Just tried this myself, sure enough as you scroll down to the card payment section on the final page of the checkout flow (after all the optional upsells, seat selection etc), the price increases by £10 x per passenger thanks to a "System surcharge" that is added. You wouldn't notice the charge being added unless you explicitly looked out for it, as it only appears when you start scrolling the page down to the card details form.
Disabling ad block results in the charge not being applied.
What's even more baffling is I had to complete a reCAPTCHA half way through the checkout flow, so them saying it's to do with bot detection is a stretch.
Edited as I forgot to mention the captcha code during checkout flow.
As a general concept, I'm not opposed to having to pay for a service instead of seeing ads. Or even better, to be able to choose whether I want a free service with ads or a paid service with no ads.
But if I'm already paying for the service (in this case, the airline ticket) why are you trying to show me ads? This makes absolutely zero sense
If a customer is using an ad blocker, and they're on your site spending money, then they got to your site without you having to pay anyone for their traffic. They're already higher margin than a customer who you'll have to pay a conversion fee for if they make an attributable purchase on your site.
In the article, a Wizz Air rep explained it’s meant to charge bots and other automations for booking, but is catching users who use ad blockers as a false positive.
Ad blockers blocks ads, it does not block bot detection scripts. Even if ad blockers did block bot detection, all the bot operator have to do is… not run any ad blockers on their puppets?
I think it might make sense assuming that the ticket to "increase price for automation bots" ticket was taken by someone who did not think through the implications, and maybe there wasn't an adequate sprint planning (or maybe place is sort of old fashioned no actual sprint planning) and so nobody else discussed potential downsides.
So instead of getting a bot detection script they rolled their own solution.
Why am I giving them the benefit of a doubt here, because it doesn't really make sense for an airline to want to punish ad blockers.
> Ad blockers blocks ads, it does not block bot detection scripts
While not wrong explicitly, I think that most ad blockers I’ve used are very generous in what they block, incl trackers and other monitoring scripts. In this case, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the statement is true, that blocking or otherwise interfering is messing up bot detection. That said, they could be intentionally misleading in that they are trying to bill ad blockers not bots but don’t want to say it for PR. Especially considering others have said they run a captcha already.
The general concept sounds great, but it never lasts. Even if you’re paying for a service, the company will eventually realize they’re leaving money on the table not showing you ads.
Which is why ads being introduced to a product in any form is a sign to start looking for alternatives. It may not impact your tier yet, but it's only a matter of time before an executive thinks that enabling ads on all tiers is free money. They've already done all the actual work of integrating with an advertising network, and the only thing left is flipping the switch.
> But if I'm already paying for the service (in this case, the airline ticket) why are you trying to show me ads? This makes absolutely zero sense
Personally I find ads on company/commercial websites make the company look very cheap and untrustworthy.
But I'm guessing your purchase of an airline ticket, means that hotels, car rentals and other ads for things in the city you're visiting are far more effective, clickable and profitable.
Hotel affiliate schemes can pay anything from 2-15%. You don't need many of those for hundred dollar hotel bookings to make it more profitable than the actual flight alone.
> make the company look very cheap and untrustworthy
Which WizzAir is. They reschedule or cancel flights all the time, mentioned that you needed a negative covid test during the pandemic and requested a PCR test for boarding, they charge for seats and monetize just about everything. During the flight there's a frenzy of commecrial activity which reminds me of Moroccan bazaars.
I email them to have written conversation in case I need to and resort to the consumer protection authority, which is what is needed most of the time in order to extract refunds from low cost flight operators. Fortunately my most recent WizzAir tickets that needed refunding due to covid-19 flight cancellations were purchased through a ticketing agency, along with other Ryanair return tickets, so I filed my complaint against the agency. It took like 6 months and several e-mail exchanges with two to three week delays between responses to get a 90% refund.
There is no universe where Wizz is earning £10 per visitor booking a ticket through their website. Ads are dollars or parts of a dollar per thousand clicks
It identifies passengers that are not price sensitive. Price sensitive customers are subsidized in all airlines by overcharging customers that are not price sensitive (e.g. business class).
Someone at Wizz skipped the statistics lesson on variance. There is no way an adblocker accurately identifies price sensitivity outside of qualitative handwaving.
Why not? It seems at least somewhat plausible that people who know about ad blockers are technically savvy and technically savvy people do better in the job market, therefore higher income and lower price sensitivity.
Correct. Your comment is qualitative handwaving, an armchair speculation that sounds plausible. Is that enough justification to pend off eventual discrimination lawsuits? I personally doubt it.
Very few companies have the analytics maturity to use A/B testing in production to prove your hand-waving assertion without the effect failing sensitivity checks. And by very few, I point to the ones that hire economists and eocnonetricians en masse as having an inkling and trying to work this out in the ad tech space.
>Correct. Your comment is qualitative handwaving, an armchair speculation that sounds plausible.
As the saying goes, what is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. You rag on people for doing "qualitative handwaving" and "armchair speculation", yet you make the claim of "There is no way an adblocker accurately identifies price sensitivity" with nothing but "qualitative handwaving" and "armchair speculation".
>Is that enough justification to pend off eventual discrimination lawsuits? I personally doubt it.
Obviously nothing can fend off "eventual discrimination lawsuits", because anyone can sue for any reason. That said, I find it really a reach to say that discriminating based on ad-blocker status would be construed as discrimination against a protected class in a court of law.
> Very few companies have the analytics maturity to use A/B testing in production to prove your hand-waving assertion without the effect failing sensitivity checks.
Right, that's why I said it was plausible, not that it was a rigorously proven theory.
On the other hand they're flying Wizz Air which is a budget airline so they've implicitly demonstrated their price sensitivity regardless of ad-block usage.
