Can you buy the same ticket at a lower price if you buy it from another country?
travel.stackexchange.com
travel.stackexchange.com
In the end, I've realized that my time is better spent not chasing these elusive deals. I can spend all day searching for the cheapest flight somewhere, or I can just book the cheapest thing on Kiwi or SkyScanner in 10 minutes and spend the rest of my day writing code for a project that is paying me far more money than I would have saved searching for flight deals.
The best hacks to save money on plane tickets: travel carry-on luggage only, fly economy, and book with a credit card that provides travel insurance and accumulates rewards. Chase Sapphire cards are pretty much the standard for travelers.
Usually saves at least €100 each way, every time I travel, and occasionally much more. And as a bonus, it's quite nice to spend a day working from a coworking space in a random city elsewhere and see a little of the local working lifestyle.
A coworking space for a single day in a European city is normally €20 or so, but many places offer free 1 day trials too, and there's also 'work from anywhere' portable coworking subscriptions and 'use any of our locations' benefits from multi-city coworking chains, if you/your company already pay for coworking elsewhere.
I LOVE public libraries, but not always set up for working comfortably, especially if I need to take a call, or want to do some whiteboarding.
And lastly, paying for something sometimes makes my appreciate it more - I've paid for this space so I WILL WORK.
Anecdotal for sure, but it changed the way I look at coworking spaces.
Lately though I’ve noticed a trend with libraries becoming… scarier? Even in seemingly wealthy, clean, safe areas, there’s a ~20yo pacing around very… agitated? Drugs, lack of drugs, bad day perhaps - not sure - not my specialty. My conscious brain was saying “it’s fine, you’re in a well-lit public area”
My less conscious brain eventually forced me to move to a spot against a wall, where everything was happening in at-least-peripheral vision.
Be aware of the limitations though. For example, you rent a scooter in Vietnam. Well, you're not covered in an accident because you are only covered if you have a license. The only way to get a license is to live in Vietnam and they don't recognize a US IDP.
Then they outsourced it to Expedia, and the hold times went up and the efficiency and sanity of the whole process of dealing with any minor adjustment to your flight or travel plans degraded precipitously.
It seems like in 2021, they bought the company that was providing the backing technology for the in-house version of the service and have ditched Expedia again, so maybe this has gotten better since my last stint of big international travel?
I do understand the strategy of just going after the cheapest flights and I know younger people who swear by it. But these are often the same people who will not pay annual fees for credits cards, so they have never tried these rewards programs.
Also, if a customer has accumulated a large quantity of points, then she may not want to use the points on the "cheapest" options. She might want to choose more expensive ones since she is using points.
That is impossible if one wishes to carry a pocketknife or handgun at one’s destination. The latter is fairly uncommon, but the former is very common, right?
Not to mention if one is bringing back a bottles of beer, wine or spirits.
1) I require a pocketknife and a handgun immediately upon arrival, and
2) I'd also like to pick up some bottles of fine wine while I'm there.
Sounds like a very interesting vacation, though.
I carry a pocketknife every day.
I don’t carry a handgun, but there are plenty of states in the U.S. with CCW reciprocity; someone who carries in one and wishes to fly to another might quite reasonably wish to carry there as well.
‘Immediately’ is a loaded word. It would be weird to mail my hotel a pocketknife for a weekend trip.
> I'd also like to pick up some bottles of fine wine while I'm there.
There are a ton of microbreweries and distilleries in the U.S. whose products are not nationally distributed. I often like to bring things back from my travels. Wine’s not as regional, I think.
It’s an OR, of course, not an AND: some folks want to carry a pocketknife; others a handgun; others wish to fly with more than a few very small bottles of liquid.
idk, is it really?
>Not to mention if one is bringing back a bottles of beer, wine or spirits.
Buy that stuff at the destination.
If you're trying to reduce airline hassle, you kind of have to skip the handgun, mail it to yourself or get (borrow?) one at your destination. Whether or not you "need" one really depends on the purpose and location of your trip, but those details are too specific for this conversation. Also consider taking the train, since if you're carrying a handgun it's probably a domestic USA trip.
