Travel Tip: avoid getting ripped off by travel sites!
As regular viewers of SebFreyTV will know, I spent the weekend in lovely Carmel, CA with my wife to celebrate our 12th anniversary. What you don’t know is that we nearly spent $100 more on our hotel room than we had to! What happened? To make a long story short, we ended up booking our room late – really late. Most rooms in Carmel were already booked. I was on every travel web site under the soon – Expedia, Traveloicy, Orbitz, TripAdvisor, Hotels.com – the works. The best deal I found on a nice hotel room was close to $400. I told my wife I’d found what looked like a nice hotel and a decent room and it was almost $400 and I was about to book it. So she grabbed her iPhone and hopped on Expedia and looked up the same hotel, same night, same room – and it was less than $300 for the same room! I was like, WTF? I launched an incognito mode browser window and checked again on my computer – it still showed the $400 price. I had thought maybe a cookie was set, but I guess not – looks like they were tracking me by IP address. My wife’s iPhone was on AT&T’s network, not our home’s WiFi, so she had a different IP, and because of that, we saved $100 for the room! Apparently if they see that you are really looking in earnest for a room, rather than just casually browsing, they jack up the rates. Who knew? I didn’t – but my wife did, and now you do too! So that’s my travel tip for the day.