On some routes, there are no alternatives to low-cost airlines if you want a direct flight. For example, when I flew from Prague to Milan a couple of months ago, the options were basically Wizz Air and Ryanair.
We flew 200 euros cheaper to Portugal with TAP and a stop in Lisbon. And they operate flights daily rather than once a weeek. If you add lugagge, seats and other hidden costs, WizzAir stops being low cost.
Recently Wizz bought new Airbus 321 neo jets and operate quite cost competitive flights to Spanish islands, so we decided to put up with their crap for the time being.
Yeah I came home in Italy today from Netherlands it was a 2:40 hrs flight on Transavia, and I had a realisation that I don’t have the age anymore for these kind of airlines and I think I will try to find a better , larger, quieter airline and class from next holiday, it was really hard today, I had a guy next to me that would have needed 2 seats and I couldn’t find a way to seat comfortably to give him space, had to have half body outside in the middle lane , and try to fit back when someone had to pass to go to bathroom, these airlines are shrinking planes like hell and it’s becoming painful
My solution is to avoid flying altogether! I can go many places by car or high speed rail, I can videoconf with anyone in the world; there better be a damn good reason I really must get on a plane and I will get myself a good seat when I do.
Yeah but it still takes 2-3 days to get from Amsterdam to Naples by train, if I had unlimited days off I would do it, but if I have days off that are counted I would rather spend them with the family instead of on a train, another think would be to travel while working, I guess I will try to ask my a employer if that would be a thing to let me do that next time
That's quite a journey, sure, but seeking agreement on working on the train (with a first class seat on a HST that's certainly possible) is a great solution. Maybe meet family in the middle, and force older family members figure out how to VC (been there ;)). Unavoidable travel such as seeing relatives is also a good reason to shell out for good seat on an airplane.
The point isn't (just) to avoid air travel, also to avoid those shitty Ryanair/WizzAir/Easyjet seats/travels ;)
I used to travel between Amsterdam and Lyon, the KLM flight was so much better than Easyjet, in every respect. I didn't have a lot of money, but that splurge on KLM was worth it.
Also, business and holiday travel where I'd seek the easiest wins in terms of just not flying.
First, perhaps not. In that case, the budget airline mindset kicks in: if some people are willing to pay for something, charge differentially.
However, I wouldn't be so sure that £10 per user isn't the actual value of the ad impressions and data. Users who would pay to opt out of ads aren't a random sample. They're adblock using airline ticket buyers who paid for some sort of premium experience. Could easily be a premium segment.
Advertising is valuable, and that value isn't evenly distributed at all.
It you are trying to stay revenue neutral as a company, and want to charge people to avoid ads, you can't just charge them the exact same amount that you make per customer from your ad provider.
People who can afford to pay to avoid seeing advertisements are more valuable to advertisers because they have more money.
What's to say the ad blockers aren't visually hiding upsells though? This might actually cost them a lot of money. There are plenty of visual hiding rules in the most used blocklists.
You are right! I wasn't debating the ethics but the mistaken notion that ads on a website could only give "pennies" of revenue. (aka Cost per impression)
Maybe not a loss from adverts as you book - but knowing when somebody is going to arrive in a city is worth an f'in fortune to hotels looking to shift unsold rooms.
But do they really need some kind of elaborate fingerprint-and-retarget scheme when they've already got your name, address, credit card, and possibly passport details?
The very act of selling over the web in an automated fashion makes the sale cheaper for Wizz compared to selling via a ticket agent. And, no bit of code costs Wizz £10 per sale.
Ad revenue isn't needed to recoup sale-costs, because those exist for people who do not purchase. Those costs are zeroed out for the people who do purchase.
> what you call ads it's actually called upselling.
Are you sure you don't mean cross selling? IIUC upselling means trying to sell a customer a more expensive version of their chosen product, while cross selling means trying to sell extra products which combine well with the customer's chosen product.
Why use a separate term for them? If "upsells" are advertisements from the same company, and "ads" are only advertisements from other companies, what difference does that make to me?
I don't insist that others know the difference between software, a script, a program, and an executable, because my industry jargon isn't relevant to how they are interacting with it. I don't see why the specific jargon of how advertisers categorize or rename their advertisements is necessary for anybody outside of marketing to know.
An hardware store that puts a sign for a particular kind of painting is not doing advertising, it's promoting some product because maybe they have better margins on it or it sold so badly that they wanna get rid of what they have left.
a magazine putting the same product on display is advertising it, because they don't sell it or anything related to it.
if Ryanair showed on their website a link to an anti virus software or garden furniture, that would be plain and simple advertising.
advertising is a specific business
aggregators or Spotify playlists, even though they promote something and might profit from it, are not advertising
cross selling serves the purpose of giving customers options related to the product they are buying or using, like a train company asking if you want to buy food.
cross selling is easy to avoid: just ignore it.
what Ryanair does in cabin is advertising and it's much worse than having to say no to a rental car option in the checkout process.
Why should I want to buy a watch on a plane??
> between software, a script, a program, and an executable,
because they are different representations of the same thing.
> An hardware store that puts a sign for a particular kind of painting is not doing advertising, it's promoting some product because maybe they have better margins on it or it sold so badly that they wanna get rid of what they have left
That sounds like a form of advertising to me. The hardware store is placing something in public view in order to cause a different behavior in the public. That's advertising. Being done in-house, rather than subcontracting out the advertisements to another company, doesn't change its nature.
> cross selling serves the purpose of giving customers options related to the product they are buying or using, like a train company asking if you want to buy food.
So, cross selling is a form of advertisement, done for a different department within the same company.
> cross selling is easy to avoid: just ignore it.
