I propose another workaround alternative that doesn't exist yet. A "multi-browser" which lets you browse and visually diff the web from different points of view. See the web from deep china, europe, Kansas City, San Francisco, Chrome, Firefox, daytime and nighttime, incognito, logged-in, etc all at once (modulo some time spreading for opsec or something) so we can get back to peace and what matters: booking a bloody hotel room or reading a magazine article without making a project of it.
When I travel it is often cheaper (hundreds of dollar cheaper, even after currency conversion) to book parts of a trip from a UK or US based device, than from an Australian one, directly through the airline or hotels website. Same for digital goods -even for services that do not have a business or support presence locally ie no local overheads, we still get charged a premium.
It seems fairly reasonable to me to pass those costs on, though of course it can be hard to tell whether that is happening or whether you're just getting gouged.
The poster child for this was Adobe Creative Suite, which at one point in the 2010's, you were able to buy a return flight from sydney to LA, purchase the software, and fly home for less than it cost to buy domestically after exchange rates. They were hauled before a Senate committee and refused to give any answers.
https://delimiter.com.au/2013/02/14/farce-adobe-ceo-flatly-r...
Though it's difficult for non-citizens to get many services, since ID seems to be required for everything from getting a phone to riding a train. Most places also don't take cash, so you have to have a working phone and one of the payment apps.
Which is very interesting for China because we can marvel at the still large size and number of cities which see few foreign visitors. Leading to "tiny cities like Ordos 2M". Or what? dozens like that? Hundreds? And considering the size of the China "full of foreigners", that's an equivalently "authentic" China.
Anyway, Peru is fine if you prefer.
My point is pretty simple: Booking is offering a discount that only exists in the users head because they trust that after N purchases in a row this qualified them for getting an even better rate. But Booking can't really offer these things because they have already squeezed out the limit from the accommodation.
NPR did a piece on it last year which to me came off a bit too cheerful.
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1197958433/dynamic-pricing-gr...
Using only time of day is fairly primitive, though. We can do better. With facial recognition, we can probably personalize prices to the penny.
That’s the same argument for charging thousands of dollars for insulin. It’s also the same argument landlords are using to charge more to victims of the LA fires.
I've seen this advocated many times here for how cities should set parking rates. It never seems to be called predatory in that scenario.
It’s not really a good comparison and doesn’t seem predatory at all.
But also if you consider it predatory then you wouldn’t want to advocate or defend the expansion of the practice into other areas.
During COVID, I'd have preferred to be able to buy a roll of toilet paper for $5 than to have the price unchanged but the stores totally sold out for weeks.
In Ohio rare bottles are sold at retail pricing and you join a lottery to be able to purchase one. Secondary prices are $1,000 for a $100 bottle. We could just let people who are willing to wait to be first in line buy bottles and then sell them at higher prices - that's market efficiency, but we've decided that kind of sucks and instead we've decided to enact a lottery instead and open the bottles so you can't resell them as easily. Most people are pretty happy with the results. It's not efficient but that's ok.
I think parking falls under a similar purview, except that the government is heavily involved in parking schemes. As an example, the promotion of the usage of gas-powered vehicles and the automobile industry, which require us to go to war and things to secure supplies. There's very little that is efficient about that market and the usage of the vehicles is extremely subsidies, you're only noticing the immediate cost when you go and have to pay pricing for peak/off-peak hours. Other goods and services are more efficient and/or less necessary, so there's different pricing schemes that we like as a society.
The main problem with economics as a field is that it assumes "good" and/or rational behavior. But markets and the economy are just one aspect of society. We intentionally make trade-offs all the time because we like the results, even if they aren't efficient.
But politicians in California have forbidden the market from functioning in such a way -- so those with housing (possibly) available chose not to offer it because the price isn't worth it.
Plus the timescales involved go beyond “emergency” to actually effecting the market. LA is down 5000+ properties for the next 3+ years - a genuine reduction in supply that will drive prices upwards.
Price caps don’t limit demand and instead cause supply shortages, which we should expect to see in LA.
I’m in the former camp- it’s predatory and our prosperity is built on it.
