I don't mean to sound standoffish, but as far as I know this isn't true.

I have yet to see real proof that airline companies get you to pay a higher fare by tracking your searches/browsing. While I'm sure you saw a $50 difference, it was likely a slightly different search, which is almost always what happens when people claim they've noticed this.

About a year ago, someone on reddit went out and offered a year of reddit gold for anyone that could, there was nobody: https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/1ekv6e/lpt_bou...

As recently as last week, someone claimed they had reproduced, but they used slightly different search params and ended up with something totally different: http://www.reddit.com/r/travel/comments/2okml5/for_anyone_pl...

This myth is rife with anecdotal proof, but I've yet to see anything concrete.

Obviously this is just one more anecdote, but this exact same thing happened to me on the Iberia website about two years ago, while looking for flights from Europe to South America.

I kept track of my searches in a spreadsheet, so I know for a fact that the price went up slightly (I think it was by 20€), and went back down immediately when I switched to a different browser.

Again, this was unfortunately too long ago for me to have reasonable proof, and it hasn't happened since (perhaps because I now tend to avoid Iberia anyway; they're pretty crappy in other ways as well).

I experienced this just the other day. My father was looking at a price in his computer that I couldn't get (I was getting one that was $500 extra). I erased the cookies of the AA site, refreshed (exactly the same flights, the same days, everything the same) and bam! $500 dollars cheaper.

I bet you can't reproduce that result ... As someone else here stated, nobody can prove this happens

Your threshold for proof is too high. We're not talking about physics here, these aren't immutable laws to be scientifically investigated, these are systems designed by humans. The wise thing to do is assume they will do anything to screw you until proven otherwise, not the other way around.

Personally I don't search airline tickets outside of incognito , and preferably not without VPN or tor protection as well.

A couple of weeks ago I were searching for a flight on Easyjet with a friend, and every time we searched for the flight, we got a different price. We tried from incognito, tor and from a phone. Most of the differences were in the cents or at most a few euro, for a 45€ flight.

This study seems to corroborate https://www.petsymposium.org/2014/papers/Vissers.pdf

That price fluctuations are more due to activity than user profiling.

I know Air Canada does this pretty blatantly. When searching for flights they constantly go up by $50 - $100 an hour then magically reset to the original price when I open up an incognito browser window.

I've only worked a little with the inventory back end so you can take what I say with a grain of salt. Different points of sale can have different yields and report different available seats in each class of service. So the price for a travel agent or a partner airline can be different. If a website detects you are searching for a holiday flight, and are back, they could switch the point of sale that they give you quotes from.

1. search a flight.

2. search it again.

3. the price has surged.

they don't track individual users, they track the search queries, this makes me wonder if flight search services are just rising the entire market prices, instead of a user only searching once, they constantly search the same query.

> [...] this makes me wonder if flight search services are just rising the entire market prices, [...]

Not in general. The airlines account for that. (Otherwise, if the market could bear a higher price and still get reasonable demand, the airlines would have raised prices to that level in the first place.)

The all inclusive branch also does this, you search a nice holiday, get hyped, tell your family or mates, and when you get back a day later it's suddenly 200 euro's more..