I wouldn't say it is easy to "just" ignore any type of advertisement. They are crafted to be as difficult to ignore as possible.
> because they are different representations of the same thing.
Exactly! Just as a "script" and a "program" are technical terms that are merely different representations of the same thing, calling it "cross selling" or "up selling" or "promotions" are just different representations of advertising. There's no difference to the public between them.
Advertising is when they pay you to advertise the product.
Advertising is a marketing communication that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea. Sponsors of advertising are typically businesses wishing to promote their products or services. Advertising is differentiated from public relations in that an advertiser pays for and has control over the message. It differs from personal selling in that the message is non-personal, i.e., not directed to a particular individual
> Exactly! Just as a "script" and a "program" are technical terms that are merely different representations of the same thing, calling it "cross selling" or "up selling" or "promotions" are just different representations of advertising. There's no difference to the public between them.
No.
Baguette, ciabatta and pita are all different kinds of bread.
Just like a script and an executable are both software artifacts.
But pizza is not bread, even though it is made with the same ingredients, like a script is not a natively compiled program and an executable cannot be edited in a text editor and be run again or executed on an unsupported architecture.
Up/Cross selling is selling, advertising is advertising.
If you gloss over the distinction, you could say that Google Ads is the same thing as Amazon, because both display links to products you can buy.
> Advertising is a marketing communication that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea.
Applying this definition to cross-selling:
> marketing communication
Putting a sign out for another product you sell is a form of marketing, and is intended to communicate to the reader.
> openly sponsored
Cross-selling messaging is openly sponsored by the company, and appears as a message from the company.
> non-personal message
Cross-selling isn't being sent directly to me, nor is it specifically aimed around me. It may be targeted toward people who fall into a similar category, but it isn't a personal message to me.
> to promote or sell
Cross-selling is an attempt to sell something.
> a product, service, or idea.
No restriction here about it being a product/service/idea sold by a different company, so this applies to cross-selling.
It meets every part of the definition you gave, and therefore pushes for cross-selling are a form of advertising.
Edit: Perhaps you're confused about the use of "that employs"? In this usage, "employs" doesn't mean "has a contractual relationship with" but instead means "uses".
Advertising is differentiated from public relations in that an advertiser pays for and has control over the message
me promoting a product I sell is not advertising. It's business. Businesses work on client's trust, promote a bad product, they'll leave you for someone else.
Sellers are not advertiser and vice versa.
Advertisers don't lose their job if they advertise a bad product, their job is to create a campaign for the product, their reputation does not depend on the quality of the product, but only on the quality of the ad.
Adding a feature to a software product is not marketing, it's a way to have an edge on the competition (or be on par)
If everything is advertising, than me giving you the phone number of my dentist should be advertising.
If I pay for signage, or if I pay somebody else to put up signage, I've paid either way. I also ignored that sentence as it was adding clarification, not changing the initial definition.
Giving me the phone number of your dentist would be a personal message, so it wouldn't be "advertising". It also wouldn't be paid for by your dentist, so not advertising.
> If I pay for signage, or if I pay somebody else to put up signage, I've paid either way. I also ignored that sentence as it was adding clarification, not changing the initial definition.
Moving the goalpost
I explicitly made the example of an hardware store putting the signage for its own good
> I also ignored that sentence as it was adding clarification, not changing the initial definition.
clarification is what makes all the difference.
> Giving me the phone number of your dentist would be a personal message". It also wouldn't be paid for by your dentist, so not advertising
Funny that ADV nowadays says the same thing: "we think you might like this"
My dentist might also reward me for sending a new client.
The real difference is I don't sell dentists phone numbers as a job, that's why it is not advertising.
Like the hardware store sells wall paint and want people to tell their friends "try that store, they have this amazing wall paint, you won't be disappointed"
This is really really reductive. There is a range of prices that people will pay, and the final ticket price is probably a a study of how long it would take to pay off a project with a range of demand levels. As a plus, advertising is more effective with more traffic, so lower prices to get more demand and offsetting that with ads could be worthwhile.
Now tbh, I have no idea if this is how it works. Just my own reasoning about things.
Yes, also, all airlines have ads visible to you. The name on of the airline is a big billboard on every plane. It's not actually necessary. I'm honestly surprised airlines don't put more ads on their planes, but perhaps there is some regulation preventing that.
“We ask that you pay attention to the security presentation - which conveniently is now bookended by ads that of course cannot be skipped and since audio comes out of the plane’s PA, everybody has to put up with”.
I'm honestly surprised airlines don't put more ads on their planes, but perhaps there is some regulation preventing that.
More due to cost than regulation --- painting a plane is not cheap. Hence why their name (which of course doesn't change often if at all) and the mandatory information like registration ID is usually all they have.
It is so expensive that airlines will often not repaint planes even after a rebrand (and sometimes after an acquire) until such time as it becomes necessary.
Making ads optional is often suggested, sometimes tried, and there aren't many success stories. Most successful combinations of ad/payment commercial strategies aren't customer choice scenarios.
Most subscription papers made more on ads than subscriptions, but subscribership made ads sell at a premium. The stable revenue is nice too. Ryanair clones use advertising as within their get-an-extra-penny ethos. Buses and such do the same.
A lot of people seem to like the theory of paid opt-out... but that doesn't seem to be a thing.
YouTube premium seems to be a counterexample. I wonder why it's managed to stick around (and be pushed so hard) when other pay-for-no-ads attempts have failed (either before or after they launched).
The thing that's interesting is that according to what I've heard, it seems that YouTubers do actually make more money off of YouTube Premium viewers than they would off of advertisements from free users, on average. Now this could be false or dependent on channel, but that I can't answer.
