
How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight - xpop2027
http://www.josecasanova.com/blog/how-i-hacked-kayak-and-booked-a-cheaper-flight/
======
coldcode
No. I work for an OTA (not Kayak). First of all airlines file their fare rules
and OTAs don't change the prices, and generally airlines pay around $10 to us
to book a RT fare so there is little room to discount. Kayak is a meta which
means all they do is present prices they are given from their partners (either
via a feed or scrape) and then send them to the partner who shares the fee.
Southwest (as others have mentioned) is not available in the US as a business
choice. Kayak also heavily caches the fares (everyone does to make performance
better) and inventory changes a lot especially in close by dates. Seeing
cached prices of a cached price means the actual price can change a lot from
searching to booking. Note the final price is __only __determined when you hit
a booking page, everything before that is cached and might be fairly stale. Of
course they can be errors in pricing since the fare rules are crazy
complicated and often the difference in fares might be all the taxing
entities. Each country, county, city, airport and cow pasture might affect the
final price so it 's possible that a country where you are booking might
affect this (our customers are mostly in the US) but I doubt it.

tldr - lucky "hacker"

~~~
nathas
If I open an incognito window and hit it again, why does the price change?

~~~
jrockway
Perhaps because time elapsed between when you searched and when you searched
using the Incognito window? Perhaps because you hit a different load balancer
with a different cache?

It's quite possible that nothing nefarious is going on.

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firstplanthendo
Like someone else said, it’s because it’s a Southwest flight… Southwest isn't
shown on the results of the big airfare search engines (kayak, expedia,
orbitz) when searching from the United States because it refuses to pay those
websites' fees.

Looks like you’ve found out that they are shown on Canada based version of the
Kayak site. Most likely because the fee arrangements are different or because
Southwest is willing to pay them, probably to get exposure to markets that
wouldn't otherwise know about them because they don't have a marketing
presence there.

~~~
benjaminRRR
This is definitely the most likely scenario. Kayak and other aggregating sites
have different arrangements with different partners in different regions. In
turn those partners have different arrangements either with direct connect or
the GDS themselves (who may also have different arrangements depending on the
geographic market).

You can get the same effect with other GDS products also, try rental cars for
one. The other crazy thing is that different geographic markets are generally
responsible for their own revenues, so you can have different promotions, and
yield management strategies depending on who is trying to hit their numbers.

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WildUtah
Looks like the cheap flights were on WN (Southwest) and the expensive flights
were on DL (Delta).

I just did an example flight search to fly later this week (Jan 24-30 round
trip) from SLC to OAK, a route that both DL and WN fly direct. Kayak shows me
fares from $492 on US and B6 changing planes in Phoenix or Long Beach
(doubling distance and quintupling flight time) and direct flights from $532
on DL.

Kayak doesn't show me any WN prices in the USA, but might have some sort of
pilot program or contract to show them outside the USA. Iflyswa.com shows
direct flights from $526.

Meanwhile ITA Matrix (matrix.itasoftware.com, made with secret alien
technology [0]) shows flights on US for $318 which violate the rules for
domestic connection times and cannot be booked. It's strange that those
flights are shown since Matrix is usually very reliable.

Going directly to US's website reveals fares of $440 for flights with a
connection in Phoenix.

So what's the lesson here? Check the WN site directly instead of depending on
search sites. Check both ITA Matrix and Kayak if you're depending on search
sites; they don't have the same flights listed. Sometimes you need to check
individual airline websites even though it's a pain because they have better
flights and prices than search sites have; there's no reliable way to know
when that's the case.

[0] [http://www.lisperati.com/logo.html](http://www.lisperati.com/logo.html)

~~~
jstratr
> So what's the lesson here? Check the WN site directly instead of depending
> on search sites.

Kayak and TripAdvisor will give you unpriced WN flights in their search
results. You still have to check WN directly for prices, but it's useful for
seeing what's available.

~~~
larrydag
Being from Dallas (Southwest HQ) I know that Southwest doesn't allow other
websites to use their booking and online flight pricing. Most airlines can be
checked through Google Flights or Kayak but I know that I have to check with
Southwest directly to compare their prices. BUMP: I guess I should have read
the other comments as this has been said a dozen times.

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rjd
I've been doing this for years. After I noticed most places are cheap to get
to but flights are expensive back. I noticed the same business model was in
place from the other direction. So just fake the country of origin and you get
cheap to and back.

The other one is clear your cookies before booking. Places create fake demand
by disappearing the cheap flights on you if you shopping around. If you clear
your cookies the cheap flights will return.