It is possible that price gouging after a natural disaster is predatory, while action pricing for one-of-a-kind memorabilia is not.
What I am concerned about are the emergent effects of this. Invariably, everything will be more expensive. Whether a single transaction is unethical is kind of missing the point.
Not entirely the same. LA is currently missing homes and experiencing a surge. Of course the proper solution is to (re)build houses.
Price discrimination does not mean anyone is getting hosed. A simple example is someone that wants to go through the trouble of using coupons at grocery stores. A person with less time and more money might choose convenience, or a brand name product. A person with less money can still buy using a coupon, or buy generic.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean a richer person is obliged to pay more. But it’s not evil to attempt to maximize the take based on differing buying power / desire.
The game has obviously changed quite a bit, but I specified “able and willing to pay more” for this reason.
Two factors coincide for a buyer to make a decision to purchase something, ability and willingness. The seller does not benefit if they drive away people who are not able to pay more with too high prices, and if they give discounts to people who are able and willing to pay more, but savvy enough to figure out how to get the discount.
So a seller will enact hurdles for the savvy to see who is willing to do more work to get a discount, or they can sell under different labels to sell to both people paying lower prices and higher prices, under the guise that it is a different product.
Most common though is to slightly tweak a product so that you are not selling the same exact thing at different prices, so the person paying more feels like they got more for more money.
If all businesses discriminate then there is an opportunity to compete using no discrimination as an edge.
Just as, for example, if a business decided (if it was legal) to only allow people of a certain race to enter, I would like to think that most members of that race would be disgusted enough to boycott that business and the business will rightly fail.
Finally, people already effectively pay different amounts for all sorts of things due to varying amounts of tax paid.
The private sector can't detect or profit from your tax paid so they use where you live and other signals like whether you're using an iPhone etc. as a proxy for your income/wealth.
The reality is, every product has an asymmetry of information, and the more complex it is, the higher the asymmetry. And you can’t determine the quality of a product until you buy it. And determining quality takes time, which is a limited resource.
> the business will rightly fail
In reality, what stops bad behavior is regulation because in reality, people do not have infinite time and infinite information to assess each thing they consume.
Reputation is much easier to destroy and bad behavior is much harder to hide today than 50 years ago due to the easier spread of information.
There is still a huge spectrum of business behaviour that is not violating regulations. In the aggregate businesses who please their consumers more will thrive compared to those that don't.
What you probably mean is that people take the concept of the invisible hand too seriously. Which was a relatively minor point in the book, and has somehow been magnified to the point of absurdity by the economic and political trends of the last 40 years.
Adam smith is way more reasonable than you’d think, given how he’s portrayed in the modern era.
We literally have federal laws outlawing this because it was, in fact, a selling point to exclude other races. Are you unaware of the history, or just hoping that racism has successfully been ended in the United States?
I suspect almost all such businesses would die quickly.
So yes, there would be such public disgust and stigma that even those patrons who valued such a business would hopefully hesitate to expose their bigotry.
What are your parameters for optimization here? If the point is to maximize extracted revenue then this is a reasonable outcome but we could optimize for any number of targets. We could optimize to make the best use of resources, we could optimize for best consumer reviews, we could optimize for the ideal buyer/seller price that makes both entities in the transaction walk away with the best deal for each of them.
But there's this persistent notion in the current business zeitgeist that the only metric worth optimizing is profit maximization and it's one that we should reject. Companies need to make a profit and workers need to take home a salary and that's fine, but we get to build the world that we live in. Living in a world where we care about quality of life and equity in transactions is much more interesting to me than living in one where all we care about is the velocity of extraction from anything that isn't nailed down.
What I’m suggesting is to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior.
Every time a company is hacked, they pay into an annual pool. Every company which isn’t hacked receives money from that pool.
CO2 emissions are taxed, which goes into a pool. This pool is used to pay companies that scrub emissions.
I’m wondering if these incentives can work to increase life expectancy, decrease child mortality, eradicate diseases, etc.
Without better incentives there is no reason not to burn down the planet for a dollar. Of course it is not a panacea, it still requires some social trust.