The fact that this even can be the case, though, I find interesting. It makes me wonder if YouTube is either subsidizing YouTube premium payouts, or simply waiting to squeeze the margins until there's more revenue. But if this is sustainable today, it seems promising.
Two things I've noticed is this:
- YouTubers pick up paid sponsorships in addition to advertisements presumably because today's viewership doesn't provide a good stable revenue, especially due to issues like demonetization. However, many videos that get demonetized are actually still eligible for revenue from YouTube Premium, according to LTT.
- Paid sponsors are much more likely to have no problems with edgier YouTubers and podcasters. I believe this to be a net good, especially since YouTube flourished as an edgy, scrappy alternative to traditional video content (maybe somewhat similar to how Flash games were a sort of edgy, scrappy alternative to conventional video games.)
I don't really want to pay Google more money, but I don't see serious alternatives to YouTube popping up, so I really hope the subscription model can work this way. Even if I have to skip or even sit through sponsor segments here and there, it feels like it's part of what could help save YouTube from just continuing to degrade into another version of TV that somehow is even more crappy and oversaturated. And some YouTubers even make the sponsor segments genuinely entertaining. (I think Internet Historian is a good example here, though as a warning his content is probably more crude than his name is evoking if you've never heard of the channel.)
I occasionally run into issues with the Android TV app where I have to kill and restart it for the premium subscription to kick back in. As far as I know, YouTube Premium really does get rid of all video ads, although they do offer a confusing "Free With Ads" benefit for movies. (Why anyone would want to watch movies on YouTube when there's so much great video native to the platform is beyond me, and it's a giant misstep by Google imo.)
Maybe you’re conflating in-video sponsorships with ads? If you’re signed into YouTube Premium the system won’t serve you ads in that browser/app, but obviously a video creator can still read a sponsorship message.
Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access)? As far as I know it still offers two subscription modes, ad and ad-free, and subscriber stats on Wikipedia seem to be trending in a positive direction.
But I think the real issue is this: aside from services that use ads as an explicit differentiator, there is really no reason for a service that charges customers not to also add ads. It's just extra revenue. The only reason I could see for services not wanting to do this is when they want to specifically cultivate a "premium" feel. Cable in the US was/is a classic example: people paid inordinate feels for access, and then also put up with ads on top of it all. And for a large segment of the population, cable was so ubiquitous as to be unthinkable not to subscribe to it.
That's a good counterpoint, but to play devils advocate online ads seem to degrade user experience more than a static advert. Seeing a printed ad on the side of a bus doesn't make more hassle or slow me from getting from Point-A to Point-B while online pop-ups do.
Do those ads at all block/interfere with my ability to ride the bus/train? Do they use up (steal) my (artificially) limited public transit mileage (bandwidth/data-cap)? Do those ads track my bus/train trip and sell that info to other transit businesses? There's a pretty significant difference between those passive ads one sees (or ignores) on a bus or train and the sort of constant abusive behaviors we see from Internet advertisers.
When I got down to Wizz Air's statement about "bugs in adblockers" making browsers "act unexpectedly" thereby triggering the robot detection code, I was reminded of the robot detection functionality in a very common enterprise WAF middle-box that injects background JavaScript on the page to detect bots. The code supposedly produced no user-visible change but would participate in some SOAP challenge/response fluff.
We ended up never deploying it because the false positive rate was absurdly high- on the order of 38% or so- with no tuning options available (short of falling back to a captcha). Having said that, I'd expect that this is a very common practice. I also suspect that blaming the ad blockers for lazy middle-box usage (if indeed that's what this particular case proves to be) is _not_ going to age well.
I used to work for an airfare marketing company. We would get our 3rd party scripts onto an airlines booking engine to be able to run our own analytics and gather data for ads. We'd mainly collect things like prices, number of available seats, etc, because it turns out airlines can't really give you those answers through an API without it costing too much, so we piggybacked on real customer searches.
Almost no one in the office ran adblockers, which was weird to me. When our analytics traffic dropped by like 50% one day, I was the only one to notice that our domain made it onto EasyList.
I created a GH issue about it, had a productive chat with a maintainer about what data we collected, and which data they thought was PII. If we wanted our domain unblocked we could remove the PII data from the requests, or create a secondary domain that only received the non-PII data.
We were gathering data that was not legally considered PII by something like GDPR, but I understand why an adblocker would be even more strict than the legal minimums. I brought this up with the executives and instead they tried to threaten the maintainers of the block list and tried to educate them on how "technically this isn't personally identifiable data according to this legal spec".
The maintainers stopped responding (rightfully so) and our data collection was forever halved.
I remember an instance where Lowe's website was broken on the corporate network. Our proxy re-arranged the order of HTTP content headers from the site, and Akamai took it as malicious behavior.
Lowes website has been 100% broken for me ever since I enabled Resist Fingerprinting in Firefox.
I can load exactly one page, but on any navigation or refresh I get:
=====
Access Denied
You don't have permission to access "http://www.lowes.com/" on this server.
Reference #18.cc69dc17.1661724957.fe4ef4
====
Result, unless I use the profile with fingerprinting enabled, I just have to buy elsewhere.
Drupal.org triggers "prove you're not a robot" every few page navigations with Resist Fingerprinting enabled. Walmart.com too.
Fedex package tracking errors (seemingly due to the API server refusing the connection) if resist fingerprinting is enabled. Amusingly if you use the website help bot and say "track XXXXX" that does work to get some basic information.
For the last one, make sure it's not on your end. I've seen order tracking HTTP requests be blocked by uBlock Origin simply because the URL contains `/tracking` or something.