~~~
cwp
So you book two one-way tickets? AFAICT, that's usually not cheaper.

~~~
homersapien
No, he changes his country of origin to C then books a round trip from A to B.
It is sometimes cheaper that way.

~~~
rjd
That actual works as well, don't book anything from South Africa I found out
as I was booking my mates flights. You could knock several hundred off by
going through an Australian or UK proxy. I believe from memory it was the same
agency as well. Just changing the domain brought up vastly different prices on
the same flights.

But no as I mentioned above lots of holiday destinations have cheap tickets
inbound, but out bound are expensive. I first noticed it travelling from
London to Croatia.

It was like $200 flight to Split, but the flight home was double or triple. I
hopped on a proxy, and found I could get the reverse deal from Split to
London. $200 to London, $600 back home to split. So I started gaming the
system.

The agencies are hedging on the fact you have to take the return flight. So
they coerce you into the cheap flight to location X, but claw the money back
with the return flight which I guess the vast majority of people have to take.

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001sky
The price descrimination that the airlines do is so opaque and manipulative,
this is exactly why one needs to be cognizant of the technicals. We are really
only a single logical step removed from a pretty bad place (read:
racist/sexist/elitist, etc) with this teqnique to dynamic pricing and
(essentially) ... front-running.[1] For example, we can charge black people
more (based on zip-code demographics) to discourage them from flying first
class. We could, if we wanted to, require PII prior to bidding on tickets.
Imagine if the NYSE priced publicly traded equities in this manner? The irony
of cutting out the middle man to reduce costs, is that at some stage, we may
be paying an intermediary (broker/marketmaker) to anonymize our order flow to
get "fair" prices.

[1] This is what it really is, lets be honest.

~~~
harryh
How is there front running when there are only two parties in the transaction?

~~~
001sky
A market maker can front-run you with 3rd party inventory (just like Kayak).

~~~
harryh
Huh. I didn't know Kayak dealt with 3rd party inventory. Interesting.

------
bnzelener
This has nothing to do with the VPN, unfortunately.

The price difference comes from Southwest's price being different than
Delta's. Southwest flights wont show up when searching Kayak's USA site, but
they do show up on international Kayak pages. It sounds like that's because
they don't want to pay the brokerage fees for flights booked through the USA
versions of Kayak/Expedia/Travelocity -- but I'm not sure of that.

Interesting experiment though!

~~~
cynwoody
I just tried BOS-DEN nonstop 31 Jan to 7 Feb through the UK† and Canada††.
Southwest came in cheapest on both searches. As has been noted, Southwest did
not appear in the same search using www.kayak.com.

I was coming from a US IP. I wonder, if I had been coming from a British or
Canadian IP, if I would have been redirected to the corresponding site.

†[http://www.kayak.co.uk/flights/BOS-
DEN/2014-01-31/2014-02-07](http://www.kayak.co.uk/flights/BOS-
DEN/2014-01-31/2014-02-07)

††[http://www.ca.kayak.com/flights/BOS-
DEN/2014-01-31/2014-02-0...](http://www.ca.kayak.com/flights/BOS-
DEN/2014-01-31/2014-02-07)

------
alexhutcheson
Does source IP address make a difference when searching fares on ITA
Software's Matrix[1]? To my knowledge, ITA Software is where Kayak and many of
the other booking sites get their data, so it's normally what I use when
searching for flights. Since they don't actually sell tickets, I've always
assumed I'm seeing "neutral" results, but now I'm curious.

[1] [http://matrix.itasoftware.com](http://matrix.itasoftware.com)

~~~
joelrunyon
Google bought out itasoftware so I'm not going to assume that it's completely
neutral, but I have consistently seen the best deals come through that. I
don't even bother using Kayak anymore as the "calendar" function on
itasoftware is so much more useful for someone like me with a relatively
flexible schedule on most of my trips.

I can't confirm, but I assume from personal experience that kayak increases
prices on flights as you search for the same flight multiple times.

