Do motel sites change their rates when you return to book?


  • 500 Club

    On Wednesday I was online looking for motels for Thursday night along I70 in Indiana and Missouri. Found a Motel6 for 39.99 plus tax just outside of St Louis. If I signed up for a free My6 membership it would be only $35.99, so I did. So on Thursday afternoon a few hours away, I go back to book the room. Now the rate is $38. Now two bucks isn’t a big deal but feel kinda screwed. Is it common for motels to jack up their rates when they see you have visited the site before? I know the airlines do that all the time but clearing your cookies usually eliminates that.


  • Global Moderator

    Hospitality rates change with availability, not web history. They probably had a room or two booked in that day between when you searched and when you decided to book.



  • I disagree 100%. They change all the time depending on what cookies you have stored in your browser. You can prove it very easily by using two different browsers. For example, let’s say you’re using Firefox and you get a price change that looks suspicious like that. Just bring up the same site and search with IE or Chrome, and often you will see the original, cheaper price quoted. You can do the same thing by deleting cookies, but it can be tricky to pick the right ones to remove sometimes.

    Travelocity does sneaky stuff all the time, and it seems like it started when they were bought by Expedia. I have clicked to book a hotel room and the room is suddenly not available at that price, and they tell me to search again or offer the room for a slightly (sometimes very) higher price. Just for kicks I will do the same search on a different browser and voila–the room is magically available again at the lower price!


  • 500 Club

    frett said in Do motel sites change their rates when you return to book?:

    I disagree 100%. They change all the time depending on what cookies you have stored in your browser. You can prove it very easily by using two different browsers. For example, let’s say you’re using Firefox and you get a price change that looks suspicious like that. Just bring up the same site and search with IE or Chrome, and often you will see the original, cheaper price quoted. You can do the same thing by deleting cookies, but it can be tricky to pick the right ones to remove sometimes.

    Travelocity does sneaky stuff all the time, and it seems like it started when they were bought by Expedia. I have clicked to book a hotel room and the room is suddenly not available at that price, and they tell me to search again or offer the room for a slightly (sometimes very) higher price. Just for kicks I will do the same search on a different browser and voila–the room is magically available again at the lower price!

    Exactly. Similar things happen when checking air fares. And if a dealer lists a car for sale at $10,000, but when you come look at it, they raise it to $12,000, the government would fine or shut them down.


 

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