How much value does this room provide you? If you can pay 2x, then it implies value you get is also 2x.
Third degree price discrimination is not as catchy. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-are-dif...
SSI is a joke, and the incoming Cruelty Administration is likely to make it worse.
I’d like to think that I can leave something to her, so she won’t wind up spending the remainder of her life on the streets. I’ve seen that happen, frequently.
What about other businesses that are willing to charge x-1?
If I sell bagels for $2 each, and then I go down the street and see another bagel shop selling for $1.90 each, I might try to offer mine for $1.80 (if I have margin to spare).
It’s really that simple and something that demonstrably happens in the real world every day.
To bring it back to dynamic pricing, you wouldn’t know what either shop will charge you until you’re there. In fact they could charge the same person different prices at different times.
But by all means, maybe you cracked the code. You should open your store and make a lot of money from these customers who aren't sensitive to price. Don't waste your time theory crafting about it on the internet!
Vendor lockin is also a thing. Even if AWS is more expensive, the cost to move elsewhere can be prohibitively high.
We tend to look at these things through a static lens “two major smartphone OSs” and not over longer periods of time, which is a problem in framing discussion. When Ford built their car there was approximately just one car (one OS). If you paused time there you’d apply the argument you’re making to Ford. But over the longer arc of time you’d have been incorrect.
The companies that do this will win long term in my opinion. People aren’t stupid.
Those who politically advocate for "equality of opportunity" should favor a future where this is how things work, not one where everyone ends up with $0 spending money. In fact, the latter is exactly the opposite – equality of outcome.
Accidental discovery, but have to say they've helped far more than hindered (especially with last minute bookings in distant lands).
Booking blames this on the hotels (probably true to some extend), but the problem is quite widespread so that Booking probably bears some responsibility, too.
I always book direct with the hotel. Saving $5 on a room is not worth showing up at 11pm to find out they don't have your reservation.
On rare occasions, using a 3rd party site will net you a better deal, but often, it's the exact same price, or a price within just a few dollars.
But if your reservation has a snag of any kind, you're basically fucked. The hotel will tell you to talk to Booking, Booking will tell you to talk to the hotel, if you can even talk to anybody.
I'd rather spent the extra dollars and book directly and just not have that worry.
The backend system lots of hotels uses will sell rooms at what is essentially the market rate, based on occupancy, demand, etc..., whereas the posted room rate is more stable, for better or worse (better if the hotel is close to full, worse if it's empty).
If Hilton isn’t running a special - and they are always running a special - if you have the Hilton Aspire credit card, you get 34 points per dollar worth usually around 20% in all. But often higher.
We will be staying at a hotel in Manuel Antonio n Costa Rica next month that would cost $4700 for 400K points.
Last year, we had around 70 days and this year we are looking at between 60-70 days.
At that point, hotel loyalty has benefits - loyalty points for free hotel stays , seat upgrades for flights and hotel room upgrades, lounge access when you fly a preferred airline etc.
Right now, if at all possible and the rates aren’t too much different, I’m going to stay in Hilton or Hyatt brand hotels. While I don’t care about 5 star hotels, I’m not staying at a Days Inn.
This isn't the case with airline miles; you get them either way, it seems. But there are often other benefits (eg, you get 5x miles if you book with your airline credit card directly through the airline).
OTOH, I prefer to purchase tickets directly with the airline because dealing with them directly when something happens is way better compared to having the OTA in the middle. Sometimes paying a small difference is worth the peace of mind.
And then they lost our luggage (tents and all), but that's another story.
My wife and I just spent several days finding and booking hotels for a 2 week trip with several stops. We searched on aggregators (Booking’s “king size bed” filter was particularly useful) but always defaulted to booking directly with the hotel. Oddly enough, one hotel had no means of booking directly; they only supported booking through an aggregator. One other hotel was offering the same price via Chase Travel, so I took the extra bonus Chase points.
Don't get them if you book it through booking.com or similar though (although hotels.com at least used to give you a 10% cashback as a credit for free nights, which is handy when you can't stay in one chain)
source: staying now in the hotel and done it ;)
Last year I was Hyatt Globalist and Hilton Diamond, so I got those benefits booking directly.
