 at 9:26:16 PM

Welcome to Europe, Airbnb is dying since Covid. Booking is the clear winner. The only gripe I have with them ks their usage of dark patterns, not fully kosher

by zoover2020

1/14/2025 at 9:59:41 PM

And their insecure platform. You occasionally get completely legit-looking phishing emails from the hotel you wanna stay in, because the hotel‘s account was compromised and attackers now send phishing emails through their side of booking.com.

Booking blames this on the hotels (probably true to some extend), but the problem is quite widespread so that Booking probably bears some responsibility, too.

by WA

1/14/2025 at 10:23:52 PM

My one and only experience with booking.com was around 10 years ago. I made a last minute late night booking, only to turn up and be told the room wasn't available. This was followed by a week of wrangling with booking.com to get the refund which was extremely annoying given I was traveling on a shoestring budget at the time. Never again.

by tmnvix

1/14/2025 at 11:13:08 PM

Yes, if use booking.com (or any other third party) and there is any problem with the reservation and the hotel doesn't have a room for you, they will point you back to booking.com and say there's nothing they can do (which may be true).

I always book direct with the hotel. Saving $5 on a room is not worth showing up at 11pm to find out they don't have your reservation.

by SoftTalker

1/14/2025 at 11:59:22 PM

I once used booking.com to book a block of several rooms for a wedding. Paid and confirmed. When we arrived, the hotel had no record of our reservations! The explanation was that their sync with booking.com was prone to failure and hadn't been updating for several weeks and they hadn't noticed. Luckily, they still had enough rooms available for us, but I will never use a 3rd party site again and I will always call ahead to confirm the reservation is still on the books.

by lowdest

1/14/2025 at 10:01:07 PM

Booking.com or frankly any other aggregator are great until the moment you have a problem and need to talk to their customer service. In that moment you realize that Booking.com does nothing that you can't do by yourself with same effort.

by two_cents

1/14/2025 at 11:35:43 PM

100% this

On rare occasions, using a 3rd party site will net you a better deal, but often, it's the exact same price, or a price within just a few dollars.

But if your reservation has a snag of any kind, you're basically fucked. The hotel will tell you to talk to Booking, Booking will tell you to talk to the hotel, if you can even talk to anybody.

I'd rather spent the extra dollars and book directly and just not have that worry.

by Sohcahtoa82

1/14/2025 at 10:17:24 PM

Kayak was the absolute worst about this to me. I had purchased premium economy tickets to Japan for several thousand USD from Kayak. Japan closed. The FAA made it clear that refunds were to be awarded. Kayak jerked me around and tried to keep half my money. Eventually I got it back less $400.

by dcrazy

1/14/2025 at 8:53:37 PM

Nah often third party hotel rooms are cheaper. I've literally been in a hotel lobby, asked about the rate, only to see that it's about 20% cheaper on Hotels.com, ask the front desk person why they can't match, only to then use the app to book right in front of the clerk and then get my room.

The backend system lots of hotels uses will sell rooms at what is essentially the market rate, based on occupancy, demand, etc..., whereas the posted room rate is more stable, for better or worse (better if the hotel is close to full, worse if it's empty).

by dismalaf

1/14/2025 at 9:47:07 PM

If you stay at the sane hotel brand often, the loyalty points make up the difference.

If Hilton isn’t running a special - and they are always running a special - if you have the Hilton Aspire credit card, you get 34 points per dollar worth usually around 20% in all. But often higher.

We will be staying at a hotel in Manuel Antonio n Costa Rica next month that would cost $4700 for 400K points.

by scarface_74

1/14/2025 at 10:18:47 PM

The aggregators are often buying inventory at below cost. They exist to help fill rooms that otherwise won’t sell.

by dcrazy

1/14/2025 at 8:12:22 PM

I 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.

by aliasxneo

1/14/2025 at 8:32:14 PM

For context, my wife and I did the digital nomad thing flying one way trips across the US for 10 months between 10/2022-10/2023 staying in hotels and I was traveling for work and she had conferences so we were staying in two hotels at a time sometimes.