This is in a profile with no addons, and only Resist Fingerprinting enabled. Also had it confirmed by someone else. Should be fairly easy to reproduce. Just create a clean profile and access tracking with Resist Fingerprinting enabled in about:config
I have RFP enabled and it works fine for me. I did get the "Access Denied" error you mentioned on my first try, but after switching VPN servers it worked fine.
On Lowes.com? Retest in a clean profile. Seems that once they trust you you are ok for a while, at least from a friend's test, who was able to reproduce in a clean profile. But maybe it is IP linked and takes a little bit to accumulate. Did you just enable privacy.resistFingerprinting recently?
Also. Doublecheck that it is enabled. Also, I'm using Nightly firefox. It may be the resist fingerprinting is more robust there.
BTW, this isn't using a VPN or anything that might seem suspicious. Just my bog standard US broadband.
> Sorry to belabour this, but by "it" you mean the setting in about:config called privacy.resistFingerprinting right?
yes, it's definitely the about:config option.
>If so, welp, no idea (aside from the Nightly thing). It consistently breaks for me and others though. Guess you're just lucky.
Just for fun I tried with various VPN servers across two different providers and got
5 / 5 working on provider A
6 / 6 working on provider B
One possibility is that they fingerprinted me and determined that my fingerprint was "good" (despite having RFP enabled) and therefore all the subsequent attempts were whitelisted. The other possibility is that RFP spoofs the user-agent to be the latest ESR version, and this causes issues when you're using nightly because it might have different fingerprinting characteristics (eg. TLS fingerprint) compared to the actual ESR release. An anti-bot system might flag that inconsistency as suspicious and therefore ban you based on that.
FWIW, I just replicated the exact same behaviour in Stable in a brand new profile (plus resistFingerprinting enabled). So, maybe it's something special about VPN IPs :) (I thought the Nightly theory was a bit of a long shot since I was pretty sure my friend tested in Stable)
Perhaps they whitelist generic profiles coming from VPN services.
Result, unless I use the profile with fingerprinting enabled, I just have to buy elsewhere.
Have you tried contacting them about it and teling them that you're taking your business elsewhere because their site blocks you? If enough people do that, they may actually do something about it.
I did in fact send them an email. Never got a reply. I'm guessing it went to the web team then straight to the trash.
I suspect possibly a registered letter might help, but to be honest I don't actually care that much, and as much as I like my local Lowes, switching to Home Depot works just fine too.
And you know... I kind of suspect given the fact that FedEx suffers from this too, that it is a generic failure of an Akamai service they both enabled, since they both use Akamai.
I know the EU has an anti-price discrimination policy based on location, so that probably does not apply, but I don't think they thought anybody would be crazy enough to do this.
Calling it a 'System Surcharge' seems highly misleading and one of the things the EU tends to come down on like a ton of bricks is misleading line items in service charges. If they had called it an 'adblock surcharge' they might get away with it but this seems entirely on purpose.
Probably not. Additional mandatory charges on top of the advertised price are not legal. Airlines get fined periodically for these reasons, but they keep on doing it anyway.
No country wants to hurt their national airlines. They’re strategic. What strategy seems to differ country to country (defense, tourism, foolishness?).
The EU's enforcement of its regulations/directives is severely lacking (see the GDPR for an example) so in practice it doesn't really matter whether it's legal - the worst that will happen is a slap on the wrist in 5 years' time and if you're lucky, a fine worth a fraction of what the company earned by breaching the regulation.
Surely for the people who visit the site and do buy a ticket the revenue lost from them blocking ads would be basically insignificant compared to what they pay for their tickets. And obviously the people that visit the site while blocking ads and don't pay for a ticket won't be paying the surcharge.
I guess ultimately it helps by just bringing in extra revenue via a sneaky hidden charge that most people won't realize is there. But it doesn't really have anything to do with ad revenue.
Presumably by impeding competitors who attempt to automatically price match.
For those who didn’t read the full article (I don’t blame you; it’s nearly illegible—font weight 86‽) the airline intended to price-discriminate against automated scrapers, not against people who don’t view ads, but distinguishing between robots and humans is futile in practice.
It's a bug. They didn't intend for it to flag ad-blockers, it was supposed to inflate the prices for third party aggregators so that their direct website would look cheaper than booking on a third-party site.
The first thing that came to mind when reading the title is "how do they detect? how can we crack it?" Much like anti-anti-debugging is a thing, perhaps adblockers also need to have anti-anti-adblock features.
...but things like this are why "remote attestation" and its ilk should be our biggest concern, because they can use such technologies to deny or distinguish anyone not using the --- no doubt already narrow and increasingly narrowing --- "supported" or "compliant" hardware and software.
Wizz Air are on the rocks and should be avoided unless you really like to gamble. There have been a few flights cancelled at very last minute - one group I know were halfway through the ~10 of them checking in when they learned their flight was cancelled (on their way to a wedding). There was also a famous case this summer of a flight being cancelled after everyone had already boarded and the plane was on the runway.
Don't bother, even if your ticket is 50 EUR cheaper it's not worth the risk.
Usually it's not just 50 EUR cheaper, but a few hundreds EUR cheaper.
Is it worth the risk? It depends. I use it regularly to visit friends and family back in my home country. Usually not a big deal if it gets cancelled. If I have something important to do I flew out a few days early and sped that time with my family.
A few hundred Euro cheaper than a flagship carrier? Eh maybe. A few hundred Euro cheaper than other (often not great but still more reliable) budget carriers like EasyJet and Ryanair? That'd be very rare, and likely only in teaser/promo fares that are only available in extremely limited quantity and which can go either way
> If you do book any Wizz Air flights and notice any unexplained extra charges in your booking summary, turn off ad-blocking software, which should remove the surcharge.