A tip for bringing back un-carryon-able items: Pack a simple and low bulk backpack inside your carry-on suitcase. If you decide to bring forbidden items back, check your carry-on suitcase and bring whatever you need for the plane in your backpack. This way you pay checked bag fees only in one direction and only if you really need to.
No, it’s honestly not. I carry a pocketknife all the time, to open envelopes or packages, cut twine, slice a sausage or cut some cheese, whatever.
As for handguns, it’s not common in other countries, but in many American states it is relatively easy to get a license to carry one, and about 1% of the population do on a daily basis. They are useful for self-defense. Plenty of people like to target shoot, too. It’s easy enough to fly with them in one’s checked baggage (one just has to declare them, and of course they must be unloaded), but they aren’t allowed to be carried aboard (or in the airport, for that matter). If one is already checking one’s firearm, one might as well just check a full bag.
I hear you, though, I frequently bring back some knickknacks from abroad and will check in a small bag of booze.
These are money saving tips. In general, if you want to go beyond basic services/privileges, you’re gonna have to pay more.
Just wait for the day when airlines buy hotel booking data and increase your price because you already booked a non-refundable room. Or they look into your messaging service or social network for clues in how determined you are to go (e.g., to a funeral or job interview). Privacy is valuable, indeed. Even in hard cash.
Glad someone mentioned it, one of reasons to NOT use any social media. Pretty sure, this is already in the plans for all the big social media companies.
Most people use social media platform, or messenger owned by those companies to communicate between friends and family not realising the side effects. Please, use some kind of E2E app and make sure the people who are running the server doesn't have access to your data and meta data.
If your flight is cancelled you get it refunded or monetary compensation only if you bought it from the EU website of the airline. If you bought it form another country, then the laws of that country apply. It's simple.
(Which is unfortunate, as there usually is VAT on train tickets.)
Actually this is (usually) the opposite
Tickets sold for tourism are usually cheaper than a non-tourism ticket to the same place, so the ticket might be conditioned to being sold together with a hotel booking (travel agents like selling those combos)
The difference with tourism is that usually they are not refundable or have quite limited refundability and these all thus sold for less.
I can only do this because I consistently travel to that same place every year, otherwise I wouldn't be able to swap the origin. It also requires you knowing your dates in advance, but generally, even if I have to change the ticket, it's still much cheaper to pay the difference.
So whenever the next trip was required the return-leg of the trip was changed and a new return trip was booked.
I thought that airlines will block you from buying a flight from a different country. Often this is liked to credit card issuer country. E.g. you can't buy a flight departing from Australia on a foreign website using an Australian credit card.
Because the poster is repeating this purchase every year, it results in the same long-term flight pattern. However, because they have shifted the airline’s window into those travel patterns by a half step, all of the flights look cheaper to the airline’s pricing algorithm.
I had this happen on AA. for legal reasons, I had to book a flight in advance (9 months). had to cancel, but did not immediately rebook. went to rebook 14 months after purchase date and credit has evaporated. (
All the tickets include "weekend stays" but you never spend a weekend in XYZ.
The OP may have used a one way ticket or something for the original trip since airlines don't book more than a year out.
> returning "home" to XYZ for a little bit before booking another
More likely, "booking another" actually happens before landing in XYZ, closer to 6 months out (seeking the best price), but otherwise you've got it.
I was living in DC area but was traveling to Bay Area every week (mon to fri) for work.
I always booked fare in reverse with Friday evening departure (from sfo) and Monday morning ( from DCA) return. A Saturday night “stay” apparently made it a leisure fare which was way cheaper than Monday to Friday fare which was way more expensive. (Like 4x more). [ this was United Airlines btw].
My understanding is that this does not work anymore (at least for US domestic). Airfare are all priced for one way (return fare is just the sum of two legs).
However, difference between what business travelers pay and what leisure travelers pay is huge (see hertz rental prices or Marriott hotel prices for saturday vs Monday).