Last year, we had around 70 days and this year we are looking at between 60-70 days.

At that point, hotel loyalty has benefits - loyalty points for free hotel stays , seat upgrades for flights and hotel room upgrades, lounge access when you fly a preferred airline etc.

Right now, if at all possible and the rates aren’t too much different, I’m going to stay in Hilton or Hyatt brand hotels. While I don’t care about 5 star hotels, I’m not staying at a Days Inn.

by scarface_74

1/14/2025 at 9:08:40 PM

It's worth explicitly stating that you (often?) don't get hotel rewards when your stays are booked through a third party.

This isn't the case with airline miles; you get them either way, it seems. But there are often other benefits (eg, you get 5x miles if you book with your airline credit card directly through the airline).

by rconti

1/14/2025 at 9:20:44 PM

That’s true. The issue with airlines is that if you have to make any changes, it’s harder and in the case of st least AA, they charge a fee when you change a flight that was booked through a third party portal that would be free if you book directly.

by scarface_74

1/14/2025 at 9:23:29 PM

Third parties often have their own fairly reasonable reward systems. And you are not tied down to a specific chain.

by varjag

1/14/2025 at 8:15:15 PM

In 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.

by walrus01

1/14/2025 at 8:40:12 PM

I've seen online travel agencies with better prices compared to the airline/hotel website even with fares at the same changes/cancellation policies.

OTOH, I prefer to purchase tickets directly with the airline because dealing with them directly when something happens is way better compared to having the OTA in the middle. Sometimes paying a small difference is worth the peace of mind.

by rescbr

1/14/2025 at 8:19:01 PM

Sure, 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.

by aliasxneo

1/14/2025 at 9:22:06 PM

Does the air Canada website work nowadays? Last time I tried (admittedly 2 years ago) I found myself literally screaming "just take my goddamn money".. the most painful website I've used for years.

And then they lost our luggage (tents and all), but that's another story.

by _puk

1/14/2025 at 8:24:23 PM

Some large chains will only give you rewards points or honor your status if you book directly.

My wife and I just spent several days finding and booking hotels for a 2 week trip with several stops. We searched on aggregators (Booking’s “king size bed” filter was particularly useful) but always defaulted to booking directly with the hotel. Oddly enough, one hotel had no means of booking directly; they only supported booking through an aggregator. One other hotel was offering the same price via Chase Travel, so I took the extra bonus Chase points.

by dcrazy

1/14/2025 at 8:33:33 PM

No hotels that I’m aware of will give you loyalty points unless you book directly. You can also get more loyalty points by using a cobranded hotel card. But only by booking directly.

by scarface_74

1/14/2025 at 8:43:48 PM

I stay in IHG hotels a fair amount booked through work's travel agent - indeed I'm about to check in to one when the train gets in. Always get the points and credited stay.

Don't get them if you book it through booking.com or similar though (although hotels.com at least used to give you a 10% cashback as a credit for free nights, which is handy when you can't stay in one chain)

by ta1243

1/14/2025 at 8:47:00 PM

Booking through something like Concur is different. Concur doesn’t charge the hotel a fee for booking through them. Concur gets paid by the company.

by scarface_74

1/14/2025 at 8:54:25 PM

I bet Concur gets paid for having slow page loads and thereby discouraging employee travel. It's the only explanation.

by shermantanktop

1/14/2025 at 8:34:42 PM

I’ve had mixed success asking to add my loyalty number at check-in, even if I already provided it to the aggregator.

by dcrazy

1/15/2025 at 1:52:50 PM

RIU hotels does. If you are part of their program after you stay you can go to your profile and add points for previous stays that weren't booked through them

source: staying now in the hotel and done it ;)

by odshoifsdhfs

1/14/2025 at 8:59:10 PM

And some booking websites will also give you rewards points and free hotel stays.

by dismalaf

1/14/2025 at 10:13:22 PM

Yes, but when you show up to your hotel across the world and they can’t find your reservation or they gave your room away because they didn’t know you were arriving after at 8pm, they then tell you to take it up with your third party booking company.

