Brazil's major airline, TAM, has a nice little trick of their own to fend off the OP's advice.
Even if you use TAM's Brazilian portal where you have to navigate in Portuguese, and even if you use it from within Brazil, you won't get the Brazilian price. As a foreigner, you'll have to pay up to 50% more.
What's their little trick? They demand that you enter your CPF number, a Brazilian national identity number, to buy from the Brazilian portal for exactly the same ticket. And you can't make one up, or use the CPF number of a Brazilian friend, because they query a government database to verify that the CPF number matches the purchaser's name.
The CPF number, by the way, is absolutely not a government requirement. Anyone can buy a ticket at a travel agency in Brazil or at the airport without a CPF number. This is either the height of incompetent website design by TAM, or more likely, their price discrimination technique to charge more from foreigners.
In case it's helpful: anyone can get a CPF. You don't have to be Brazilian, or even live in Brazil. From what I remember, you go to the Brazilian consulate, fill out a form, pay a small fee. (Foreigners need a CPF to do various things, basically to enter into any kind of binding legal agreement, IIRC.)
Not that you're probably going to go to all the trouble for a cheaper ticket or two, of course.
Back in 2002, in Argentina, I had a similar problem (I was living in Brazil at the time). I purchased flight online in Spanish while in Buenos Aires and got a great price relative to the price quoted on the English version. However, when I went to pick up the ticket, I was told that I was given the wrong price and that the price I paid was only for Argentine nationals. They basically wouldn't let me get my ticket unless I paid the original price.
I don't remember the exact figures but it was something like $60 for Argentinians and $200 for foreigners.
After I bought my ticket. There was nothing on the site that said "This price is for Argentine nationals only". I was absolutely livid when I was in the office where I had to pick up the ticket. IIRC I told them that they deserved the banking crisis meltdown for commerce shenanigans like the one they were pulling (this was about one year after those events).
> Get a Brazilian friend to buy the ticket online on your behalf using his Brazilian credit card and CPF number. Note that a CPF number is demanded from the purchaser when booking online, but passengers can leave the CPF field empty.
Making this into an on-line market (matching Brazilians and foreigners for mutual profit) sounds like a business opportunity.
How would that work? If I understand correctly the CPF number needs to match the passenger details. So someone else could buy the ticket for you, but then the ticket is in their name.
No, the linked article[1] says, "a CPF number is demanded from the purchaser when booking online, but passengers can leave the CPF field empty".
I can confirm that that's how it works. The CPF number is needed from the person buying the ticket, not the person travelling.
Nevertheless, I don't see such a brokering business being very profitable. The main problems are (a) the customer doesn't care about the extra cost because his/her company is paying or (b) he doesn't even realize he's being suckered because he used the English-language TAM website and didn't realize Brazilians get a better price.
Also, getting a CPF isn't impossible if you're a foreigner. I have one, and there are sites and blogs that deal with Brazil and business/travel topics which explain how to get one.
The real problem for me was paying with my US bank card (w/ Visa or Mastercard symbol). Because this wasn't allowed, I had to travel to the airport and pay in person on several occassions.
Now you only need to match your name with a brazilian with the same name. This assumes the airline doesn't require an ID card with that same CPF to board.
Airlines could do this even more straightforwardly by requiring passport details as part of the booking process, and then applying an additional surcharge to anyone wishing to fly on foreign passports, assuming such practices were legal under local law.
In 2009 Vietnam Airlines had an amusingly low-tech way of preventing foreigners from using their English-speaking call-centre for advance bookings: requiring people to physically turn up in their local office to collect the ticket within a week. (Their Singaporean sales agency also required my physical presence, but actually sold me a cheaper ticket)
Say you are in Lima and want to buy a plane ticket to Arequipa. If you have a South American ID ("DNI"), you pay a very cheap rate. If not, you pay the regular USD rate.
I recall a long time ago when I lived in Canada, I could sometimes buy cheap airfare if I used the American Travelocity site instead of the Canadian one. At one point, it stopped working because they "updated" the final price after I entered my credit card information, as that stated my residence/billing info was in Canada.
I'm going to keep that in mind next time I buy on TAM. I had no idea about this. I'm Brazilian, have a CPF number, but have been living in the United States for over 20 years. I did think that airline prices were unusually high between Brazilian cities when I looked online to buy tickets during the world cup.
> For reasons I never quite understood, every time I tried to book a domestic flight in another country, the prices were always exorbitant.
...
> But, say, once I was in Bangkok, that same flight that was once $300 would fall to $30 almost inexplicably. This phenomenon is because a ticket’s point-of-sale—the place where a retail transaction is completed—can affect the price of any flight with an international component.
