In an Instagram video that has nearly 30 million views, a couple claims to save hundreds of dollars simply by booking a flight on a library computer.
The library computer, according to the post, is essentially a blank slate unencumbered by the digital baggage of search histories, IP addresses, digital fingerprints or logged-in accounts — and so, theoretically, won’t serve you inflated prices based on past shopping habits.
Readers asked what we thought. We posed the question to experts, who declared themselves “very skeptical” and said the tip was “one of those airfare myths.”
“Every time we see airfares inch upward, we see the cheap flight hacks come out to play,” said Katy Nastro, a spokesperson and travel expert at the flight deal site Going.
Citing the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s consumer price index, Nastro said average airfares are up 20 percent year-over-year and have been soaring over the past five months, in part because of the war in Iran and the squeeze on jet fuel.
We’ve examined dynamic pricing and whether you should book flights in “Incognito” mode for better prices (and found the evidence lacking). Yet consumers continue to harbor suspicions. Last month, JetBlue was sued over allegations that it used surveillance pricing, which the airline denied.
Since we love a good deal and adore a great hack, we tested the library trick ourselves. Here’s what we searched and what we found.
The viral video
In the video, set to the 1974 hit “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” a screen shows a price of nearly $7,200 for unspecified flights. “The algorithm kept going up and up” after weeks of comparing prices, the text says. Cut to a new screen showing a price of just over $4,000, which the user said her husband found on his phone.
The big reveal comes next, with a closeup of a new total: $3,459.86, “the price when we booked at the library for the same exact flights!” the text reads.
There are some key details missing: We can’t see which airlines, destinations or dates are being searched, or if the same flights are being compared across the board. It’s also not clear how much time has passed between searches.
The couple behind the original video did not respond to messages on Instagram or email. But we contacted another social media user, Ellyce Fulmore, who posted her own testimonial that now has more than 11 million views. She told us she had success with the library approach and saved money on a pair of tickets from Alberta, Canada, to Rome in August.
Fulmore had been stalking her Rome flights for weeks. She and her partner had set up price alerts with the flight booking site Skyscanner and used various airfare search engines hoping to find a better deal. They cleared their cookies, used virtual private networks and Incognito mode for more private browsing. Occasionally, they’d see an Air Canada fare for just under $3,000, but every time they tried to purchase, the total would jump more than $300.
After someone sent Fulmore the viral video, she drove five minutes to her local library last week and tried her search again. A lower fare for $2,875 “showed up everywhere,” she said, and she was able to book it this time. She doesn’t know if it was a fluke.
“There’s not really a way to ever prove it, but, like, so many things when shopping online are tracked and they use that information to give you targeted ads,” Fulmore said. “Is there some of that going on with flights?”
On Thursday, we were able to book Fulmore’s same itinerary on the Air Canada website using a personal laptop for $89 cheaper than what she paid without experiencing any glitches.
In a statement, the airline did not give credence to the library-booking theory.
“As you likely know, airfares are dynamic and have the potential to change multiple times within an hour and we recently ran a 20% off sale so possibly the customer benefitted from that,” Air Canada said. “Otherwise, we can tell you Air Canada does not track customers or geolocate customers for pricing purposes.”
Testing the myth IRL
Travel reporter Natalie Compton has been shopping for a pair of tickets from D.C. to Bangkok in January on EVA Air. She sent the exact flight schedule to Post reporters Andrea Sachs and Hannah Sampson to compare on various devices, including laptops, iPhones and library computers in D.C. and Massachusetts.
Sampson wanted to test a Labor Day weekend flight from Baltimore to Florida for her family of four, so we also ran that domestic search on personal and library devices.
Compton tried different browsers and searched while logged in to her Google account and logged out. Sometimes location services were on, sometimes off. None of it mattered. The price for the EVA Air flight was $3,176 no matter what.
“I wanted the theory to be true so I could book a cheaper flight to Bangkok, but you can’t argue with the results,” Compton said. “This ‘hack’ does not work.”
Sachs looked for the Bangkok fare on Google Flights and EVA’s site, conducting the Google Chrome search simultaneously on her laptop and the library’s PC. The results were unchanged: $3,176 for two passengers. Her phone spit out an identical fare a few minutes later.
Sampson logged on to the library computer with a guest code, not signing into any personal account. Every search for the Bangkok flight — on the library computer and other devices — revealed the same prices the other reporters found.
The domestic flight delivered an unwelcome surprise. The first search, on the library’s computer, revealed a price of $1,476 for four people. A search on the Southwest app on her phone shortly after showed the same price.
But while searching on a personal laptop a little while later, the price had rudely increased to $1,556. Sachs and Compton found the same higher price in their own searches — Compton on her phone, Sachs on all devices, including the library’s computer. By the next day, that price had increased again to almost $1,600. (Sampson’s husband suggested driving.)
What experts say
Kevin R. Williams, a professor of economics at the Yale School of Management who has studied dynamic pricing and airlines, said he was not surprised that the library trick didn’t work in our testing. But he also wasn’t shocked that we did see prices change mid-test — or that people might find different prices at different times, regardless of where they’re searching.
He said travel companies such as airlines forecast how popular a flight will be and then constantly revisit that forecast, adjusting prices accordingly.
“These pricing systems react to sales or bookings,” he said. “That can move the price around, and that’s totally unrelated potentially to if you were trying to mask your identity.”
James Byers, the product lead for Google Flights, said that when searching through that tool, “your browsing history, Incognito mode or the device you’re using — even a library computer — have zero impact on the prices you see.”
He said if prices change on Google when someone switches devices, it’s solely because the airlines updated the fares in real time.
Lourdes Losada, director of Americas for Skyscanner, acknowledged in an email that it may feel like prices go up the more you search or that switching to a public computer might change things, but it’s really availability and demand dictating updates.
“That can make it seem like repeated searches or different devices are driving the increase, when in reality, the price is likely changing for everyone at the same time,” she said. “Flight prices might change quickly, but that doesn’t mean you’re being tracked.”
Sally French, lead writer at NerdWallet, recommended setting up a price alert instead of trying to outsmart dynamic pricing — a tall order.
“Rather than mess around with using different computers and whatnot, use Google Flights to set alerts,” she said. “It tracks when airfares are lower than average, or when they’re higher than average, and it’ll send you an alert when it’s lower than average.”
Nastro, at Going, conducted her own experiment at her local Brooklyn library, checking round trips and one ways, domestic and international, logged into nothing, in Incognito mode and with a cleared browser. Her results: Two test fares were the same and one was $10 less on her laptop. “We can officially 86 this,” she said.
To not waste a trip to the library, Sachs bought three novels for $3 in the book sale room — a different kind of hack. And Sampson picked up a colorful 1,000-piece jigsaw from the free puzzle shelves showcasing a Cinque Terre village in Italy. Libraries for the win, airfare deals or no.
The post Can you book a cheaper flight by using the library computer? We tried. appeared first on Washington Post.