by dcrazy

1/14/2025 at 8:13:46 PM

100% seconded. One of the things that's often buried in the terms/conditions and booking if using an expedia/booking.com type 3rd party site is that your reservation cannot be modified in any way. Often if you book directly with the hotel chain in question you'll have a better experience in the event that unforeseen circumstances require a change in plans.

by walrus01

1/15/2025 at 12:44:13 PM

It depends entirely on the hotel how they will let you cancel or modify your reservation through the third party.

by carlosjobim

1/14/2025 at 8:26:03 PM

Same.

I feel so strongly that I built a site to help with finding those prices.

https://directbooker.com

by sanj

1/14/2025 at 9:39:00 PM

What's different than just using any other aggregator and just not clicking the "book" button on their side then?

by dewey

1/15/2025 at 10:31:34 AM

Where do the prices on your site come from?

by shellfishgene

1/14/2025 at 9:00:51 PM

You obviously do not have an Amex platinum card, and you haven't had the delicious experience of a guaranteed 4PM checkout, free room upgrades, and paid for breakfasts.

by Der_Einzige

1/14/2025 at 9:34:56 PM

This is only for Fine Hotels and Resorts bookings and those prices are usually more than booking directly.

Last year I was Hyatt Globalist and Hilton Diamond, so I got those benefits booking directly.

This year I will be Hilton Gold and Hyatt Explorist.

But I will get free C+ upgrades on Delta at time of booking because we are both Delta Platinum Medallion

by scarface_74

1/14/2025 at 10:01:49 PM

Amex Platinum gives you Hilton Gold as part of the "coupon book" of benefits for holding it.

by Der_Einzige

1/14/2025 at 9:20:09 PM

Recent-ish recipient of a Venture X. It and the Platinum were my two finalists, but the “coupon book” aspects required to really benefit from the Platinum pushed me away. Have I made a terrible mistake?

by spokaneplumb

1/14/2025 at 9:28:37 PM

I ended up using many of the "Coupons" (not all), but the travel benefits after 2 international trips more than pay for the yearly price - and that's without the generous 150K points. Lounge access at airports is a life saver.

I hate credit card companies too - but I can't deny that it's cheap to be rich and expensive to be poor. Just bite the bullet and get it or equivalent nice credit cards and use their (the credit cards) own travel booking websites. You'll be happy you did.

by Der_Einzige

1/14/2025 at 9:38:10 PM

Currently we have:

- Amex Platinum + paid authorized user

- Amex Delta Platinum, Business Platinum and Reserve - having all three got me halfway to Delta Platinum Medallion. They each have a buy one get one free ticket and Delta Stays credits

- Amex Green and Blue Business Plus

I’m also a credit card churner, I’m looking to get four this year for sign up bonuses

by scarface_74

1/14/2025 at 9:38:10 PM

Flights...agreed, but hotels sometimes have such shitty booking interfaces that I'd rather use the one from Booking which is solid and already has all my data.

by dewey

1/14/2025 at 9:39:27 PM

Hotels are worse. Especially if you need to change anything. I stay loyal to Hilton and Hyatt

by scarface_74

1/14/2025 at 8:28:46 PM

I on other hand prefer the added security from Europe from getting both from same agency. As long as they are packaged.

by Ekaros

1/14/2025 at 8:39:42 PM

The agency is still a third party and if something goes wrong with either the flight or the hotel, you are still having to deal with both. What happens if the hotel isn’t satisfactory?

The agency isn’t going to do anything for you.

by scarface_74

1/14/2025 at 9:03:50 PM

Have not travelled for a while now, but the relatively tiny travel agency I used to use had a 24/7 support phone line. Did not personally have a need to use it, but a friend did, and the agency indeed handled the situation to his satisfaction.