The reasons are pretty easy to understand. When you try to book an in-country flight in Thailand from the United States or Europe, they infer that you are someone who will soon be traveling on an expensive international flight to Thailand. They infer that you will accept $300 for an in-country flight rather than say "screw this, I'll take the train or bus", because (1) you can afford international travel so $300 probably isn't a big deal to you, and (2) there's a good chance you are on a business trip and need that domestic flight to keep things on schedule.
When you try to book an in-country flight from within Thailand, those inferences do not work.
At some point, they'll get clever and look at your IP address when you make an online booking, and even if you are booking in-country they will give you the $300 rate if you are connected through a hotel that is popular with international travelers.
This does not only go for airline tickets, it's very common in all transactions. Just need to go to the console market and compare the game prices between market. They extract whatever they think the customer is able to pay.
There are people buying diapers and filling trucks with them going from one country to another because of the large price difference between the countries.
People do this in America with tobacco cigarettes. In Missouri, the taxes are low so the price per pack spread can be pretty high when compared to NY state, so people illegally sell Missouri cigs to NY stores to avoid the high taxes.
I do the same thing, but with booze. The Idaho border is 15 minutes away, and the amount you save (at least, if you drink as much as I do) is well worth the time spent getting there and back.
Or if you're in my area and need cigarettes, you drive to the nearest reservation and buy them tax free (which like you point out, makes a huge difference). This one is a little bit more of a legal gray area, but that never stopped anyone.
This is also very common of people in Massachusetts who live near the NH border. The state run NH liquor stores are significantly cheaper than in MA. They also conveniently place their stores all along the border on major highways. It's less that an hour drive from Boston.
My friend and I were hitchhiking through Ireland awhile back. We got a ride up into Northern Ireland with an older guy. A little ways before crossing the border he stopped to buy a trunkload tobacco so he could resell it up north.
> There are people buying diapers and filling trucks with them going from one country to another because of the large price difference between the countries.
Cheers for looking up the stats. But I suppose there might be more to it than just "average price of booze". For instance, when I (in NL) need some quantity of (cheap) vodka for a party, it pays to get them from Germany where most hard liquor[0] is roughly half the price than it is in NL. Other stuff, like beer, is about the same.
[0] that isn't marked up for other reasons, such as Whiskey
Every once in a while, certain people in southern Sweden will go on a booze shopping spree in Germany. They'll drive south, take a ferry to one of the German coastal cities and fill their cars to the limits of what is legal (and oftentimes over that) from these so called border shops.
This is also common in the United States. A couple examples I'm familiar with:
- Pennsylvania has relatively strict laws regarding alcohol, so just over the Delaware border you'll find a lot of these "border shops" (although I haven't heard that word in the US);
- my wife was born in a dry county in Arkansas. Just over the county line (which happens to be the state border with Oklahoma) there are drive-through liquor stores. You can go, get your booze, and turn right around and go home.
This is still a thing, at least if the number of fireworks stores right at state lines are any indication. (I recently saw some along the Georgia-Tennessee border, although I can't remember which side they were on.)
It is even stranger in Texas, where the state says they are OK to sell at certain times of year but most large cities and towns prohibit them. Thus, you see seasonal roadside stands set up in unincorporated areas.
I have a friend in Denmark who told me he buys a danish beer from Germany and has it shipped to him in Denmark, because its cheaper. I thought that was pretty interesting in itself.
Finland has even more idiotic rules: microbreweries aren't allowed to sell their wares online. So they ship them across the Gulf of Finland to Estonia, which is way more liberal, and sell them online from there, which Finland can't prohibit thanks to EU free trade laws... and then the orders get shipped right back to Finnish buyers!
Remember though that this is tax fraud if you exceed certain quantities, while airline price discrimination is legal, so it's not quite the same thing :)
Are you sure of that? Certainly you can bring with yourself (for personal use) as much alcohol as you want across any EU border, and I'd be surprised if it became a fraud at some point just because it's shipped for you.
This kind of airline price discrimination, however, is not legal within the EU.
They're doing that in Venezuela with food. The prices of staples are subsidized, so the citizens are buying locally, and reselling in neighboring Colombia.
When I traveled to and within Chile in the late 90's, I was advised to not book domestic Chile flights from the U.S., but instead to just buy them with cash at the LAN Chile office once I got there. Good advice: they were way cheaper that way.
The reason given was that there is no way to drive the length of Chile within its borders. If you want to go from southern to northen Chile, you have to either drive through Argentina, or fly. So the Chilean government subsidizes domestic airfares, basically as a matter of sovereignty. Buying in cash in a local office, you get the subsidized price.