This year I will be Hilton Gold and Hyatt Explorist.
But I will get free C+ upgrades on Delta at time of booking because we are both Delta Platinum Medallion
I hate credit card companies too - but I can't deny that it's cheap to be rich and expensive to be poor. Just bite the bullet and get it or equivalent nice credit cards and use their (the credit cards) own travel booking websites. You'll be happy you did.
- Amex Platinum + paid authorized user
- Amex Delta Platinum, Business Platinum and Reserve - having all three got me halfway to Delta Platinum Medallion. They each have a buy one get one free ticket and Delta Stays credits
- Amex Green and Blue Business Plus
I’m also a credit card churner, I’m looking to get four this year for sign up bonuses
The agency isn’t going to do anything for you.
Moreover, booking international flights through that agency somehow always ended up cheaper than what I could find myself, even when accounting for their fees.
I used to use sites like Expedia for flights but lately i just book those directly through the carriers and i think the experience on that end is better.
I wonder if a single computer with a VPN could generate screenshots of those discounted quotes for the sole purpose of price-matching.
Now I find it is almost always the opposite. Outside some more super low budget hotel options. Booking direct on the direct site more often than not is cheaper than the travel / third party sites.
I like the new trend, the third party sites were too disconnected and wonky.
“Oh, you don’t see that price too? Sorry Mr Manager, I guess it must be because you’re booking it from another location. Nevermind then, I’ll continue to book through this partner instead…”
The problem is, the customers tend to want said third-party sites. Hotels have, at least for the masses, become a commodity - 99% of people just need a place to crash because they're out all day - and so customers expect to be able to shop around purely based on price and a bit on the location.
I live near a decent-sized college town and there is a hotel right off the interstate. It's a well-known hotel name in a decent (even semi-posh) location, so you'd think it was good and safe. In reality, it is run down, dirty, smelly, has pest problems, long-term residents, and lets just say is frequently the subject of police activity and only the occasional murder. The owner lives outside the country and has no interest in cleanliness, upkeep, or safety. The health department and local government have been trying to get it shut down but there's only so much they can do. The owners pay people to post positive reviews online and try very hard to get the bad reviews taken down.
Their prices are only slightly below most other hotels in the area and all of the photos are from rooms at other locations. So unless you actively went and searched the Internet for reviews for this specific location, you wouldn't know what you were getting into.
One off hotels in popular supply constrained tourist destinations are the exception.
It would be an amazing miracle if sites weren't still doing this.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/as-...
This was also true after we logged into loyalty accounts (the discounted loyalty price on iPhone was still higher than the general public price on Android).
I currently work remotely for a company based in California and they issue MacBooks by default to employees. We can request Windows devices but our IT department prefers to have as many people on Macs as possible for admin efficiency reasons.
We hire remote workers from all around the world and so this Mac-first policy has raised quite a bit of discussion about what the majority of our workforce is accustomed to and has been trained on. It has come up time and time again that Macs are really popular in California but outside of that state Windows still dominates by a large margin.
Now, not all parts of California are affluent of course. And like every state the demographics are all over the place in terms of income. I bring this anecdote up because I wonder if both the Bay Area discrimination discussed in the article and your hypothesis about Macs stems from California stereotypes. Outside of the state, even though wildly inaccurate and unfair for a great many Californians, a lot of people tend to think of California as if everyone in the state is extremely privileged.
One might think they spent more time in apps, and more time total, but perhaps Android users would spend more time on the Web—but no, iOS users also spent markedly more time in their browser than Android users. They used everything on the device more, period.
Who knows why. SES-related stuff—maybe more free time? Their devices just being way more pleasant to use (this was a leading hypothesis among my fellow mobile devs who spent lots of time in both operating systems)? Hard to say.
Could your statistics compare iPhones with premium (e.g. largest screen size) Android phones, therefore excluding most of the budget Androids?
> The implication is that the expensive rate that San Franciscans see is the “real” price — while Kansas City and Phoenix travelers are getting a discount.
