Are Brittany Ferries taking the proverbial? (1 Viewer)

[Emmit]

Hi All,
So SWMBO came up to me this afternoon and showed me the tablet, upon which was a ferry, Portsmouth to Bilbao in Feb for £249.
She suggested that, although funds were stretched, we might squeeze in a month over there before we go on a planned hol. in April.

So I got to work and bu&&er me, half way through looking at various alternatives, the price for the ferry she had already found did a hike as well as others I was looking at.
Question. Have I 'just' been unlucky or have those devious persons within the ferry organisation got it within their power to tweak prices at punters who don't take the first ferry they find during their search.
Just asking. I know that you should clear the 'cookie' jar before every search so they don't know you have been previously looking, but this takes it to another level.

 

[camocam1]

Happens all the time if you are using search engines for hotels etc I think it is triggered by the No of times a site is checked over a set period but I'm no expert

 

[MikeD]

We had the same with BA. In the end their Club price was cheaper than coach.

Delete your browsing history, shut down PC and reboot and I suspect the price will be back to where it was once before.

I am no expert but I think you get a new IP address each time you switch your PC on and if the history has been deleted the web site will think you are a new visitor.

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[Ivory55]

You can use , hide my ass. Com . Or Google reset IP address. Then they will not know its you again.

 

[DBK]

I have heard of this happening before. Clearing cookies might work as the cookie can record earlier visits to their site. There is also no language issue as the French for a computer cookie is... cookie.

However, it could simply be this is the time of year folk are booking their holidays for next year and that great economic principle of supply versus demand determines prices.

 

[mjltigger]

They will have a number of tickets at each price point and the computer will run through them in sequence so if there was one ticket left at the lower price when you looked and it got bought you would have seen the price jump.

When we were booking flights for our October holiday last year, there were only 3 tickets left at a price, as there were 9 of us the price went up massively because the computer calculated it at the new price instead.

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