That's a great question! The reason many of us are upset. Because it shouldn't, but it does. Not always, but it does. Now this is black box probing so may be another factor, but the prices do swing quickly.
Stop spreading these lies. This cannot be done on any major airline (one large enough to be on a GDS). Airline pricing may be complicated but the way fares are constructed is public.
You may be witnessing:
* An ota changing their markups (which immediately asks the question "why are you paying the markup")
* Differing currency conversions and fares if you're changing the country you're issuing from (but this will reset itself once you actually try to pay)
* Fare class availability (somebody might have just bought the last ticket at that price)
If what you are claiming is true, there'd be far more evidence for it, and ITA Matrix (and hell, OTAs) wouldn't exist as a product. Given how well this is documented, it almost seems like you're disingenuously trying to sell VPN products (especially with your name-drop of a specific product)
I'm not aware of these things being well documented but I'd appreciate a link.
And I'm just trying to say what I've observed. I'm explicitly saying that this is black box probing. I'm not sure these are the causal variables making the changes but they seem to correlate. I've said there are other effects than VPN too, like clearing cache and changing browsers. It is definitely a weird feeling to open a page in multiple browsers and see different prices. You're right, I do not know what's going on but I'm not lying nor am I alone in seeing these things.
My understanding is that on most airlines, for a given route and fare class, you should expect a consistent price. Fare class is determined by stock available and a few extra inputs like trip length.
I'm not quite sure what you wanted me to take from that. First off, it's the best case where there's a high competition. I mean it is a YouTube video and it starts by stating how people spend their entire lives figuring out pricing, so of course it's not going to talk about everything they do in the fine grained nuance. Second, there's another name for price matching: collusion. It's usually indicative of a unfair market and he goes on a tangent for this. Then the next section he called the previous section "micro". Clearly he's not talking about dynamic pricing on a sub day interval.
It was a nice video and I learned some things but I'm not sure how its contents are relevant to the conversation. Doesn't prove or disprove anything. Well... it does demonstrate some ways airlines are anti-competitive but that's not what's being talked about here
Sites used to book travel, ie airfare, hotels, etc, are notorious for changing price based on your perceived interest. I've noticed this myself when I look at a hotel listing multiple times, the price tends to creep up.
Hotels maybe, but airfare is not going to change because you're in incognito or clear a browser. I rarely see any price differences between an Expedia and booking direct. If an airline was messing with prices based on something with your computer you would be see frequent large differences in prices between direct bookings and third party bookings, which I've never seen before.
