Along these lines, I've noticed airlines seem to jack up a ticket price in the subsequent days if you search for a ticket, visit their website, and don't buy the ticket. Though maybe if you wait a couple weeks they might get disappointed and lower it again. Anybody had a similar experience? (From what I can tell, it doesn't tend to happen if you don't actually visit their website.)

I always buy using the airline’s website and no middleman website, and sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down. I use google flight tracker sometimes to track the price, and I can’t find anything to indicate it is targeting me specifically.

I presume the price goes up and down based on aggregate searches or reservations for the flight, i.e. supply and demand. I know for hotels, there are programs crawling and searching for competing hotel’s prices and changing pricing based on that as well as changes in inventory and prior year’s data.

I've seen this happen fairly consistently on very low-demand off-peak flights. I don't think it's a supply/demand thing. The coincidence of the timing a day or two after I search and the consistency of the experience is what makes me think they do it deliberately. The normal price variations I do see too (including with Google flight tracker), but they don't seem to correlate nearly as strongly with my searches. Hard to prove it though...

If your search causes the price to go to for anyone who searches, them I would still say it isn’t targeting a specific buyer, but just that it’s triggered by a lower level of demand.

I can imagine that a route with 500 available seats won’t be programmed to be sensitive to one search, but a route with 10 seats could be.