Just looked up economy London-Singapore return, Sunday-Sunday in economy on BA Aug 7 to Aug 13
and there's space in the 'M' bucket with fare MHNC80S7 which is £510 each eay (plus fees and taxes)
TRAVEL FROM LAST INTERNATIONAL STOPOVER MUST COMMENCE NO
EARLIER THAN THE FIRST SUN AFTER DEPARTURE OF THE FIRST
INTERNATIONAL SECTOR.
That means the extra day in Singapore saves you £1200. (the taxes and fees are the same regardless)
If you travel a lot - especially flexibly - then it is sometimes worth a subscription to expertflyer, which if far faster at seeing rules and availability than traipsing through ITA Matrix.
1.Kick off Itinerary 1 on Sunday 1 (To SFO),
2.Kick off Itinerary 2 on Friday 1 (DC return),
3.Kick off Itinerary 3 on Sunday 2 (To SFO),
4.Close Itinerary 1 on Friday 2 (DC return),
5.Close Itinerary 2 on Sunday 3 (To SFO),
6.Close Itinerary 3 on Friday 3 (DC Return)
...ad infinitum
Yes, it looks like traveling outbound from some major hubs is more expensive than from other places. A round trip SFO-XYZ two week ticket can be substantially more expensive than XYZ-SFO round trip for the same period.
Note that depending on when you travel and for how long, a SFO-XYZ-SFO ticket might be more expensive also because it is a shorter ticket (1 month or 3 month ticket) and it hits a high season period ("tourist season"), whereas the XYZ-SFO-XYZ is a long-term ticket (12 months) that avoids (most of) the high season.
I live in Budapest and regularly have to go to Wien. If you buy the ticket from the hungarian railways it costs the half or less than compared to the austrian railways.
Example: next monday
Hungarian BP>Wien https://i.imgur.com/9rZgB8c.png
Austrian BP>Wien https://i.imgur.com/mn95IrV.png
Hungarian Wien>BP https://i.imgur.com/GymMOaW.png
Austrian Wien>BP https://i.imgur.com/zN3VCDv.png
I always tell my friends coming from Germany or Austria to buy tickets from the hungarian railways because it's much cheaper.
I think you also had to make it an international ticket to make it work, booking the journey from Berlin to the first station after the border. And then just leaving the train early, at your intended destination.
I do actually track the prices and have built a site that exposes the data[1]. I found a couple of other hacks that are interesting (for example, you can save multiple thousands of £ by just splitting your stay, you'll need to move to a different hotel room but that might be worth it for many).
So if you're in country A, but you're browsing the news website of country B, they might see where you're browsing from and offer up an ad for travel from/to your specific country A. This is meant for expats because the whole site and the ad is in the language of country B.
This was on a flight that had already been booked from the US long ago.
[1] https://www.vatupdate.com/2021/04/21/vat-rates-in-france/Cheapest ones in France are around 700-800€ when japanese ones are around 41,000¥ (~300€). This is crazy.
Japanese website:
> All amounts are in JPY. Taxes and surcharges are excluded.
French website:
> All amounts are in EUR. Taxes, surcharges and booking fee are included.
Does including all taxes amount to the same prices?
What used to work very well is to rent a car through a foreign website. I live(d) in the US and was planning a trip in California for a few weeks back in ~2015. By going through a major car rental company's UK website, I literally halved my cost.
I didn't have much luck with this trick last time I travelled though, unfortunately.
The only downside is last-minute cancellations will cost a non-trivial fee, but even those can be mitigated through insurance.
[1] https://www.ttcar.com/en/ttcar [2] https://www.autoeurope.com
Side note if you ever find yourself up that way it’s hands down the most beautiful drive I’ve ever done in my life and I’ve been driving in Iceland, Switzerland and other parts of Norway several times
If you ask very very nicely when it's not too busy, someone may teach you the query terminal and let you have a look at fares across airlines if you happen to be more/less stranded.
But https://matrix.itasoftware.com/search is a close second, if you know how to play around
To me, this is a signal that Google has used all of its price history data for flights to say "this is a bottom in price", and given they don't want to lose money hand over fist from mispredictions, they're probably right.
I usually set up a price watch on a specific flight I want, then every time it drops, I check if it got the "low price guarantee" stamp of approval and buy then. Even if I'm wrong, I'll get paid the difference either way!