I never checked to see if the subsidy story was actually true, but the price was definitely lower in-country.
I would assume it only covers EU citizens buying tickets in an EU country from an EU country. A common scenario, but it doesn't help the rest of the world.
So meta of me to find this on Hacker News! I run Map Happy, and yeah, we have a syndication relationship with BI. Thanks for being so kind to link back to the original piece... though it would have been nice to see our site headlined instead of the BI piece. :)
Obviously, there are a lot of strategic PR rationales behind it.
Since it's a full copy of the text, I'd imagine there is some business relationship involved, so we don't really know which one they would prefer being linked.
You'd want to be careful that you're viewing the same price package when doing this. For example, when displaying a ticket price in Australia, it must be an all-inclusive price - including all airport fees, surcharges, and everything else. Viewing the same ticket from, say, Japan, it might appear cheaper but it doesn't have those same inclusions, and when you add them all back in it comes out pretty similar.
That said, I always buy my air asia flights in malaysian ringgits - it's always cheaper than AUD.
One reason why Air Asia is cheaper in MYR is because it's a Malaysian company, so they don't take foreign exchange risk nor pay bank fees when selling to you in ringgit.
For even more fun, try buying KTM (Malaysian rail) tickets in MYR vs. e.g. SGD. They will charge you the same numeric price, ignoring the exchange rate of about 2.5:1. This works much the same as the airlines pricing by sales region.
There are two basic causes of this, and they apply to a lot more than just airfare:
1. Price discrimination based on market segmentation. As others have described, the consumer behavior of an international traveler is that they are willing to pay more, so why not charge them?
2. Badly set foreign exchange rates. Companies that sell internationally will use an exchange rate internally when setting prices in a foreign currency that are typically very beneficial to themselves. Sometimes this represents the inherent risk in doing business in a foreign currency. Other times, it is used as a dumping tactic so they can claim they set their prices by simple conversion (Strauss Israel, for example, uses an internal rate of 4.8, which the shekel has never reached in all of history).
The former is the reason why flights in Brazil, Thailand are expensive when purchasing abroad. The latter is the reason why Malaysian or Colombian flights are expensive. Better advice is to simply know that most credit cards (both US and european) automatically convert charges, and you'll get a much better rate (typically 1-2% commission on the forex rate of the bill date) by finding a way to make the purchase in the foreign currency, rather than USD or EUR.
I find that most of the credit card issuers don't automatically convert to USD -- this usually happens more on the merchant end. The problem is that you don't know if the online merchant is doing this or not... it's a lot easier, say, if you're sitting down at a restaurant and find it happening.
I am amused by the level of intelligence the author expects of their readership.
Personally, I would have thought that people who browse Business Insider to have at least a basic grasp of currency conversion, rather than being introduced to a price in Colombian pesos as a mysterious concept that apparently is "a lot of mumbo jumbo to most people".
He could simply have written "116,280 COP ($61.59)" and continued with the article. The whole "mumbo jumbo" paragraph does make it sound like he assumes that at least some of his readers won't be quite up to speed on the whole different countries use different currencies thing.
Really? If a high school student couldn't, they'd fail basic mathematics. Of course you'd have to look up the current exchange rate, but that goes for all currency conversion. Having to look up an exchange rate is part of the process of currency conversion.
I think GP meant off the top of your head knowing the current-day conversion rate, which would be impressive; not simply doing the calculation which is certainly trivial, by what grade level, 3rd?
Quite a lot of non-USians have rough USD conversion rates in their head for understanding US articles. £1 =~ $1.6 (or $1.5 if you want to do the arithmetic in your head) =~ EUR 1.2 . That's stable enough.
Well, yes, but given they change, if you are doing currency conversion you have to look it up anyway. Always knowing the currency rate for all currencies without looking it up would be impressive, if only because nobody can do that.
Just wanted to point out -- since I actually wrote that original article -- is that I wrote it for a general audience. We have existing relationships with a lot of media partners like BI so sometimes I write for their audience in mind to cull traffic back to the site, which has a way more niche audience (but I still like to make it as accessible as possible to the general public). Depending on where I'm trying to garner press from, I'll write with different audiences in mind. (...if anyone's interested in the business/media/pr aspect of it all.)
Apologies if I insulted anyone's intelligence but that wasn't the point. COP, by far, is not a standard or major currency. How do you think my mother is going to react when I talk to her about Guatemalan quetzales? She, does, however understand Euros but for the purposes of this example, which is a Colombian flight, it made no sense to use a different currency.
