this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
100 points (96.3% liked)

Asklemmy

43371 readers
1928 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] guckfoogle@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] hellweaver666@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] guckfoogle@sh.itjust.works -1 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] guckfoogle@sh.itjust.works -1 points 11 months ago

Same city, same search filters, different prices for different people 🤔