How to pay less for your plane ticket? Certain tips long recommended by the most experienced travelers have ended up becoming a reflex. But ultimately, they are not effective at all.
When we are about to book a trip, whether it is a short or long stay, we always try to choose the most economical destination. The same goes when looking for a plane ticket. Generally, we use flight comparator sites which allow you to find the flight at the best price, because the prices displayed are sometimes much more expensive depending on the airlines or the times and dates chosen. Other little tips, long recommended, have gradually become habits for most French people when making an online reservation.
Indeed, according to popular belief, the more we search for a destination or compare the prices of a particular flight, the easier it would be for the airline to identify us as particularly interested travelers and potential customers. . Result: prices would immediately increase online. In any case, that’s what most travelers thought until an American study and a specialist in good deals suggested the opposite.
Yes, there is no need to play hacker by emptying your cookies or searching for a flight in private browsing! “There’s a lot of bad travel advice out there. But what always makes me cringe is when people insist that deleting your cookies will cause flight prices to drop“, writes Scott Keyes, the CEO of the Going platform, specialist in good deals, on a blog. An American study carried out by economists from Berkeley, Yale and the University of Chicago corroborates this theory according to which the price of tickets flight is not at all linked to our interests or our online behavior.
So why do we sometimes see a price difference in private browsing? According to Scott Keyes, airline ticket prices increase within minutes, and between two searches. Browsing history and cookies will not change the volatility of ticket prices. Another study published in 2016 in the American magazine Consumer Reports compared the prices of reservations with and without private browsing. Fares were the same in 88% of cases, flights were cheaper in 7% of cases and more expensive in 5% of cases. So there is very little difference. To make real savings, it is therefore preferable to compare airline prices and choose flexible dates, as prices can also be more attractive from one day to the next.