Airlines, search engines and booking sites often offer different fares for flights based on information about a particular user, including him country and region of residence, history of requests and page visits. Tourists were told that with the help of a VPN, you can fool this system and reduce airfare, Express writes.
As a rule, airlines do not set a single retail price for flights, constantly adjusting it depending on demand, developments in countries, aircraft locations, and customer information. To obtain user data, sites use an IP address, a number that is assigned to each device when connected to the Internet. It can be used to determine the make and model of the device, operating system and region.
All this information affects the price of tickets that a person sees on the screen. For example, if he visits the website of an airline or aggregator from a country with a high average income, flights are more expensive. Sometimes the model of the device also affects. Travel website Orbitz admitted to showing more expensive hotel rooms to those who visit the service on a Mac rather than a Windows PC, as the former costs more money and therefore offers a higher income.
Rumor has it that cookies – software that tracks web movements – are also used to adjust price tags. Although a number of major travel search engines and booking sites deny this practice, users often report that plane and train tickets become more expensive when they revisit a previously visited page to book at a later time.
To bypass all the tricks of airlines and booking websites, travelers are advised to use a VPN. It encrypts the information transmitted by the device to the website, hides and protects it, and also allows you to change the IP address containing the current location data. In the VPN settings, you can choose the country in which the device is allegedly “located” and get access to the necessary pages, services and cheaper flights that a person would not see in other circumstances.
By itself, the use of a VPN does not reduce the cost of flights, since there is no universal country where all tickets would be cheap. You will have to experiment and try different options. For example, when flying with airlines of specific countries, such as Turkish Airlines, Singapore Airlines, American Airlines, Air Canada, Qatar Airways and others, it may be advantageous to “accommodate” in this country. Similarly, if a person is flying from an airport abroad, local fares may vary.
To find cheap flights with a VPN, you need to:
- download, install and run the VPN you like -service on your device;
- select the country that the traffic will be masked as;
- clear cookies in the web browser to delete data about previously visited sites;
- find suitable tickets, compare prices and make a bargain.
< li>open the selected airline or ticket booking site;
If you couldn’t find cheap tickets the first time, you can try to select another country and repeat the following steps, including deleting cookies. To keep track of how prices change depending on VPN settings, we recommend that you save screenshots or take notes.
For those who care about a healthy lifestyle, we recommend reading: “The doctor said what happens if you drink more than three cups coffee a day.