~~~
acjohnson55
I've had this anecdotal experience as well. How is this legal?

~~~
grkvlt
Of course it is legal. In the same way as it is legal to set the sale price
for (most) things at any (arbitrarily high, or low) value - airline ticketing
takes place in a free market.

This means sellers can offer tickets at any price they want, and it is up to
the purchaser to signal whether they think the price is appropriate by buying
the ticket (or not) at some price. The alternative is government interference
or regulation of the airline ticket industry, setting fixed prices, which
would not be good for the industry.

------
blazespin
I've often hacked Kayak by booking flights to other destinations with a
stopover at the place I want to go. It's bizarre, but yes, they're sometimes
cheaper.

"opaque and manipulative" indeed.

~~~
wwweston
I have a similarly bizarre little story that's sort of the opposite: I
recently _added_ a leg to a trip and cut my fare.

Just before the holidays, I was trying to get a flight from LAX to SLC. I tend
to fly Southwest, but was finding the fares higher than usual -- generally I
can get something in the $250-$300 range, I was seeing $350ish.

I was offered a ride to Sacramento, so I checked SAC -> SLC and found I could
purchase that flight for $200. I booked it.

There are no direct flights from SAC -> SLC on Southwest, though. Mine, as it
turned out, stopped over in... LAX.

~~~
ubernostrum
This is actually not "bizarre". It's not even unusual. And it has a perfectly
rational explanation.

Suppose there are three cities: City A, City B and City C. And for
simplicity's sake, suppose that City B is the hub for the airline.

Let's say B and C are major business destinations with a lot of business
traffic between them. Business travelers are less price-sensitive since
they're not personally paying the fare (they just have to stay within
corporate travel rules), and more concerned with things like flight length and
schedule.

But City A, on the other hand, isn't really a major business destination.
People who want to go from City A to other cities are likely on
personal/tourist travel, and those passengers do one and only one thing: punch
the origin and destination cities into a travel-search engine, and pick the
cheapest ticket. All other considerations are null.

Now, suppose that you are the airline employee in charge of maximizing
revenue. Getting money out of the B -> C route is easy -- you just need to
know a bit about corporate travel policies. If most companies auto-approve any
ticket under $500, for example, you could set the fare at $499 and, so long as
the flight is short and at a good time of day, you'll get business travelers
paying it.

But what about pricing for trips out of City A? They need to connect at your
hub in City B, but again you have to remember that price is the _only_
consideration that matters to those passengers. So you set the fares out of
City A as low as you can manage while still being profitable (and it may even
turn out that B -> C has to subsidize the routes out of A a bit).

The result is, often, that A -> B -> C is cheaper than B -> C.

Similarly, for some city pairs, A -> B -> C will be cheaper than A -> B, which
creates an incentive to buy the A -> B -> C ticket, not check a bag, and then
just walk out of the airport in City B. This is "hidden city" ticketing
(because it's "hiding" the fact that your real destination is the connection
point), and airlines will usually penalize (through revocation of frequent-
flyer accounts, etc.) passengers who do this.

------
aaronsnoswell
I'm from Australia. My wife and I regularly use Expedia and other US travel
websites to book _Australian_ domestic flights - even after our exchange rate
conversion it still works out cheaper (often we save one or two hundred
dollars). Australian airfare taxes are insane. The only downside is when
things go wrong it is expensive to spend ages on hold while making an
international call...

~~~
aestra
>expensive to spend ages on hold while making an international call

Did you try using Skype? Or Google Voice? Or similar? They are much cheaper
than actually placing an international call, at least in the US, it is only
like 3 cents a minute (US)

When I lived abroad I called home with Skype (this was before Google Voice)
and I could talk as much as a wanted for only a couple dollars here and there,
actually cheaper than my phone bill now.

------
grecy
Startup idea:

A site that uses a bunch of VPNs in different countries to look for flights on
the big search sites. Whichever is cheaper is presented as the one to buy.

It could of course be extended beyond airline travel...

~~~
kylec
Be prepared to be blocked. Each search on a site like Kayak costs money, and
if a bunch of searches are being done automatically it will lower the
conversion rate, which meta-search sites and their partners watch closely and
care deeply about.

~~~
gcb0
I doubt a search a day would even show on the radar

~~~
obituary_latte
Wouldn't be a very successful startup then anyway would it?

~~~
gcb0
not if they use that to predict which routes are cheaper in that day and then
use the client browser to request the real time data from the top contenders

------
Jd
While booking flights in Europe I frequently toggle through kayak.de,
kayak.it, lastminute, and kayak.com. Doesn't require a VPN, it's just that
Kayak works through partners and the partners are country specific. You can
often get better deals on one site or another, depending on the partner
selection.