Moreover, booking international flights through that agency somehow always ended up cheaper than what I could find myself, even when accounting for their fees.

by silversmith

1/14/2025 at 9:32:14 PM

A travel agency works differently than a portal. It’s considered a first party booking.

by scarface_74

1/14/2025 at 8:28:13 PM

I travel in Japan a lot and quite frankly Booking/Agoda have been comparable in most cases and extremely accessible for making reservations and even communicating with hotel staff.

I used to use sites like Expedia for flights but lately i just book those directly through the carriers and i think the experience on that end is better.

by spike021

1/14/2025 at 10:21:39 PM

On a previous trip to Japan I used my CC travel portal (can’t remember if it was Chase or Amex) to book one of the hotels. It took several days of back and forth with the CC company acting as a middleman to clarify whether “twin bed” meant a single bed sized for a child, or two beds which could be pushed together to approximate a U.S. queen size bed. (Japan seems to translate “two beds” as “twin room”, but it was unclear whether that had been re-translated when shown on the CC company’s whitelabeled Expedia instance.)

by dcrazy

1/13/2025 at 5:58:51 PM

Hotels 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.

by jerlam

1/14/2025 at 8:04:31 PM

In my experience it used to be direct booking was often more expensive. Often absurdly.

Now I find it is almost always the opposite. Outside some more super low budget hotel options. Booking direct on the direct site more often than not is cheaper than the travel / third party sites.

I like the new trend, the third party sites were too disconnected and wonky.

by duxup

1/13/2025 at 10:04:12 PM

I 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.

by stevenwoo

1/13/2025 at 7:49:55 PM

At 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…”

by chatmasta

1/14/2025 at 8:06:56 PM

> Hotels generally dislike third-party booking sites, because they're just skimming off profits while offering a worse service

The problem is, the customers tend to want said third-party sites. Hotels have, at least for the masses, become a commodity - 99% of people just need a place to crash because they're out all day - and so customers expect to be able to shop around purely based on price and a bit on the location.

by mschuster91

1/14/2025 at 8:46:13 PM

There is wider variability in hotel quality than you know...

I live near a decent-sized college town and there is a hotel right off the interstate. It's a well-known hotel name in a decent (even semi-posh) location, so you'd think it was good and safe. In reality, it is run down, dirty, smelly, has pest problems, long-term residents, and lets just say is frequently the subject of police activity and only the occasional murder. The owner lives outside the country and has no interest in cleanliness, upkeep, or safety. The health department and local government have been trying to get it shut down but there's only so much they can do. The owners pay people to post positive reviews online and try very hard to get the bad reviews taken down.

Their prices are only slightly below most other hotels in the area and all of the photos are from rooms at other locations. So unless you actively went and searched the Internet for reviews for this specific location, you wouldn't know what you were getting into.

by bityard

1/14/2025 at 8:14:07 PM

A lot of hotel websites are terrible too and I’ll be damned if I have to actually call someone and waste my time when I’m trying to compare prices, or if there is a significant language barrier.

by briandear

1/14/2025 at 10:01:02 PM

Practically if you go to a bigger city, it's just not feasible to look at hotels directly. Who has the time to check the 100 of pages, each with their own lookup/booking system, each possibly not available, each listing the size / facilities differently?

by viraptor

1/14/2025 at 8:10:46 PM

I have run into a hotel where the staff sent people to the third party booking site. They had decided to bite the bullet and cut the booking function from their in-house staff. Third party booking is expensive so they might as well drop their in-house staff and realize these savings.

by creer

1/14/2025 at 7:30:06 PM

Some places have worse service than booking.com - mostly cheaper and / or smaller places. Most real hotels indeed have quite good service on their own.

by ahartmetz

1/14/2025 at 8:32:43 PM

My roommate works front desk at a hotel, a common problem is that a third party site books things incorrectly or promises things that don't exist, then the customer is in the hotel lobby mad at the hotel over something they had nothing to do with

by thatguy0900

1/14/2025 at 8:50:21 PM

This happened twice on two vacations and stopped me from ever using third party booking sites. I go to them, find a deal, then go directly to the hotels site and book. It was eye opening to know the discount from the third party was not that much more than booking directly with the hotel/resort.