Do not turn you ad-blocking software (that's what they want), instead warn your local consumer protection authority, and email a copy of your reporting to Wizz Air, I'm pretty sure the £10 fee is going to disappear as well, for you and luckily for everyone else.
They are going to hit them hard and they know very well what they are doing. I really don't know where you got that idea but EU consumer protection authorities have teeth and they bite when it suits them. This sort of stuff will not fly, and I'm pretty sure the various privacy authorities will also want to put in a word or two.
The stats you linked includes people who use "some form of ad blocker" and indicates "If you use Google Chrome, you probably already know that it has a built-in ad blocker that has a default setting to block ads across websites" and "Firefox has an ad blocking feature as does Safari".
So if they count built-in adblocking features as abblockers, of course the resulting figure is very high, as it's basically equal to the % of internet users who installed Chrome or Safari. This does not mean that regular folks use and understand adblockers, just that they use the two most popular browsers in the world.
Estimates of 'active' adblockers are anywhere from 10 to 30% depending on where you look, I stand by the 'many orders of magnitude' claim.
100's of millions of devices use adblockers, and not those built into Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Ad revenue is down far enough that websites (such as those linked in TFA) respond in a malicious way. That certainly would not happen if it was a very small fraction of a percent that did this.
Just Adblock on Chrome alone claims 60 million DAU. With about 5B internet users that works out to 1% just for Adblock on Chrome.
The claim was: "0.001% of people use an adblocker or even know what one is." which is clearly nonsense.
In the low-cost airline business, your competitive advantage is being the cheapest. Everyone is racing to the bottom. Stripping out features in order to offer a few dollars more off your tickets than your other low cost competitors. The competitors are usually scraping each others' sites to see what the lowest prices are so they can beat it by being cheaper on particular flight routes or dates.
So I think what was actually happening here is that Whizz was trying to control that by raising their price $10 for the scraper bots. The competitors would now scrape Whizz and see a higher price than Whizz actually had and would lower their price to that and stop. Customers who compare all the low cost airlines (most low cost flyers will do that already) will see Whizz is always a little cheaper and purchase from them. Whizz also ends up creating an artificially higher floor (which means more profits instead of racing prices lower).
The problem, is that in the process of Whizz's website trying to determine scraper bots from normal users, a bug in that detection method lead real users with ad blockers from being treated like scraper bots and seeing the higher fee.
If this is intentional to throw off price scraper bots, why is the price only raised £10 on the final screen of checkout when the card details form is shown, after entering personal details, creating an account, entering address, going through seat selection, insurance, car rental, etc. Not to mention a CAPTCHA is filled out during checkout anyway, so they know the user is likely to not be a bot.
The price stays at e.g £100 from the point of searching for flights, all the way through checkout until scrolling down to the card details form, at which point it is discretely raised to £110.
> entering personal details, creating an account, entering address, going through seat selection, insurance, car rental, etc. Not to mention a CAPTCHA is filled out during checkout anyway
Perhaps the state of the art in competitor price discovery does actually do all these steps (probably via mechanical turk rather than automated)?
Plausibly just the final step is what scrapers checked.
Or plausibly just the final step misidentified the customer; the captcha did its job on the marketing site but the final price authorization comes from a different system.
Rather than for scrapers I suspect this is for booking aggregators.
Wizz and other low cost airlines try and avoid these aggregators as they charge huge commissions and can keep them by threatening to take away a chunk of bookings, Wizz even mentions this on page 4 of their annual report.
This is probably to prevent any of these aggregators building a manual integration to enable booking, then hitting them up later for a commission once they have captured a share of bookings (similar to the strategies Postmates etc took at the start).
Not long before this applies to the flight itself.
“Upgrade your ticket now to experience ads customization on your flight, including features such as seatback video dimming and optional opt-out of feedback surveys!”
In the US, they've started playing advertisements at gas pumps. To make matters worse they turn the volume way up.
I have never in my life been so tempted to perform an act of vandalism. Something about this kind of invasion of personal and mental space is absolutely infuriating. I can't even daydream anymore -- even that is up for grabs by advertisers.
I’ve been to a gas station where they have loudspeakers on the building itself and they pepper their customers and everyone else in a few hundred foot radius with noise.
Thankfully it’s been long enough I don’t remember the contents but I think it was for food and drinks inside.
After that there will be surcharges for wearing an eyemask or noise-cancelling headphones, to recoup the airline's lost revenues from passengers' less than total engagement with in-flight ads.
"Upgrade your cabin pressurization now! If more than half the flight pays to upgrade the pilots will lower the cabin altitude from 15,000ft to 8,000ft!"
15000ft is fine by me, why should I have to pay for other passengers pressurization? I thought this was America. I usually hyperventilate the entire flight to get my money's worth of O2.
> "The use of automations for booking (robots) require additional hosting efforts and for such activities, Wizz Air applies a system surcharge fee", Wizz Air explained to Skift on the issue.
We know that is only superficially true. Yes, automation requires additional hosting resources in regards to the website, but automation also lowers the costs incurred by the PoS (Point of Sale). It costs more to pay a person to sell tickets, and their queue of simultaneous sales is far shorter.
Yeah I tried that. People at the counter laughed "you can't do this here" (we were all right there and delayed by the same amount, why not just hand us the cash? Wire it to the accounts from which we paid the ticket? Sign us up automatically and send us the forms?). Okay, I said, where can I do this then? "On our website probably." Okay I open the website, after navigating a horrible attempt at a mobile site for fifteen minutes I found the form and filled it out. Never heard from them again. Guess I should take them to court now?
