3 Secrets to Travel Cheap Post-Pandemic and Beyond
Tips from an airline employee that everyone can benefit from.
After a sequence of very complicated months for all of us involved in tourism ventures (or for my colleagues from my former career as airline strategist), the light at the end of the tunnel shines brighter and brighter.
For this reason, I decided to share three of the best chapters of my best-selling book, Budget Travelers, Digital Nomads & Expats: The Ultimate Guide. Insider secrets to save money. Things that until now, only airline employees knew.
1. VPN and Incognito Mode on Google Chrome Can Unlock Better Prices
The department I worked during years in the airline industry is called Revenue Management, or as we called it: RM.
In this area are the gentlemen responsible for the (apparently insane) variations of airplane ticket prices. Even though for you, those price movements may look chaotic, they obey a myriad of mathematical rules, geographical variables, and real-time information.
Dozens of analysts incessantly input new details in the model and specialists responsible for entire regions calibrate the precision of the systems with only one thing in mind:
Sell those seats for the right price.
But…
What is the best price?
The answer may look vague, but after years in RM, it just comes automatically:
It is the maximum price that the consumer is willing to pay.
To explain how the price is calculated takes days (and all the contracts I signed prohibit me from doing that). During the final years of my airline career, I was training new specialists, and it took two days only to explain to them the logic behind the calculations. What I can guarantee is one thing:
The “best prices” differ between countries (or, as we called, POS — Point of Sale).
The maximum price a middle-income customer from a country like Bolivia is willing to pay for a particular flight is logically different (probably smaller) than the willingness to pay for it from a Los Angeles higher-income customer.
Therefore, it is common for airlines to offer different prices on the exact same flight — all depending on where you are from.
A few years ago, there was a scandal in Brazil when people realized that switching the language of the reservation page of an airline changed the price drastically.
Changing the language will not always work. Sometimes they will define your country by your frequent flyer profile or credit card. For those cases, this hack will not work. However, in some cases, airlines determine the country of the passenger by the IP (Internet Protocol)
So, here comes our first hack: Use a VPN to research flight tickets.
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and is a way to change your IP for another location. If you are booking a flight from the USA to Mexico, and live in California, try comparing the prices while using a VPN that gives you an IP from Mexico. Just take care to use a protected and secure network not to have your card information stolen.
Besides the IP, there is another way for airlines to change their prices to unfavorable conditions for you: the cookies stored by your browser. Don’t be fooled by their sweet names, those files serve a not so tasty purpose: airlines can use it to check how many times you searched on the internet for the same ticket. The more you search, the more they know you need it. So, they can increase the price in the next time try to quote it.
A trick to avoid it is even easier than using a VPN. You just need to do one thing:
2. Activate Incognito So That Your Browser Won’t Denounce You to The Airlines
To avoid being denounced (blacklisted or flagged), activate the incognito mode of your browser, which will prevent the cookie tracking by websites. Voilà! With Incognito mode, you became invisible to them.
Now you can search the ticket combination you want, as many times as you wish, without the airline increasing prices just because they know how badly you want to fly during those specific days.
3. For Low-Cost Airlines, Refer Back to Number One
Airlines try to stimulate customers to buy round-trip tickets (those that you go from A to B and then from B to A).
Airlines do it to avoid people flying from A to B and then taking another carrier to fly back from B to A. This is what they call flight imbalance. They stimulate round-trip tickets by offering better prices for them in comparison with buying two one-way tickets.
However, low-cost airlines are not worried about flight imbalance like legacy carriers such as United or Delta. They have smaller airplanes that rotate among multiple destinations. Therefore, to sell one-way tickets is not a problem for them.
This is an excellent opportunity to enjoy the flexibility of building your itinerary by traveling with one-way tickets and hopping from one country to the next. There are even a few situations where buying two one-way tickets with low-cost airlines will be cheaper than one round-trip!
Final Thoughts
Those three hacks are ways to avoid airlines from identifying your purchase-power (based on their historical database and algorithms) and attribute to you a higher willingness to pay.
They are quick, and you can apply both of them virtually every time you research for an airline ticket.
When you use a VPN and Incognito mode of your browser in the way recommended above, you can explore many other layers that airlines have, with even bigger discounts (and that is why they don’t want you to discover that).
Have a great, more affordable trip, and have fun with the extra money!
Author: Levi Borba, founder of Colligere Expat Consultancy, former RM specialist for the world´s greatest airline, co-founder of Nearby Airport Hostel Warsaw and author of the books Moving Out, Living Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity and Budget Travelers, Digital Nomads & Expats: The Ultimate Guide. You can check some of his articles here.
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