by burningChrome

1/14/2025 at 9:58:39 PM

I don't think that's only the third party problem. The way the inventory and availability is managed is not only delayed, but often done manually through a terrible interface. I suspect large chains get better automation, but I've seen how it works in smaller places. The mistakes can be either fat fingering something or just a concurrency issue where the booking happens at a third party while someone else books the same room on the phone. The responsibility there is somewhere in between.

by viraptor

1/15/2025 at 12:49:17 PM

The responsibility is completely with the hotel owner. Professional hotel management software that syncs instantly with third parties is very cheap and accessible.

by carlosjobim

1/15/2025 at 1:32:12 PM

You're really assuming the third party is reasonable and honest. For the record it's a holiday inn, a major hotel chain. I doubt the issue is a lack of them working with third parties

by thatguy0900

1/15/2025 at 2:08:56 PM

I'm not assuming. I've worked in hotel management and big third parties don't manipulate their reservations. However it's very convenient for a hotel to blame them when they've messed up themselves, since guests eat it up.

by carlosjobim

1/14/2025 at 9:03:09 PM

I've had this happen when booking directly with an IHG hotel. My reservation in their system said I had a 2x queen room, but the hotel's end showed 1x king.

by graywh

1/14/2025 at 7:10:56 PM

Most 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.

by fooker

1/14/2025 at 10:12:19 PM

Most 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.

by bluGill

1/14/2025 at 7:18:46 PM

I 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.

by jp42

1/14/2025 at 7:27:53 PM

There were news about that really happening a decade or so ago.

by ahartmetz

1/14/2025 at 8:16:18 PM

Yes, here's the article: https://web.archive.org/web/20141113121420/https://www.washi...

It would be an amazing miracle if sites weren't still doing this.

by bityard

1/14/2025 at 8:22:02 PM

So I should really be booking from a logged out incognito browser on my Linux machine with VPN to a less wealthy region.

by divbzero

1/14/2025 at 8:52:58 PM

I imagine they'd think you were a bot and you'd end up in a captcha loop.

by dageshi

1/14/2025 at 8:25:21 PM

Sounds like a business opportunity.

by lisper

1/14/2025 at 8:50:48 PM

Then sell a the detection of such behavior back to the site owners.

by mywittyname

1/14/2025 at 8:41:44 PM

Doesn’t sound crazy. Plug a vector that includes the user agent into a model used to determine price sensitivity and that’s what you’ll get.

by dullcrisp

1/14/2025 at 8:35:28 PM

It's still true. Recently looked at hotels and airline tickets on my droid while a friend checked the same with their iPhone and the prices they saw were 15-20% higher for the same rooms/seats/etc.

This was also true after we logged into loyalty accounts (the discounted loyalty price on iPhone was still higher than the general public price on Android).

by gamblor956

1/14/2025 at 9:26:58 PM

> I had theory long time ago that booking hotel or airlines tickets from mac used to be more expensive than windows.

I currently work remotely for a company based in California and they issue MacBooks by default to employees. We can request Windows devices but our IT department prefers to have as many people on Macs as possible for admin efficiency reasons.

We hire remote workers from all around the world and so this Mac-first policy has raised quite a bit of discussion about what the majority of our workforce is accustomed to and has been trained on. It has come up time and time again that Macs are really popular in California but outside of that state Windows still dominates by a large margin.

Now, not all parts of California are affluent of course. And like every state the demographics are all over the place in terms of income. I bring this anecdote up because I wonder if both the Bay Area discrimination discussed in the article and your hypothesis about Macs stems from California stereotypes. Outside of the state, even though wildly inaccurate and unfair for a great many Californians, a lot of people tend to think of California as if everyone in the state is extremely privileged.

by gspencley

1/14/2025 at 9:38:50 PM

the Mac thing is more direct - see iOS apps being more profitable. there's an association because they aren't budget devices generally.

by nemomarx

1/14/2025 at 9:54:20 PM

At least back last I saw stats on this (maybe 2017?) iOS users were not only a ton more likely to be willing (/able) to pay for software, goods, and services, but also used their devices a ton more.