Railways (NL, DE) pull the same sort of crap. In NL there is a centralized billing system, they know exactly what path you took and when, so also that you were in the delay. Credit it to your transport card automatically? Nah. You need to fill out paperwork and then get a few euros for missing half of your evening. Germany is even better: whenever there's delays, you see long queues at the service center because (according to my colleague with whom I was there) you need to get something stamped IRL as proof that you were really there during the delay. And the amount you get back is still peanuts.
Incentives like these to be on time don't work. I can't imagine more than a handful of people per trainload/planeload go through the hassle. At least for planes iirc it was a reasonable amount, at least for short delays where you don't have to book an entire holiday around. If you'd get it without a legal battle.
I got fobbed off after a 24 hour delay on a long haul departing from London several years ago. I then sent a friendly email to the Civil Aviation Authority and not long after that the airline sent me a cheque.
In Europe you have EU261, which if the flight is significantly delayed (hours rather than minutes) means you get several hundered euros in compensation. The exact delay and amount depends on the length of the flight.
Mind, standard operating procedure is for most if not all airlines to deny the compensation because of "unforeseeable circumstances".
Strike action because they don't pay their employees? Unforeseeable. The plane is broken? Unforeseeable. The airport cancelled the flight like it has been doing for the last 6 months? Unforeseeable.
Then you have to appeal to the regulator or small claims and most people just give up.
Sometimes they don't even refund your ticket after a cancellation and if you dare to chargeback they will prevent you from flying ever again.
Consumer rights are great, but often is hard to enforce them.
I've had plenty of success using the EU regulators to enforce 261/2004 compensation requests if an airline is not following the rules.
It can take a while for the regulator to get to your case, but it is only a 10-15 minute investment to find the relevant authority and to email to them with your information/circumstances. Then 2-4 months later the airline follows up to arrange payment. With budget flights the compensation can end up paying for multiple future flights.
My friend got this money from Aer Lingus for a flight that was delayed until the next day because of weather. They could have argued it was unforeseeable but they didn't. They just paid up. It doesn't always work this way.
The money was more than the flight was worth but the whole ordeal was terrible, literally every hotel in Dublin was booked out on every website (this wasn't the only flight cancelled, every one of them was) and she had to stay in this horrible dirty hostel. So it was kinda nice to get that money.
My flight wasn’t delayed, instead they announced as we were taking off that they needed to fly a detour and stop there for 40 minutes to refill the plane because they apparently couldn’t calculate how much fuel they needed.
Actually seems plausible: detecting a bot through differences in interaction, and the and blocker causing a false positive.
Though a bad idea: I can think of no way an ad blocker could trip it that would not mean it could sometimes trip without one due to transient network errors, so it isn't likely to be terribly good at its main job of being a bot detector.
There really needs to be a consumer law to ban hidden fees... Without that they will continue to exist.
For example, I can browse airbnb on the French website, or the australian website, and I get the real total price. But if I browse on the American website I get a fake price (which can be much much lower than the real price).
Google flight is pretty good as it shows "estimated prices" and not fake prices.
Yup, was booking a flight few weeks ago and a "service fee" of 200PLN/42EUR was added in some iterations while I was researching.
> AdBlockers are not explicitly forbidden, nor triggering our protection to be detected as a robot. But in a very rare situation, due to bugs in the AdBlockers, they can make the browser act unexpectedly, and flagged by our security tools as suspicious
None of this, Wizzair and your asshole IT contractors. You are incompetent and abusive.
I remember using vpn for wizz air bookings as flight I looked at increased 40euro with second search, then I cleared caches and switched vpn on, sure enough same flight didn’t have 40euro increase anymore. This was around 2011-2012 haven’t used them since then.
Don't ever fly with WizzAir, my experience this summer:
flight cancelled 3.5 hours prior departure on our way to airport (I booked accommodation with free cancellation 24h prior checkin anticipating this, but didn't expect they are such aholes they won't give me at least 1 day notice, so would lose all paid accommodation money for 2.5 weeks if didn't arrived), no replacement flight offered (unless you call flight 7 days later replacement), because they offer only own replacement flights (when you reach their Russian/Hungarian barely English speaking hotline after one hour waiting on call) and won't help you get another flight, immediately same day applied for EC compensation (while buying pricey ticket for next day with different airline, luckily I was prepared forthe worst case scenario so still chose the cheaper one and not the one which should be actually covered by EC compensation).
After 30 days EC compensation request (4*250=1000EUR) denied because "extraordinary circumstance", though there was no strike, no bad weather, just their own issues, which is not extraordinary circumstance they don't have plans in case they have issues with airplanes, just their own incompetence.
After their rejection now passed my claim to Czech Civil aviation authority (CAA.cz), as last resort will try some claims company (they take ~30% cut if successful, nothing if no success), worst case losing ~400EUR thanks to Wizzair incompetence, which just cost me lot of money and trouble.
They refused to provide me replacement flight within reasonable time (7 days later is not reasonable time), they refunded me not even half of the ticket I didn't use because of their cancellation (like 180EUR instead 230EUR), they refused to refund me EC compensation I am entitled to and because of more expensive flight to different city I arrived to my destination one day later combined with 6.5 hours bus drive instead direct flight.
Don't EVER give money to these cheaters, I wished they would get their license removed at least in Czechia.
Don't think EC compensation system will help you in any way with scummy airlines.
Huh, that's in stark contrast to my experience with them this summer. Had a flight delayed by several hours and was notified by text message only about 10 hours in advance. This messed up our plans and we had to book a different hotel while waiting in the airport. We submitted a compensation claim expecting we'd get nothing because the delays were partly due to a strike by air traffic control at the destination. To our surprise they approved the compensation and - admittedly quite slowly - have now confirmed a £220 refund for each ticket.
