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Comment by pkaye | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the airlines will start gaming thing. Seeing what people are being told and doing the opposite to catch them off guard.

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I've had the experience of switching from a localized google to google.com/ncr and had ticket prices drop ~4X. I think airlines already try to game the system based on country of origin.

+1 for https://google.com/ncr is the first thing I do on any browser.

- Latest version of Google Images

- Better Google Search results

- etc. etc.

What does /ncr do? I'm having a hilariously difficult time googling for it because I usually google straight from the omni bar.

"No Country Redirect", I believe. Specifies to avoid geolocation

Flight search is an incredibly dumb domain e.g. in this case, the carrier is regulated by the government to keep fares within a reasonable bound, but only for residents of that country. People booking from overseas can be gouged with impunity!

Let's not talk about codeshares.

A lot of times, airlines sell tickets based on where the ticket is issued for multiple reasons. If you read some fare rules for these country/region restricted tickets, it'll say something like "valid only when ticket issued in Japan" which leads to people trying to get a flight ticketed on a region specific site of orbitz/expedia/some-airline.co.jp

Tried this once and found that JAL will not sell tickets to anyone with a middle name. (Presumably due to a bug on their website, where you can only enter given and family name for the ticket, but you have to use your middle name for Secure Flight, and when they don't match, it fails. No combination of putting my middle name in the given or family field worked. Ended up booking an AA codeshare for $55 extra dollars :/)

British Airlines is already f#cking with Google Flights - looked up a round-trip transatlantic flight, got a quote, proceeded to booking, got "oy vey, so sorry, price changed a bit" and served 2x the quote. It was 100% reproducible in a scope of several days.

Are you sure it was BA's decision? Seems rather unlikely to me, as no-one is going to continue to book a flight when the price has just doubled, especially when you've just come from a price comparison site and one press of the back button will show all the competitors.

I think at least JetBlue is already trying to do this.

This is the daily price graph for a recent flight I was watching. Often the price was changing hugely multiple times per day.

http://imgur.com/a/qaxrX

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