- for return flights I always get different fares based on the origin. At least for the airlines that I travel with it does not matter what my IP is, but where my origin is.
- depending on the airline or the hotel booking service, I get higher fares if I book with an iPhone (including their apps) or a Mac comparing to when I spoof my user agent to Windows. The difference can be substantial.
- for hotel bookings, my IP location used to make a big difference. I guess these days the services just became better at finger printing and detecting VPNs.
[0] https://www.sixt.es/betafunnel/#/offerlist?zen_pu_location=7...
[1] https://www.sixt.de/betafunnel/#/offerlist?zen_pu_location=7...
I'm pretty sure it's illegal in the EU for the same company to give a different price to customer depending on where they live in the union, I assume they get around that by being "not the same company" but sixt spain and sixt germany instead ...
Skyscanner has come up in this discussion, and full disclosure: I'm an employee. But this is an entirely personal comment.
Skyscanner has a lot of different market-based websites, for example https://www.skyscanner.de and https://www.skyscanner.fr. We don't geo-block, though: wherever you are, you'll have full access to any Skyscanner website, and we'll happily give you whichever market, locale, and currency triple you ask for. And we pass on the underlying market-based prices that we're given. So if you want to know whether different markets get different selections of flights, or different prices for the same flight, it's relatively easy to look and find examples.
Amazon is the same: you'll get different products and prices on de and uk, but if I'm willing to pay shipping then Amazon is willing to sell me stuff from Germany even though the UK left the EU and it's legal for them to block me or give me different prices. Which was very useful when I needed radiator thermostat adapters a couple of months ago.
* I was recently looking at GVA-EWR-BTV vs just GVA-EWR it was several hundred dollars less to go to BTV.
* I was in Paris three weeks ago, looking at return flights CDG-SFO. It was several hundred dollars cheaper to book FRA-CDG-SFO or GVA-CDG-SFO than CDG-SFO.
Go on a website, be it legit airline site or reputable agency. Book, pay for the flight. After payment, they inform you that the trip you booked (through their website) simply does not exist. Your only choice is to ask for a refund that will take 28 days. Easy, cheap cashflow.
Happened to me 3 times this year, Qatar airways (official site), Fram (official site). Happened to my friends and family, all post covid.
I need to go back to France next month, am 4000 euros down in "pending refunds", reached my cc limit and most importantly, have no idea where to safely book a ticket.
You select the flight and enter your name and pay.
When I was in Africa I flew out of, and then back into Mali, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Egypt.
Booking the tickets to do so while sitting in those countries was up to half the price of booking it from the Developed country I was flying into.
I was just using kayak.com in Incognito and the price differences were staggering.
This decreased the cost of the ticket by approximately 50%
It was important to book on the right local carrier of Lan to do this, as well as entering certain info for the voucher itself
No Peru passport or driver's license required.
To fly to Tokyo from Costa Rica round trip via Atlanta layover is about $1500.
You don't even need a VPN to see the price difference. It's the same airlines, the same exact planes.
It's priced by demand not by costs and it is absurd imo, especially from a climate perspective. Should I take a Costa Rica vacation I don't need just to save money?
It has me evaluating
Medicines in the US cost 50 times their cost in Thailand.
[1] https://static.toiimg.com/thumb/imgsize-23456,msid-72197131,...
But why keep the price the same for Americans? Wouldn’t it be more profitable to increase the price overall?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination#Travel_in...
It doesn't seem like an abuse of terms, just not fully explaining what a VPN is or how you should use it in the short title.
If you know where you are going, where you are staying, when, how, etc then you can pretty much do all that yourself online, no need for an agent [1].
But if you want advice, then agents can be useful. Say for example I want to visit Barcelona, a place I've never been. An agent can help me plan that (when to go, where to stay, what can/should I do etc.) They're like an intelligent Google. They'll also likely know some hacks to make it cheaper if I'm flexible enough. They can do a lot more than just purchase tickets for me.