It sounds like you've had a bad experience and potentially like EU laws are not being applied effectively in Czechia. Based on your description you should be owed EU compensation and I'm surprised there's no escalation process that doesn't cost you money. Hope it works out for you.
This has nothing to do with Czechia, it's decided by Wizzair in Hungary ignoring legitimate claims (and I am not the only one, I was just reading about this article last week even court in Hungary is now investigating the for failure to provide assistance/compensation for delayed/cancelled flights), unless you mean by "not being applied effectively in Czechia " discriminating people flying from Czechia thinking they will bend and won't be protected by authorities/lawyers, which I think is the thing considering your experience, if you flew from UK, where you have Money Claim Online site (actually I used similar site of Czech CAA, will see how that works).
I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt since it was anecdotal, but when he got to the "bugs in ad-blockers" explanation, the bullshit was spread a bit to thick for someone innocent.
This is ableist discrimination and it's offensive. I require an ad-blocker to make the web usable with ADHD-PI.
What's interesting is when I booked the tickets, half way through the purchase journey I got a popup saying "Are you human?" with a reCAPTCHA to verify that I was human. They still tried to charge me £10 at the end for a "System Surcharge".
afaik airlines pay a surcharge to systems that have authoritative data on flights (GDS/Amadeus) iff their look/book ratio is too anomalous, which is exactly the kind of number scraping bots really play with
Air ticket pricing is already extremely opaque, the most surprising part of this is that it is listed as a seperate surcharge rather than being silently factored into the ticket price.
So the actual flight is becoming a loss leader with most profit from selling priority boarding, in-flight food and drink, car hire, hotel affiliate fees and other ad revenue etc.
> due to bugs in the AdBlockers, they can make the browser act unexpectedly, and flagged by our security tools as suspicious
I sorta buy this — when browsing in Brave w/uBlock, Captchas appear and fail more often than when browsing without a condom on. I don't think it's a "bug" it's just harder to track you, and it throws off the spam catchers.
All sorts of price discrimination in the travel industry. Expedia has been advertising lower prices in their app, but at least they’re upfront about it? I dunno, but it’s annoying because you know it means “we can sell the additional data we gather if you have our app installed”.
Plausible deniability at its finest. While it could really be a robot filter indeed, the airline seems to be okay with charging customers if they can't show ads to them.
Most likely you wouldn't even be able to buy a ticket. Appsites like these are entirely dependent upon JS for their functionality.
On the other hand, I find it ironic that a low-cost airline would use such a complex site; if they are so miserly and minimal with their services that every little bit costs extra, a boring old HTML form seems like the most suited to them.
Using a one-off private session for that booking would at least limit the information collected by the ads to what you've typed in that session plus a browser fingerprint and IP address. You can throw off browser fingerprinting by using using a separate browser, and the IP by using a VPN or some other, shared IP address (tethering off your cell phone if your carrier is IPv4-only).
I just opened https://wizzair.com/ with a default uMatrix config (only loading first party *.wizzair.com resources) and it complains straight away:
Are you human?
An unusual activity was detected from your web browsing activity, which may also be done by a robot or “bot”. For this reason it needs to be verified that you are human. Bots are not allowed to use our website/mobile app in order to protect your privacy and provide a reliable user experience.
Some activities may look like they are done by a bot, such as running multiple sessions of the WIZZ website, or performing more than one search in a web browser.
What if I am not a bot? Read on for a solution.
We take many factors into consideration to make sure real website/mobile app users are properly distinguished from bots. We recommend the following:
• Use the latest version of the supported web browsers (Chrome, Firefox);
• Don’t use your browser in incognito or compatibility mode;
• Don’t use ad blockers as they may conflict with our website’s protection;
• Don’t use anonymizer proxies with botnets to hide your identity;
• Try to book from another device and/or internet connection;
• Use our mobile apps on iOS or Android
Why can bots be harmful?
• Some third parties such as online travel agencies use bots. If you book your WIZZ ticket through their websites, we may not be able to contact you about possible flight disruptions or any relevant changes, and they may also apply additional fees on the top of the ticket price;
• Bots can overload our servers, slowing them down for our real customers.
If you are using a bot, please note that:
• By using automation tools on our website or mobile application, you are violating their terms of use.
• As per these terms, we have the right to detect and block your activity and cancel any booking you make via these channels.
• To provide the best service to our customers, bots can still access the Flight-Search capabilities, but we reserve the right to discontinue or block bot users even from Flight-Search, especially if over-use is detected;
• If you would like to show our flights in your inventory, please contact us beforehand and make sure users are redirected to wizzair.com when they are ready to make their booking. You can also use a deep link to the selected flight.
Isn't this what we've been asking for? They either make $10 selling you info to marketers or you pay extra? And this is an ultra low-cost carrier. It's almost expected.
No, it is entirely unexpected and labeled in a misleading way. If they had opened with 'we are going to charge you $10 extra if you don't disable your adblocker' that would be one thing (that would likely piss off a lot of people but at least it would be above board).
I think retargeting makes it worth a lot more. Airfare is low-margin, but hotels are much higher margin. I could see knowing you're traveling to X be surprisingly valuable because you can show users targeted hotel ads when they're likely looking for hotels.
How about this. You land on the site, and there is a popup that says, "If you allow us to show you ads while you're shopping, we'll give you l10 off the ticket price!"
No, we've been asking for a choice between seeing ads or paying. This is both seeing ads and paying. It'd only be what we asked for if people who didn't use adblockers got their plane tickets for free.
Disabling ad block results in the charge not being applied.
What's even more baffling is I had to complete a reCAPTCHA half way through the checkout flow, so them saying it's to do with bot detection is a stretch.
Edited as I forgot to mention the captcha code during checkout flow.