Nareed
Nareed
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February 2nd, 2010 at 6:49:29 AM permalink
4 years ago I booked a vacation through Expedia Mexico to Orlando, a hotel for 6 nights, park tickets and a rental car, without any problem. I did check airfare prices independently and they were about the same. When I moved from pricing the trip to actually booking it, though, it went up perhaps $10. I attributed to rounding errors and booked it anyway.

Two years later I tried booking a trip to Vegas. Airfare, 4 nights, tour to Hoover Dam and two-way airport shuttle. Everything was fine, until I moved from pricing to booking. Then the price went up $200! I wound up booking the hotel, tour and shuttle in Expedia, but the ticket I got straight from mexicana for about $200 less. Still, I thought it was a temporary aberation.

This year I tried again and got some surprisingly good prices on hotel/airfare booking. However, upon moving from pricing to booking the price went up again, this time about $250. Now, this time there's a little window providing an explanation. it says airfares are volatile and sometimes go up when finalizing the booking.

Fair enough, I guess. Except when you search the trip again, the prices appear lower, but go up at booking. That's not a rounding error, a temporary aberration or even price fluctuations in a volatile market. Much as I hate to say it, that's bait and switch.

What puzzles me is the clumsy way it's done. I mean, it's not like you won't notice a $250 price jump and proceed to booking anyway. also, when I price the flight alone, I get pretty much the ame fare the airline offers, until I proceed to booking and it goes up.

IN any case I've given up on using Expedia to book anything. It's still useful to search and compare hotels, though.
Donald Trump is a fucking criminal
boymimbo
boymimbo
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February 2nd, 2010 at 7:36:58 AM permalink
Nareed, I used to work for a major internet travel provider and have some knowledge of their booking processes.

Airline prices nor hotel prices are grabbed instantaneously from the source information. Hotels load their inventory and cost pricing onto the provider's platform using a web interface. Similarly, airlines load their available pricing and inventory onto one of their global interfaces (such as WorldSpan) that anyone can access.


It's a performance tradeoff -- the travel sites have to balance the trips to the server to get current pricing information and be able to let the user know the available trips in a timely basis. This performance is very important because many people will become impatient waiting for results to appear.

When it comes time to pay, the agent queries the servers to get the final and current price. In the time that it grabs the price vs the initial query (which is based on information that could be hours old), it checks directly with the hotel inventory and the airline inventory. It is then that prices can change. Prices are not confirmed until the "payment" page appears. This prevents people from loading a price, waiting an hour, and then book.

It's happened to me as well. The airline price will go up because someone has bought that last available ticket in the class, or the hotel price will go up because the forecast for rooms have changed. I've had the price go down on me as well.
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SplittingAA
SplittingAA
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February 2nd, 2010 at 7:45:11 AM permalink
So if I understand you correctly Boymimbo, The reason the price went back down in the booking section for Nareed is because the system reverted back to the hour(s) old data rather than actual prices that it just recently looked up?

Thanks, for the insight.
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FleaStiff
FleaStiff
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February 2nd, 2010 at 8:48:04 AM permalink
I no longer utilize such travel aggregators, partly for this reason and partly because in switching back to previous screens the website defaults to different data than the user may think is being used.

Its the way some doctors on rounds in major medical centers have GPS aware computers. The hospital knows where the doctor is and will pre-fetch the medical records for the patients he is about to approach. That way, any computerized inquiry from the doctors on rounds will be responded to fairly promptly since the data has been made recently available.

A banker in providing a credit reference may lookup a customer's checking account balance from the previous day, but in actually processing a check payment the computer will use the current balance. A travel booking site similarly uses somewhat out of data information too because the time and computational cost of always getting the latest information is high.

So any differences can be due to the use of obsolete information or to the website's display of a customer's entered data when in actuality the computer is using non-displayed default data.
boymimbo
boymimbo
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February 2nd, 2010 at 10:39:00 AM permalink
Quote: SplittingAA

So if I understand you correctly Boymimbo, The reason the price went back down in the booking section for Nareed is because the system reverted back to the hour(s) old data rather than actual prices that it just recently looked up?

Thanks, for the insight.



I think in the case of Nareed the source of the data at the booking page is different than the source of the data at the payment page. This is because the booking section queries from a dated (hours old) database while the payment section queries from a current database (or perhaps a different database altogether). Sometimes the price discrepancies are the fault of the airline who doesn't necessary update the Worldspan or GDS database. The airline itself may publish a web only fare that isn't fed to the providers.
----- You want the truth! You can't handle the truth!
Wizard
Administrator
Wizard
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February 2nd, 2010 at 10:49:23 AM permalink
I had the same issue with Ameritrade. When I went to make a buy/sell transaction, the price I was offered was usually about 1/8 of a point away from the going market price, usually against me.
"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow." -- Ecclesiastes 1:18 (NIV)
Nareed
Nareed
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February 2nd, 2010 at 1:43:47 PM permalink
Quote: boymimbo

Nareed, I used to work for a major internet travel provider and have some knowledge of their booking processes.

Airline prices nor hotel prices are grabbed instantaneously from the source information. Hotels load their inventory and cost pricing onto the provider's platform using a web interface. Similarly, airlines load their available pricing and inventory onto one of their global interfaces (such as WorldSpan) that anyone can access.


It's a performance tradeoff -- the travel sites have to balance the trips to the server to get current pricing information and be able to let the user know the available trips in a timely basis. This performance is very important because many people will become impatient waiting for results to appear.

When it comes time to pay, the agent queries the servers to get the final and current price. In the time that it grabs the price vs the initial query (which is based on information that could be hours old), it checks directly with the hotel inventory and the airline inventory. It is then that prices can change. Prices are not confirmed until the "payment" page appears. This prevents people from loading a price, waiting an hour, and then book.

It's happened to me as well. The airline price will go up because someone has bought that last available ticket in the class, or the hotel price will go up because the forecast for rooms have changed. I've had the price go down on me as well.



If that's the case, then Expedia is being, at the least, dishonest. The site should tell you the trip you're putting together "starts at $X," at the very least.

Next question is, if the site gets teh real info at booking, why doesn't it update the rest of the system with that information? Either then or the next day. Last time I did keep looking it up for several days, and every time the price went up exactly the same way.

Third question, it's always the airfare that changes, never the hotel prices. Last time it was with Mexicana, this year with US Airways. 4 years ago with Delta (operated by Aeromexico), it didn't change a tenth as much. That's why I'm miffed.

Finally, I did write to Expedia last time, two years ago, and they wrote back bascially saying they did't know why the price changed. I'm thinking it haooens way too foten, and that's why they added the xplanation on booking.

Last year I booked the plane directly with Mexicana and the hotel with IP. This year I'll wind up doing the same thing. I may try Orbitz and Travelocity just to see what happens, too.

I'm annoyed because I had such a great experience the first time I booked through Expedia. They even delivered the park tickets to the hotel before I checked in, the rental car, the hotel, the airfare were all taken care of beforehand with zero problems. It was first rate service. Now I can't trust them to quote a price accurately.
Donald Trump is a fucking criminal
DJTeddyBear
DJTeddyBear
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February 2nd, 2010 at 1:53:31 PM permalink
Quote: Nareed

....it's always the airfare that changes, never the hotel prices.

That's because hotel prices don't change. At least not on a daily basis the way airfare changes.

A hotel sets a price for the season and day of the week, and that's it. Unless there is a serious reason to change, it doesn't change until the last couple days.
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