I haven't used it that much in North America recently, but it seems to be the
same dynamic.

------
gtirloni
"BTW, I use the VPN to mask my internet traffic… sorry NSA"

As if using a VPN made you NSA-proof. Every time I see phrases like this I
force myself not to think the person is a fool but it's hard.

People need to realize that ensuring security and privacy isn't fixed by
installing just some tool and be done with it. Worse, they will do this and
trust they are immune (and then the damage will be worse).

~~~
xpop2027
I'm aware it is not NSA proof.

~~~
yaph
You may be aware, but some of your readers may not. So some may think you're a
fool to say that and other's may think it's a good way to stay safe. Both not
really desirable.

------
billyhoffman
I experimented with this a few months ago using free Amazon Windows EC2
instances. The thought being that with EC2 instances I can come from far more
IP end points than a specific VPN offers. What I found is many ticket/event
sites ban connections from EC2 IP ranges. Sites like Kayak, TicketMaster, even
Healthcare.gov drop incoming EC2 connections during the TCP handshake. I
imagine this is to stop third party scrappers or ticket scalpers. I have no
idea why Healthcare.gov blocks it.

------
jw2
The difference is southwest. I think Southwest is not offered as an option on
the US side but apparently is if booking from outside the US.

I just checked Southwest's website and the same flight is offered for $255.00
round trip.

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monksy
I do not work for Kayak. However, I believe that this may be due to the sale's
city of the ticket. This is typically to encourage discounts in specific
cities. When tickets are issued one aspect of the ticket is that it has a
"sales location"

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ml2man
No need for VPN - same result can be achieved (at least on this flight) by
toggling the country manually to Canada.

------
shimon_e
Flight price quotes can take the currency and sales city as input. You get to
play with both those options in ITA matrix.

What you saw is probably based on those inputs being changed.

------
pera
changing your user agent also works in some websites (not sure about kayak
though)

protip: don't let them know you have a mac book pro

~~~
aestra
They don't give you higher prices with a Macbook Pro, they might just suggest
higher priced things.

[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230445860...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304458604577488822667325882)

------
ghx
You don't need a VPN to do this. You can just go to Southwest.com. I always
check their website after I check Kayak because they don't list Southwest's
flights.

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jcutrell
This sounds quite familiar to the manipulation Orbitz did in 2012 based on the
user's reported operating system:
[http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/06/25/orbitz_displaying_...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/06/25/orbitz_displaying_higher_priced_hotels_to_macs_than_pcs)

~~~
calbear81
That is incorrect and unfortunate that it left the wrong impression in user's
minds. Orbitz did not price up hotels based on OS, they chose to change the
list of options presented to users based on OS. This is no different than what
we simply call "personalization". If a user found the Wynn on a Mac or a PC,
they were the same exact price, all that was different was what position that
hotel was in in the default sort order.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
That's an awful fine distinction there.

~~~
calbear81
It's simply a sort algorithm that takes into account any possible signal
including OS, Browser, IP / Geo, past purchase behavior, etc. If you figure
out that Mac users on average tend to click more on "boutique" hotels that
have better design, why would it be wrong to feature those higher up in the
results list? It just so happens that those hotels tend to be more pricey but
they certainly did not "price" up the same hotel for Mac users. One is
standard personalization, the other is price discrimination, and the headline
made it sound like the latter.

------
hartator
> (BTW, I use the VPN to mask my internet traffic… sorry NSA)

Unfortunately, that's not true and will even draw attention.

This XKeyScore slide is crazy:
[http://hothardware.com/newsimages/Item26839/Xkeyscore1.jpg](http://hothardware.com/newsimages/Item26839/Xkeyscore1.jpg)

~~~
Glan1984
XkeyScore can decrypt my tunneled connection with aes-256, sha256? I knew the
nsa was good but not that good... where does it say it decrypts the vpn
tunnels of any kind on the slide though I'm curious -_-

~~~
eli
Is your goal to be anonymous on your web? Because the traffic isn't encrypted
when it leaves the VPN and your browser cookies (or various apps phoning home)
will make your identity obvious.

~~~
Glan1984
No my goal is simply to evade the NSA wiretaps as well as my ISP who has
recently started messing up my internet connection whenever I torrent, so I
vpn overseas and torrent. But yes you are correct, in order to browse
privately you should really use tails or something along with vpn and avoid
say logging into facebook or anything linked to your identity.