I was probably being an over-judgemental arsehole, is just that it seemed really weird to have a price in a foreign currency referred to in a piece as "a lot of mumbo jumbo to most people", especially in a business paper, though I would have found it out of place in the normal press as well.
I do not have any idea how your mother would react, however I am sure that prices in Guatemalan quetzales can be presented in an article for general readership outside Guatemala without worrying too much about how the audience might react and without describing the written price as mumbo-jumbo, or otherwise confusing.
You just tell them that the prices are in Guatemalan quetzales and how much it is in something more well known. There is absolutely no need to prepare people for the shock of the existence of obscure currencies.
The US journalist H. L. Mencken was quoted as saying:
"No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."
For my money, writers taking this advice to heart has been one of the most damaging forces in journalism and the knock-on negative effects into the culture are incalculable in their horrendous variety.
Also worth clearing your cookies and logging out. I've seen Delta offer me better prices after clearing cookies. I've seen Marriott offer me better prices after logging out (amusingly I'm a platinum rewards member, but get better pricing by logging out).
Airline pricing is such a racket - I can't imagine any other consumer facing business with such dirty pricing practices. It woulsnt surprise me if the only reason paying in USD or EUR is more expensive is simply because typically people paying in those currencies are just more likely to pay a silly high price.
If you try to run a straightforward business, you have to charge more money than competitors that do shady things. And the people who say they want no bullshit buy from your cheaper competitors.
Yes. Airlines have decades of evidence showing that people will compare comfort, reliability, "shady" practices, etc., and then 99% of the time throw it all out and buy the cheapest ticket. If you wonder why flying sucks so much now (aside from the TSA), it's because airlines literally have no option but to compete on price. Airlines that try to compete another way will inevitably fail.
There was. From 2004 through 2005, I used to fly an airline called Independence Air[0]. I used to biweekly commute up and down the east coast of the US. Best airline I ever flew. No bullshit sales, friendly and helpful staff, and nice planes with good legroom. Sadly they went out of business.
It's harder for airlines to start small the way Google did. You have to offer a certain number of flights to achieve minimum visibility, and people cannot try out your offer whenever they're flying, if only because they're taking another route.
For that, you'd need some "unbundling" strategy where not just the Star Alliance (or whatever the companies are called) can sell seats, but another entity can buy seat contingents and sell them at similar conditions. Oh well, phone service, search, and flights are all different, with different rules.
If you're in Europe, ryanair are steadily getting better and better. They still don't quite fit the bill, buit they're cheap and reliable and their dirty practices are getting less invasive
Ryan Air is "no bullshit" right up to the point when something goes wrong. If you're on a flight that is problem free they're fine, but if you happen to be so unlucky that you have to deal with delays or cancellations or perhaps just a lost or damaged suitcase then they're bullshit personified.
And are any other airlines any better than Ryanair for that? My last ryanair flight that was cancelled, I spent 3 hours in the airport and was flown home, and got lunch out of it, and when the flight was cancelled the estimated departure time was correct. Obviously, I'd rather get home, but that's not a half bad service. Comparing to Aer Lingus (another Irish airline that offer similar routes) I've been offered nights in a hotel because they decided to overbook my flight, and I arrived on time (~50 mins before departure to Dublin), not early. Which would you prefer?
are any other airlines any better than Ryanair for that?
Much better. Swiss, Lufthansa, SAS and Air Canada for example have all been extremely helpful to me in the past with re-booking flights, dealing with lost luggage and generally fixing things when things go wrong (even when the thing going wrong was my fault).
RyanAir have a fanfare if a flight is on time. Literally. If you land on time, the cabin intercom will play a fanfare and a message along the lines of "This has been another On Time flight!". And they're only on time in the first place because they tend to inflate the durations they advertise: they'll say a 2h flight takes 2h 15m, then act all surprised when you hit the tarmac after two hours.
They're on time because their business model depends on them having minimal turnaround times, and they mostly fly out of small airports with relatively little chance of a holdup (and avoid Heathrow like the plague) and don't have to worry about flight connections. Empirically comparing "on time" performance is an inexact science at best (and most of the delay factors, including those that make a flight regularly take ~15 mins longer than an ostensibly similar one, are outside an airline's control), but efficient flight ops are to Ryanair what effective search is to Google.
Except that American Airlines doesn't allow you to use a non-US credit card on their US site and fails with a completely obtuse, out-of-context error that you only discover the reason for after calling their callcentre.
Another similar one I've founds is to find a good price and then run the same request in several different country domains. The differences can be quite large e.g.
travelcompany.com
travelcompany.co.uk
travelcompany.com.au
Also I've learnt never to book an extra night at the hotel reception when plans change. It's invariably cheaper to go online and book through an aggregator.
