Airfare Went Up After You Searched Again? The Myth You’re Being Tracked Just Won’t Die

You search for a flight, don’t buy right away and come back to find a higher fare. There’s a widespread belief that the airline recognized you, figured out you really wanted that trip, and raised the price to make you pay more. A new investigation by the Dutch competition regulator confirms what those who understand airline pricing already know: that isn’t how these algorithms work. Previous searches and the device you’re using aren’t driving the fare. Prices changed, but the airline wasn’t charging you more because you’d looked before. I explained this to a reporter the other day. They assumed that searching tells an airline you want a ticket, so naturally the airline would raise the price. Except you searched and didn’t buy. It’s plausible to believe you thought the ticket was too expensive. A lower price might get you to buy. A higher one might convince you to check another airline or skip the trip entirely. If anything tracking you this way might induce them to offer a lower price, not raise the price. Something I’ve explained before about personalized pricing is that airlines want to offer discounts that fill otherwise empty seats without giving those discounts to customers who would have paid the higher price anyway. Historically they’ve used advance purchase requirements, Saturday-night stays and restrictions on cheap fares to try to separate those groups. Basic economy makes customers reveal something about their preferences by accepting a less attractive product to save money. None of that requires identifying your laptop. And an airline can’t simply raise price when your demand is inelastic, because another carrier would make money by undercutting the effort. What The Airline Pricing Investigation Found The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets released its findings this week after industry interviews, information requests and transaction analysis. The underlying report covers more than 14 million transactions across 155,417 flights on 56 selected routes, for flights operated between July 2022 and July 2025. The regulator found extensive dynamic pricing, but little personalized pricing. An average flight had roughly 30 to 35 different prices for a comparable ticket over its selling period. Previous searches and device choice didn’t explain the prices customers were offered. Meanwhile, 46% of surveyed consumers believed previous searches affected their price, and 25% believed their device did. People are trying to avoid tracking that doesn’t affect price. Why Searching Again Can Produce A Different Fare The world keeps changing while you’re deciding whether to book. Other people buy tickets. Reservations get canceled. Airlines revise their demand forecasts, or respond to competitors with new fares. You first saw an old price in a search engine, which updated when the booking site checked availability. Your second search used different settings or looked at different flights A reservation or hold temporarily removed inventory from sale. The website returned different results, or simply malfunctioned. I’ve been writing about the logged-in version of this concern since 2006, when a US Airways customer thought Dividend Miles members were being charged more. More recently, a viral video appeared to show United charging a senior citizen $400 more. United’s explanation was that changing the passenger’s age triggered a new search, replacing a mixed coach-and-first class itinerary with first class on both flights. Orbitz Didn’t Charge Mac Users More For The Same Hotel Room The famous Orbitz story is another example of a claim becoming more sinister as it gets repeated. In 2012, Orbitz found that Mac users were more likely to book premium hotels. It experimented with using that information to recommend hotels those customers might prefer. I explained at the time that recommending more expensive hotels wasn’t the same thing as charging more for the same hotel. In a 2014 letter to researchers, Orbitz said the operating system experiment affected its recommendation module, rather than the initial ordering of search results. It lasted approximately a month and was discontinued because it didn’t really improve customer engagement. Orbitz wanted to make a sale. If its recommendations missed what customers wanted, they could leave and book somewhere else. Of course an online travel agency cares about commissions, margins and which hotels pay for placement. A higher potential commission on a hotel you don’t buy is worth less than delivering the hotel you’ll book. Guessing that a Mac user might prefer a nicer hotel was a hypothesis about how to close the sale, but it didn’t work. Logging Out Or Using A VPN Doesn’t Deliver Lower Prices I’ve discussed logging out, incognito browsing and VPNs as ways customers might respond if an airline began using their identity to quote higher fares. But these tools do not unlock cheaper tickets. Incognito mode starts a separate browser session. But generally airfare isn’t being priced based on whom the airline thinks you are. There are a set of fares on a route, eligibility for those fares based on your trip parameters, and available inventory in a fare class on a given route. None of that has to do with your identity even if identity-based pricing appears to be Delta’s long-run goal. Changing countries can also change the sales market or currency. Some sites will revert to your hom market and currency based on your address, credit card billing, or geolocation. You can go through one of Expedia’s country-specific websites to ticket in a specific country. But none of that is punishment for searching twice. There are fares that in some cases may be available only in a local market. Topics on this page