------
dsl
The "TL;DR" at the top of the post is completely different than the actual
content of the post.

~~~
xpop2027
Fixed

------
senthilnayagam
Kayak is not the only one, in India I have seen MakeMyTrip did not show couple
of direct flights which I found on Cleartrip .

I would like to know if using VPN has a impact on large sites like Amazon(I
have seen the price change there too)

------
jstratr
Flight metasearch sites have contracts with airlines and OTAs for specific
markets, so you're likely to see different inventory if you visit a Canadian
site instead of a US site, for example. Seeing different prices on the same
inventory is much less likely (disregarding taxes and exchange rates.)

Like others have said, Southwest inventory doesn't often appear on sites like
Kayak because they want customers to book directly. That cuts out the
commission to Kayak and conditions people to look for flights on southwest.com
in the future.

------
benhebert
I just did this for a CheapoAirFlights.co.uk flight to Saigon from London.
Booking from a US IP cost a few hundred more, but I fired up the VPN and it
worked fine.

------
artellectual
OTAs have all kinds of weird tricks raising and lowering prices to get people
to book sooner rather than later. Instead of realizing that providing good
service with a nice clean interface is the way to go they use these cheap
tricks. Agoda, Booking.com and many other OTAs all do this sort of thing.
Sometimes it's as simple and clearing your cookies to get a lower rate.

------
xtc
The word hack becomes cheaper and cheaper each day.

~~~
Loughla
Right or wrong, I have no opinion, but at this point, that word is used in the
general population and popular media to mean, "I thought about a problem or
situation differently than I usually do."

I think the lifehack movement started that train of thought. I'm not really
sure.

------
javiramos
How much do fare change by location? Is it only a US vs. Canada things or are
prices dependent on the US location from which the search is being made? It
would be interesting to create a price map of various fares searched from
different states in the US...

------
emrekzd
there is working a trick for long distance flights. I used it a few times to
get cheaper tickets:

when you are buying long distance flight tickets, pick a city close to where
you will depart (this will add an additional flight transferring from your
departure city). When you get multiple transfers there is a possibility that
the offered price will be cheaper (I confirmed this with an agency when I
initially figured this out). If you get a cheaper price buy it and call the
airlines to tell them you will miss the first flight, and have them correct
the check in location to your departure city. I was able to save $100
travelling from europe to east coast last time I did this.

~~~
saryant
Do this often enough and the airline will ban you. This is hidden city
ticketing and repeated abuses will lead the airline to simply drop you as a
customer.

------
yadongwen
Ticket prices will also be different if you use an international credit card.
I used to save 100+ bucks with paypal instead of my Chinese credit card.

------
kbenson
_BTW, I use the VPN to mask my internet traffic… sorry NSA_

That's okay. I'm sure the minor inconvenience of not seeing the data flow
directly to your local IP is more than made up for by the data collection at
both sides of that VPN...

To be serious, I wonder if they apply extra scrutiny to VPN providers, and use
traffic analysis to build correlations between TCP connections. The extra
effort might be justified by a higher class of data going across the
connections.

Then again, it's probably easier to just use some form of evercookie injected
into TCP streams on the fly...

------
imartin2k
To me, the moral of the story is rather: Use another search engine than Kayak.
Others, like Skyscanner, include Southwest.

------
ashleyfox
@OP PSS == "post script script". I do not think that means what you think it
means.

------
testaccount4
>(BTW, I use the VPN to mask my internet traffic… sorry NSA).

>BTGuard

>

>mfw

oh hackernews..

~~~
TillE
BTGuard is based in Canada and they have a strict policy of not keeping logs.
What's your point?

~~~
eli
Well, for one thing, you've taken your domestic internet traffic -- which has
legal protections against _many_ types of NSA intrusion -- and traded it for
foreign traffic which has virtually no protection.

~~~
Glan1984
ok so use a vpn located in america. Boom.

~~~
Glan1984
And what protections does the NSA even respect?!? Dont make me die of laughter
man.

------
xmrsilentx
Cool. So just booking one flight pays for almost a years worth of VPN service.

------
a-b
Check your user agent line; Apple owners might overpay as well...

------
dorfsmay
Wait! There's something cheaper from Canada???

------
asc123
Someone going to Phish?

------
zendev
Just tried this myself and it definitely makes a difference. Thanks for the
tip.

~~~
philmcc
Ditto. Tried the same thing, and a United flight went from $400 to $356 on
Kayak.