One might think they spent more time in apps, and more time total, but perhaps Android users would spend more time on the Web—but no, iOS users also spent markedly more time in their browser than Android users. They used everything on the device more, period.

Who knows why. SES-related stuff—maybe more free time? Their devices just being way more pleasant to use (this was a leading hypothesis among my fellow mobile devs who spent lots of time in both operating systems)? Hard to say.

by spokaneplumb

1/14/2025 at 10:09:46 PM

I would think it's because the large group of people who don't really want to use a smartphone buy a cheap Android one.

Could your statistics compare iPhones with premium (e.g. largest screen size) Android phones, therefore excluding most of the budget Androids?

by Symbiote

1/15/2025 at 12:04:44 AM

Soon, price discrimination via CPU performance, pixel density, and last security patch install date.

by jerlam

1/14/2025 at 10:41:35 PM

The phones don't make the people use them more or less. People choose different phones based on their inherent usage patterns.

by kube-system

1/14/2025 at 9:37:48 PM

Trying to distinguish between what I consider good and bad discriminatory pricing, I think a useful litmus-test is whether it is being done secretly or has secret criteria.

by Terr_

1/14/2025 at 7:45:32 PM

Their(hotel) tech is 5 years behind.

by newhotelowner

1/13/2025 at 5:24:24 PM

> 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.

by htrp

1/13/2025 at 6:47:27 PM

> 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.

by creer

1/13/2025 at 4:00:15 PM

The 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.

by PopAlongKid

1/14/2025 at 8:09:38 PM

Another 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"

by walrus01

1/14/2025 at 8:15:38 PM

With 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

by scarface_74

1/14/2025 at 9:39:43 PM

I 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.

by Eridrus

1/13/2025 at 6:43:48 PM

> 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.

by creer

1/14/2025 at 8:51:28 PM

I will have to have my mother in law in Kansas book our hotels.

by cortesoft

1/14/2025 at 7:46:29 PM

I 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.

by yumraj

1/14/2025 at 11:39:35 PM

There'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.

by teractiveodular

1/14/2025 at 10:08:43 PM

I'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.

by iforgot22

1/15/2025 at 7:43:30 AM

There'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.

by bufferoverflow

1/15/2025 at 8:01:19 AM

Aren't all the big hotel booking sites owned by the same company?

by franga2000

1/15/2025 at 4:06:54 PM

No.

Booking.com, Priceline are owned by Booking holding

Expedia, Kayak are owned by Expedia Group

TripAdvisor is owned by Liberty Media

Airbnb is private.

by bufferoverflow

1/13/2025 at 5:59:19 PM

I'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.

by xkcd-sucks

1/13/2025 at 6:35:39 PM

> 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.

by creer

1/14/2025 at 11:30:35 PM

> 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.

by rlpb

1/17/2025 at 6:59:40 PM

That'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?

by creer

1/14/2025 at 9:11:09 PM

Often the hardcover version comes out well in advance of the paperback, so if you want the book as soon as it comes out, you have to pay the premium for the perceived "premium product". Only later does the paperback come out at a lower cost, while the hardcover retains its higher cost -- I'm not sure if it drops a bit when the paperback comes out or not.

This is a lot like back in the movie rental days. The VHS cassette for a new release would be $120 or something, and only a few months later could you buy it at the grocery store checkout for $25.

by rconti

1/14/2025 at 7:11:06 PM

I remember when I was looking for new cookware a while ago, there were rumors that Kitchenaid was selling rebranded Demeyere pots and pans. It sure looked like the exact same cookware in the photos. But Zwilling is known to disguise the same pan in 30 different ways, and for anyone willing to trade the "Demeyere" label for a "Kitchenaid" label, they were getting a steal of a deal.

by Xcelerate

1/13/2025 at 10:19:56 PM

A lot of luxury products are like this. For example a lot of wine on shelves are literally the same wine under different labels and price points.

by blackeyeblitzar

1/14/2025 at 11:44:46 PM

Have a source for this?

