Passengers Pay Less If They Tell an Airline Website They Live Abroad
By Caroline Mcguire, The Daily Mail | Jan. 18, 2016
|
Booking flights is a costly business - but by using a few technical tricks, wily travellers are managing to make serious savings on the cost of plane tickets.
If you are going on a holiday that includes taking on internal flights within a foreign country, it can be more cost effective to book your ticket through the home website of an airline within that country.
By pretending to come from that country, dramatic savings can be made on tickets that often have extra costs instantly added for tourists.
Erica Ho, a travel expert and Editor of the website Map Happy, decided to investigate after realising that internal flights always appeared to be cheaper if she left booking until she was in the country she was visiting.
She discovered that the point of sale -- the time and place where an item was purchased -- affected how much the person paid.
By going to a site like ITA Google to search for her flights instead of SkyScanner or Kayak, which automatically assumes she was buying in her home country, Erica could change the location of the point of sale and the currency she wanted to buy the ticket in.
So, when she was buying a ticket from Cartagena to Bogota in Colombia, if she looked for the ticket with her point of sale as New York and currency as U.S. dollars, the price of a round trip was US$137 (89 pounds).
But if she changed her point of sale to 'Cartagena' and the currency to Colombian peso, the cost is 269,340 Colombian pesos, which is the equivalent of US$89 (57.06 pounds), even though they were offering identical seats on the airlines.
In order to buy these tickets, Erica then has to head to that website -- Avianca -- directly.
The computer naturally attempted to register her as American, but by clicking in the top right hand corner of the website, she was able to choose her location as Colombia instead.
By doing this, the airline continues to register the customer as a local instead of a tourist.
Erica then searched for the flight again on the website and was offered the same flight for 136,000 Colombian pesos, which was equivalent to US$72.14 (50.55 pounds).
Erica aid: "It was a bit more than what I was told but still less than Kayak's price. In total, I managed to get a flight about US$43.86 (30.73 pounds) cheaper than what any U.S. site quoted me."
'Though most of the time it works out that I get some sort of discount -- which can range from a few dollars to over a hundred dollars -- by leveraging foreign currencies against each other, it doesn't always work all the time.'