[1] I needed an agent once. I was flying from the UK to USA on United. I live (and my CC is based in a country United doesn't fly to directly.) United _requires_ me to use the "web site of the country matching my credit card". Except they don't fly to my country, so no web site. I could book online, but no way to complete the purchase. I ended up using a travel agent in London (which is where I _was_) to make the booking for me...
A travel agent can basically set up a complex chain of things and then book it all in one go. They'll also handle the fallback scenario if something goes wrong. And if you are on your destination and it turns out the complex chain of flights back home is no longer available, then they'll sort out a whole new itinerary. For 90% of trips it's probably not all that useful, e.g if you fly just 1-2 legs or stay in just 1 hotel.
Right, because "travel agents" were a front for a network of Cold War Russian spies with an incredibly high skill at impersonating a typical American family -- no accents, real kids, very middle-class. It all fell apart after an FBI agent moved in next door to one of them. I heard one of the female spies was a dead ringer for the actress who played Felicity on television.
As for flights, the last few times I tried booking from a booking como5any through Skyscanner where the price was 20% lower, I got all the way to entering my CC number and clicking "Buy now" only for the page to tell me, "Oops, tickets for this price are no longer available, do you want to buy for [price advertised on the airline website]?"... Hell fuck no!
But as I said, none of this involves actually saving money
Her banging away magical codes in Sabre was a lot easier than me trying to use the shambles which is currently Qantas’ website.
But yeah, first time I’ve been in a TA in perhaps 20 years.
They need to find three separate providers/offers, and then choose cheapest option... so they call an agency, tell them where they want to go and when, what hotel, and that they need two more expensive options too,... so an agency calls other friendly agencies, tell them what (higher) price they need, and the public sector worker gets what they need with minimal work.
Most of the airlines price the flight roughly the same (writing up the differences in pricing to currency conversions, like ~1%) but Singapore Airlines is offering the same flight at 3x the cost!
I feel like I've read in the past about how flight tickets are priced based on many rules, that are shared between various companies that sell tickets. My inference is thus that these rules might be dynamic, but they aren't like.... "price will change minute to minute based on all of the cookies in your browser" dynamic. Which then leads me to wondering: what sort of pricing rules are kicking in for these pricing differences? Because it feels to me a lot more like "lack of a discounting mechanism" rather than "rule that triples singapore airline flights out of Tokyo for Tokyo-based pruchases"
[0]: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/flights?search=eyJ0eXBlIjoicm...
[1]: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/flights?search=eyJ0eXBlIjoicm...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price_discrimination.as...
Everyone including you will do it whenever you can when selling. The logical place surveillance capitalism is going isn't pretty. Will regulation protect consumers or will Goog, FB, Apple etc capture a good amount of everyone's consumer surplus? Would mass consumer outrage influence regulators more than lobbying cash?
I don't have any answers, if don't think much of the questions it'd be interesting to know why you think that way.
This is absolutely one of those situations where we should really start thinking about what kind of world we want to live in and where we are actually headed.
Surveillance capitalism powering price discrimination sounds scary, but there seems to be few examples of ML powered price discrimination. Currently we are paying massive amounts for simple price discrimination. You can save a ton of money (for things in general) by searching for discounts, booking ahead of time, accepting slower shipment, waiting for off-season/off-peak, buying in bulk, haggling, etc.
Yes it is. That's why people who book flights using an Apple computer will pay more (https://www.imore.com/mac-users-might-be-paying-more-pc-user...) they're pricing based on their best assumptions about your income level.
Their dream is that they'll be able to just use facial recognition, or grab your ID from your cell phone, or force you to sign up for an account with them so they have all the info they need to pull up your credit history, yearly income, the size of your household, a list of your recent purchases, and whatever else they can get from data brokers all just to make better guesses about your wealth and how much money they can squeeze out of you rather than just using your IP address or your useragent, and that's in the works (https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/11/17/a-special-p...) but until they can shift public perception away from viewing that sort of thing as being discriminatory and exploitative, or until everyone in an industry is doing it too (airlines and hotels) it's still seen as too risky. see https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3
There is no claim of this on the article you linked and no proof of it. It says “could be”, which is unsubstantiated.
