Tons of sites do variable pricing, especially in the travel sector. Typically discriminating by device, OS etc.

And you'll often get a discount coupon after staying on a shopping site for a few minutes without interacting.

I’ve read rumors about this, but I’ve never experienced it on any hotel/airline/car rental’s website. I know people that work at chain hotels and they set the price, or the computer does based on shopping the other hotels around it, but never based on who is searching.

I’ve tried searching flight prices by remoting into someone else’s computer far away and comparing to mine, and I’ve always gotten the same priced even though I’m not logged in or anything. Ditto for car rentals.

I don’t use travel agents so I can’t say for any other kind of sites.

Being that all publicly sold fares for plane tickets from the airline must have their price registered in advance of the sale, I agree I find it suspect in that case too.

Maybe sites like Priceline or similar places might do stuff like described, but I very highly doubt airlines do, unless they just don’t show availability in some fare codes to specific customers (which I also doubt, with the possible exception of elite status members).

You can search for Wordpress plugins that do the above and then look at their documentation to learn the rules. Shopify has a setting you can enable to email a 15% off code to anyone who adds and item to their cart but doesn’t check out.

That's just abandoned cart recovery, which is pretty ubiquitous. I'd say it's very different than presenting different prices to different users.

I meant in the travel sector, as the previous poster pointed it out specifically. For retail yes, all you usually need to do is add something to cart and then leave and in the next few days they email you a discount code.

I'll frequently get quoted different prices on travel sites when using different computers or after turning incognito mode on.

Are any of those websites the airline/hotel/car rental company itself? If so, which ones?

I've definitely experienced a case (I think on hotels.com) where I was using two different computers to look for the same room, and they both displayed consistently different prices. I think on the more expensive one I was already logged into my account, so that may have made the difference.

But that’s a travel agent, not the hotel itself. And the big hotels brands guarantee they offer the lowest price on their website to their rewards members since they don’t have to pay commission to travel agents.

Unless it’s an opaque rate where you’re bidding for hotel rooms and don’t know which hotel you will get, but you’re forced to buy it once you bid. But I’m talking about publicly advertised prices.

There was someone who got caught increasing prices for iOS users.

Travel sites are the worst for this.

Which sites exactly? I’ve never seen it actually happen and I’d like to experiment.

Travel sites are worst about it but I've seen it on Amazon which claimed it was a mistake. Smaller stores don't typically do it, but with an iPhone and an Android, one on VPN sometimes you can catch the site being funny about pricing.

Are any of the websites actually the official website of the hotel/airline/car rental?

I’ve never even seen a lower price advertised on a third party website compared to the official website of the vendor.

I've only seen this on third party sites. Never in direct sites. I've definitely seen cheaper prices on third party rather than direct sites on more than one occasion.

Netflix charges differently based on location which is a proxy for those.

Amazon offers multiple shipping option for various prices.

Location pricing was done before the internet and ad tracking. Some countries have richer people who can afford to pay more for luxuries.