Uber and their 'flash promos' come to mind here.
And some of this has always existed. Think of stores which always offer a coupon. Customers only pay full price if they are in a desperate rush or if they don't know. But the fact that it has always existed doesn't make it any nicer.
I also wonder if/when AirBnB/VRBO may start doing a similar thing? But I guess that would involve the private property owner participating in the scheme.
Whereas if you use a residential cablemodem or DSL or FTTH connection in some specific city, where you're likely not behind cgnat and the ivp4 /22 or larger sized IP block you are "coming from" remains consistent on a multi year basis, 3rd party geolocation providers are much more likely to say "yep that person is in the SF bay area"
Using a VPN, with the associated hassle, likely indicates the person is stingy and very price sensitive, so you want to keep giving them the cheaper prices relative to others.
Probably - unfortunately - and so we can expect buying online to become ever more cumbersome. Great /s. Although diminishing returns might save us: the platforms will focus on "most buyers" and hopefully leave techies alone. But we can see in the youtube story that in some cases there is sooooo much money that even the techies will be beat back through pharaonic efforts.
What about travel agents? Do they also get price discriminated against depending on where they are?
This can lead to startup ideas as in book-from service which scans all the zip codes and helps book from the cheapest one.
This applies even if the experimenter is not going any further than checking top level prices, because other people are booking actual hotels and thus impacting prices all the time.
Edit: "I compared hotel room rates for five different sites: Kayak, Booking.com, Trivago, Expedia and Hotels.com. The tests were all performed on Dec. 11, 2024, within a two-hour span, and involved searching for a hotel room in Manhattan For Valentine’s Day weekend, Feb. 14 to 16, 2025."
Haven't used those before, so that could be it. Also suspect that it's very specific to the hotel and won't show up for mine. Anyway I'll try it.
This isn't some crazy situation without competition, like charging US military $50 for a can of coke.
Booking.com, Priceline are owned by Booking holding
Expedia, Kayak are owned by Expedia Group
TripAdvisor is owned by Liberty Media
Airbnb is private.
Very good and yes: Think of it from the manufacturer / seller perspective. Why shouldn't it be? If the goal it to optimize profit or return (and it is), then anything less would be a waste of opportunity. Even kickstarters go to great effort to think up ways to "justify" "bonus offers".
This is often one of the great failures of new ventures not to try and offer versions or features that SOME customers would love to pay for.
Except not pricing discimination in that these prices apply to everyone (who doesn't know the discount code). Just "differentiation" and "price point". Offering a different price to someone who "calls" from San Francisco, Kansas City or Mumbai is a different issue, and less palatable.
The interesting thing about this statement is that expecting a fixed price for anything is a relatively new phenomenon. It isn't very long ago that the price for pretty much everything was individually negotiated in some physical market, and nobody expected to pay the same price as everyone else.
This is a lot like back in the movie rental days. The VHS cassette for a new release would be $120 or something, and only a few months later could you buy it at the grocery store checkout for $25.
It's certainly plausible, but I'm not going to just accept it.
“Enthusiasts” might have legitimate reasons for preferring hardcover (durability, aesthetics, etc) and are willingly and knowingly paying extra for that.
How much it cost to manufacture is mostly irrelevant.
I've worked at a place where there was exactly one chip and ~8 ways to disable different things to make the whole product family, with nearly 2x difference in cost between low and high. This is usually done by disabling bad sections of the chip, but if yields are too high, you just disable functioning bits of good chips. Our yields were great. :-|
I think the term used for this practice is "market-segmentation".
(I don’t agree with the practice, but I am also opposed to progressive taxation as well.)
hotels that overcharge bay area customers, and hotels that overcharge other customers?
Booking.com operates as a de-facto monopoly.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/spain-fines-bookingco...
'iforgot22' is literally wrong by around half a billion dollars [2].
It's bizarre that initially stating a world-widely reported, simple fact needs "proving". And, results in downvotes like there were insults to someone's mother...
And it's also sad to see such irrational ideological biases at HN.
[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/03e5eb20-ec91-485e-b0e4-ed49b4dc2...