On Orbitz, Mac Users Offered Pricier Hotels First

An anonymous reader writes "Travel site Orbitz found out that Mac users tend to select pricier rooms and swanky hotels. So, from now on, they will show more expensive hotel options to Mac users than to PC users. This is why, although I am a Mac user, my Firefox agent string says 'Windows XP' :)" The (paywalled) WSJ report on which Reuter's summary is based carries Orbitz' s softer explanation, which is that the results by platform are an experiment based mostly on presentation and search-result ordering rather than actually naming higher prices based on OS: "[T]he company isn't showing the same room to different users at different prices. They also pointed out that users can opt to rank results by price."

Comments

Suprised This Doesn't Happen More Often

[rsmith-mac]

To be honest I'm surprised we don't see this kind of thing more often. Not just on travel sites, but on any kind of site that doesn't have strict MSRP pricing such as Amazon. Certain platforms absolutely attract certain demographics, and unlike tracking/profiling you don't have to spend time building as profile as all of this data is conveniently offered up by the browser with page requests.