Do Ryanair use cookies to raise the price of their tickets after you have visited the site before?

Question

According to this website, this and a few others, apparently, RyanAir uses cookies to detect whether you've been to the site before and increases the price, presumably because it believes if you're checking it again, you're going to be more desperate to buy at a higher price.

My first impression is I'm skeptical as I would've thought it'd basically be illegal to offer two sets of prices to two customers at the same time. Also, doesn't seem very good business sense as the customer who've checked for the second time is more likely to have looked at other sites too, therefore, more likely to be deterred by a higher price.

Can anyone confirm if this actually takes place with RyanAir or with any other airlines?

Answer 1

This belief seemed to spread in April 2011 via twitter.

Due to Ryanair's reputation as being overly greedy at the cost of the consumer, I think many people have simply assumed that this claim was true.

It does not appear that it has been looked into too conclusively, but the investigations that have been done indicate that the claim is not true.

Popular travel blog tnooz investigated this, which has an unsourced quote from a Ryanair official denouncing the claim as untrue. tnooz refers to a company called Invisible Hand which make a browser addon of the same name which helps to find the lowest flights on airline websites.

Invisble Hand tested this claim by running 52 flight searches in Firefox and Chrome over 2 days, with cookies being consistently cleaned from Chrome but not from Firefox. The conclusion they reached was:

“If the price manipulation allegations were true, we would have expected to see price discrepancies in the results between Firefox and Chrome on day two. What we actually saw were exactly the same prices on both browsers.”

It isn't a comprehensive test and doesn't take into account the possibility of manipulation based only on certain usage patterns, but is interesting nevertheless.

Given the widespread attention this news item received, if it were the case it would seem reasonable that it would have been independently confirmed. However there were no reliable reports of reproducing what was reported, which along with the Invisible Hand results may indicate that some sort of bug was encountered rather than a deliberate action.

Answer 2

Can anyone confirm if this actually takes place with RyanAir or with any other airlines?

An indirect answer, but yes, Delta Airlines admitted to having made a similar system, in error, for a period of 19 days, in April 2012, where customers that weren't logged in were offered cheaper flights:

In late April we began testing a new search functionality as part of these enhancements. We phased the installation, to first offer the new search function to customers who weren’t logged in because we wanted to be particularly careful not to disrupt the booking experience for our best customers. As a result, over a period of about 19 days, logged-in customers were seeing different flight search results than customers who chose not to log in.

They further explain the discrepancy in prices was because the same search may have returned different flights, and hence the different prices.

please know that delta.com did not sell the same flight itinerary to different people for different prices. That very idea goes against the grain of how Delta treats its customers. And based on the way we file our fares it’s actually not technically possible. In fact, Delta’s fares are consistent in all channels.

Source: Delta Blog