> It's invariably cheaper to go online and book through an aggregator.
Depends on the country. In less-developed places, proprietors of smaller hotels pay relatively large fees (think 25%) to online booking services. If you are already staying there, they will probably give you more days at whatever rate you're already paying, or even less (because it's less work for them to manage longer-term stays, and/or they may not be fully booked).
This happens when you deal with people who charge you based on their margins rather than your consumer surplus.
There's also the risk that aggregators will screw up something. On two separate occasions I saw someone arguing with hotel reception about a booking they made with an aggregator that the hotel never received. Customer says, "But I have the printout right here that says I paid in full!" Hotel says, "Sorry sir, you'll have to take that up with the company you paid. You didn't pay us."
The whole concept of geographical segmentation is built right into the GDS systems (Global Distribution System). Agents are all designated by an identifier that ties them to a particular geographical point of sale. That's why the above works, many TLDs of a company are actually tied to an agent point of sale in that country.
Works on all GDS content - car rentals, hotels and so forth.
I remember reading about this hack awhile ago and I was trying to do it, but it was always +- same price + hassle to find company who will accept whatever local currency is.
FWIW, this is what I do when I'm looking up air flights:
- Create a $5 DigitalOcean droplet.
- Setup a PPTP VPN [1]
- Login and verify you're now in x location (where x is the region you created the droplet).
- Search, find appropriate flight.
- Repeat with another region if needed.
- (optional) Login without a VPN and book your ticket.
I've heard prices are higher if you are logged in with your username on airline sites. Also I wonder if there is a cheap way to run a Vpn that lets you choose your "location" on the fly.
I remember reading about companies offering different prices based on your browser's user-agent - the argument was something like "Mac users are more willing to spend more". Maybe you'd get discounts if you make them think you're using an extremely old machine... like IE6 on Win98SE or thereabouts.
In theory you could use Tor (in the config file you can hardcode a list of exit nodes that you want to use). In practice you probably don't want to do this because: 1) If not everything is correctly SSL encrypted on the airline website the risks are much higher and 2) there's a good chance that the airline will block open proxy IPs.
Like it says, the key is the "Sales city". You have to find an agent physically located in the city/country in question to be able to book with that fare.
Once you've found one, give them the fare construction from the bottom of a Matrix details page and you should be set:
Pretty poor examples. I reside in Colombia - you can choose spanish and Colombia on the airline websites, but it all comes down to the country where your credit card was issued. LAN simply won't let you pay the domestic price with a foreign card, you'll have to physically go to a bank and hand over cash. Avianca has one of my American cards whitelisted after actually going down to the office to pay in person, but will generally decline the transaction for foreign cards. Until you've actually submitted a transaction and had it approved .. what you see on the site doesn't matter.
tl;dr: if you are traveling to a airport that is dominated by a single carrier, try to find a flight that includes that destination as a layover. Then just get off there (only works if you are not traveling with check-in luggage)
Its called price discrimination[1] and is fairly common practice. It can only really be maintained for a longer time if resale is impossible, and restrictions are added to ensure that market segments buy in the booking class range that has been established for them.
Hi HN, not very savvy here but would be great to learn how to fake your location? I am in London at the moment and would like to travel through Europe for a bit for cheap.
Generally flight taxes are based on (1) departure airport (2) arrival airport (3) overflight countries. I remember looking at a flight from the US to France that had about a dozen government entities adding taxes and fees that exceeded the airline's actual price.
While the information useful in itself, the article has a misleading title and assumes that reader has information he doesn't.
1) What is "that same flight"? Is that a domestic US flight that gets cheaper when you're abroad? Or is it a domestic Thailand flight that gets cheaper when you're in Bangkok?
2) Currency has little to do with Point of Sale. What the article is saying is that using local currency may yield cheaper prices and that the airline's website might not allow you to change the currency directly but might change it automatically when you change the location.
Even if you use TAM's Brazilian portal where you have to navigate in Portuguese, and even if you use it from within Brazil, you won't get the Brazilian price. As a foreigner, you'll have to pay up to 50% more.
What's their little trick? They demand that you enter your CPF number, a Brazilian national identity number, to buy from the Brazilian portal for exactly the same ticket. And you can't make one up, or use the CPF number of a Brazilian friend, because they query a government database to verify that the CPF number matches the purchaser's name.
It's discussed in more detail here:
http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Booking_a_domestic_fl...
The CPF number, by the way, is absolutely not a government requirement. Anyone can buy a ticket at a travel agency in Brazil or at the airport without a CPF number. This is either the height of incompetent website design by TAM, or more likely, their price discrimination technique to charge more from foreigners.