In today’s age of technology, we are booking flights and flying across the county at increasing rates. With the summer season upon us, ticket prices will also be increasing. However, there are still a few tricks to try to get the cheapest tickets available be flying at certain times or certain days. You can read my post Best Time to Book Airline Tickets. However there is another trick that a lot of people may not know, and it’s pretty simple. It’s called clearing your cookies. Not we aren’t talking about cleaning cookie crumbs off your keyboard, lol, we are talking about clearing the history in your browsers.
Airlines are sneaky and use what is called Dynamic Pricing. This simply means that prices go up based on demand. Thus refreshing your browser window a million times a minute will not make a flight cheaper and could use your search history against you. Pretty sneaky of them huh? It makes it look like there is more demand for a flight so they up the prices to keep up with the “demand”.
While planning our trip to Europe a few years ago, I was doing some searching and found that prices jumped, increased at least $10-$15 in about 30 minutes. Sometimes it was even more drastic depending on which airlines I was searching. Sometimes prices may go back down after clearing cookies, but more often than not, they just stayed the same. At least they didn’t go up, but I still don’t want to pay more for the same flight.
It seems like a silly thing to do to save money, but I am definitely willing to take a few minutes and clear my cookies before starting a search. Like I said before, why not get the cheapest price available? I enjoy working with computers, but I know some people don’t, so clearing cookies might not be something they know how to do, or might seem intimidating. However, it is pretty easy. Here are the directions below for clearing your cookies on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome.
Internet Explorer
- On your browser select Tools then Internet Options.
- Click on the General tab and then the Delete… button.
- Make sure to uncheck Preserve Favorites website data and check both Temporary Internet Files and Cookies then click Delete.
Chrome
- On your browser toolbar, then More.
- Point to More tools, and then click Clear browsing data.
- In the “Clear browsing data” box, click the checkboxes for Cookies and other sites and plugin data and Cached images and files.
- Use the menu at the top to select the amount of data that you want to delete. Choose beginning of time to delete everything.
- Click Clear browsing data.
Firefox:
- On your browser toolbar, click More, then Tools
- Click on “Clear recent history.”
- Set the time range to “Everything.”
- Click on the arrow next to “Details” to expand the list of history items and select “Cookies.”
- Click “Clear now” to clear the cookies and then close the window.
Hope this post helps you save a little bit of money on your next trip or vacation. I don’t like the way they work, but that is the way it is today and I don’t see it changing. Just make sure to clear your cookies before and during searches, and you should hopefully get the best possible price out there.
Join Samantha next Wednesday: May 12th at 8 pm Eastern on Zoom for “Let’s Talk Travel“ Click the link to join the conversation! The topic for this call will be travel accommodations. Do you like to stay at hotels, an Airbnb, a hostel, etc? I look forward to hearing your thoughts and suggestions. Hope to see you then. Click the link above to join the conversation! Password: Travel