The hotel itself never charged Mac users more, and I have never seen or heard of Hyatt/Marriott/Hilton/etc websites charging based on which operating system they think the query is coming from.
I have yet to see proof that airlines or hotels or car rental companies directly put out different prices to customers based on the device being used, or even anything else.
What they do do to price discriminate is sell via opaque pricing, e.g.
Or discounted volume pricing for travel agents who promise to pay a minimum and then the travel agent is on the hook for organizing a group of travelers.
But those are both different than price discriminating based on Windows/Mac.
That's much less fair, but try this which explicitly states that airlines in the US set prices according to a customer’s personal information.
https://catalaconsulting.co.uk/why-hotel-personalized-pricin...
and note this source in particular:
https://www.duettocloud.com/press-releases/duetto-gamechange...
Companies are already prepared to sell this to hotels as a service: https://blog.guestcentric.com/personalized-prices-the-next-s...
No, it does not. Your catala consulting link is about what hotels could do, and it is nothing more than what you learn about price segmentation in microeconomics 101.
>https://www.duettocloud.com/press-releases/duetto-gamechange...
This is a valid link, but still not about hotels in the sense that most people use for tourism/visits friends/family and work.
It is about casinos using technology to automate how to entice their whales, which they already did using “comped” rooms and upgrades and whatnot in exchange for gambling.
I have yet to see evidence that an airline website presents different prices to customers based on the device they are using (the original claim), nor do mainstream hotels like Hiltons/Marriotts/IHG/Wyndham/Choice/Accor/etc.
They very well might in the future. And in some broad sense, currently do via benefits for frequent customers via rewards programs, but as of now, there is no automated pricing system that drills down to the individual level.
Ok in this particular example of price discrimination it isn't. Yet. Sure.
Now imagine you wan't to power it buy surveillance capitalism to get more of that surplus and current laws and norms are no object. What would that look like? How close do you think we will get to that? How fast? [1] Think vendors will keep much of that captured surplus in the face of Goog, FB, Apple, whatever market power?
[1] I'd just refuse to buy any ticket unless your country of birth and residency of your family was known, which holidays you celebrate. By which I mean make dis counts readily available on that basis (with exclusions) to really slug anyone going home for high holidays, for example. Frame it as a discount, whatever.
So that's one way it might go. Can you think of how this is going to work for insurance? Health insurance? What else would really supercharge revenue using techniques like this?
I am actually not worried about Surveillance Capitalism powered Price Discrimination in it's current state. It is probably happening already, but not to a wide degree. A few things would make me worry, and they are also mostly things that are opportunities for price discrimination.
* There is no cash option. There is no resell option. There are no advertised prices.
* I must disclose personal information to do business, before the prices are revealed. You can link your travel agent website with social media, but you can also guest checkout from a public library.
* Comparative shopping is hard/impossible. Ideally the information age actually empowers consumers on this one. This doesn't stop companies from varying prices based on individuals, but it does put downward pressure on prices. Cartels and price collusion can negate this.
Mostly because you don't have to buy any of this. If it's that unfair, figure a better/cheaper way to do it yourself, otherwise quit complaining that the poor ppl have it so much better
Maybe nobody has to buy an airline ticket, but I'm not convinced that's true. Worse, is that while you can look at the places where we know this pricing model is being used right now and think it won't impact you, the goal for many years has been to push this to everything you buy everywhere.
The only thing holding them back is that most consumers feel that this is abusive and discriminatory. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3
Still, it's being tested all the time, including in grocery stores. They want to use your personal income level, your personal buying habits, all of the information they can get about you, and use it to set a different price for you than the next person, but also to offer some goods and services only for certain people, hold certain policies only for certain people etc.
Right now, you might be able to dismiss this when it comes to airline tickets or hotel bookings, but what we're heading toward is a caste system, several really, where "you don't have to buy any of this" will need to apply to food and toilet paper and "your kind aren't allowed to buy this" is right around the corner.
When the vendor know what's in your hand, your "I could walk" bluff is called and you get smashed. Every business including yours and mine wants to charge every single customer as much as they will possibly pay. Capture consumer surplus. Surveillance capitalism can help here.