It's certainly plausible, but I'm not going to just accept it.

by Sohcahtoa82

1/14/2025 at 8:50:41 PM

Is that really price discrimination?

“Enthusiasts” might have legitimate reasons for preferring hardcover (durability, aesthetics, etc) and are willingly and knowingly paying extra for that.

How much it cost to manufacture is mostly irrelevant.

by arnarbi

1/14/2025 at 8:06:51 PM

Coming from the hardware world, wait until you learn about e-fusing chips to lower tier products!

I've worked at a place where there was exactly one chip and ~8 ways to disable different things to make the whole product family, with nearly 2x difference in cost between low and high. This is usually done by disabling bad sections of the chip, but if yields are too high, you just disable functioning bits of good chips. Our yields were great. :-|

by nomel

1/13/2025 at 7:32:33 PM

American publishers tend to give one a choice: hardbacks, more expensive, clumsier, but made for heavy duty; paperbacks, less expensive, handier, but not holding up as well under wear. And in general the first year of publication one can buy only the hardback--which is why I don't like book clubs that want to read only new books.

by cafard

1/14/2025 at 10:16:06 PM

I've sometimes found library editions which are a middle compromise - cheaper than hardcover but higher quality that paperback.

by bluGill

1/14/2025 at 8:15:41 PM

Or just buy the ebook and save the paper, transportation, and shelf space.

by briandear

1/14/2025 at 8:54:55 PM

Assuming you can in fact buy it DRM-free. Otherwise it is just an indefinite-term rental.

by VyseofArcadia

1/14/2025 at 9:10:38 PM

> I'm starting to think that like 80% of product diversity is really just pricing discrimination in disguise.

I think the term used for this practice is "market-segmentation".

by danans

1/13/2025 at 7:15:14 PM

[dead]

by thegrim33

1/14/2025 at 8:18:34 PM

I 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

by walrus01

1/14/2025 at 11:12:19 PM

As 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).

by m101

1/14/2025 at 8:11:25 PM

Going 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.)

by briandear

1/16/2025 at 5:53:31 PM

San 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.

by Hilift

1/14/2025 at 8:34:16 PM

Because 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.

by saagarjha

1/14/2025 at 11:20:44 PM

Isn't that something socialists would actually champion?

by elevatedastalt

1/15/2025 at 1:09:28 AM

If 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.

by saagarjha

1/15/2025 at 5:26:38 PM

The 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).

by cozzyd

1/14/2025 at 9:35:42 PM

If we were back in the time of travel agents, would it be OK for them to charge more because they are in the area?

by seydor

1/14/2025 at 9:36:57 PM

I mean they do have more money in the bay area generally

you can charge what the market afforfd

by nemomarx

1/14/2025 at 9:39:13 PM

What's the difference between this and remote work pay being based on local cost of living?

by jessepasley

1/15/2025 at 1:23:54 AM

great parallel. i think people are angry about both.

by rsanek

1/14/2025 at 11:38:23 PM

You mean "hotel booking sites offer discounts to non-bay area customers", surely?

by MrPatan

1/15/2025 at 2:16:14 PM

theres 2 kinds of hotels?

hotels that overcharge bay area customers, and hotels that overcharge other customers?

by lazylizard

1/14/2025 at 11:32:35 PM

Goodbye booking sites.

by xbar

1/14/2025 at 8:27:36 PM

parasitic middlemen

by sleepybrett

1/14/2025 at 7:12:06 PM

They do it because they can:

Booking.com operates as a de-facto monopoly.

by DrNosferatu

1/14/2025 at 10:17:37 PM

Booking.com has nothing. The article names 4 competitors, besides booking directly on the hotel's website.

by iforgot22

1/16/2025 at 4:08:22 PM

Booking.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-ed49b4dc2...

by DrNosferatu

1/14/2025 at 7:26:06 PM

[dead]

by meta_x_ai