I was looking into booking plane tickets home yesterday and tried looking at Expedia. Google automatically sent me to Expedia’s Taiwan’s site. Once I punched in my details, I got a list of ticket prices but none of them seemed that cheap.
I then used a VPN and hid my IP address. I searched the regular Expedia site and got much cheaper options for my flight. The cheapest Expedia flight on the Taiwan site was about two times as expensive as the ones I found when I hid my IP address.
The airlines I found with my IP address didn’t even show up on the Taiwan Expedia site but the airlines do have flights into and out of Taiwan.
Anyone know why such a difference in prices? Is it just a scam by Expedia to get more money?
I then went and used Travelocity for my tickets and they gave me a much better deal and better flight times. The price was actually a bit cheaper than the price from the airline website as well.
It’s not just Taiwan and not just Expedia. If you ask them, they’ll probably tell you they “need” to charge differently depending on “where” an online purchase occurs.
This common practice with any online booking site. I’ve sometimes found cheaper prices by going to a non-US version of the site and book the same hotel.
Your location and what language version may result in different prices.
Yeah, I guess I just never thought about it much. The only reason I found out was that Expedia automatically sent me to the Taiwan site, even though I tried to get to a different location.
I think I was really surprised because the Taiwan site was giving me prices that were two times as expensive as the non-Taiwan site. This wasn’t for the same airlines or flights, it just didn’t seem like those cheap flights were available.
The only way I could do it was to hide my IP address. It’s one of the things that really bugs me about sites reading my IP address. Sometimes I get sent to a Chinese language site and can’t get away from it unless I hide my IP address.
It’s because online travel websites have to actually set up shop in a given country to sell flights there, and then make sure they have contracts in order with the airlines who fly in and out of a given country. It’s an industry with lots of rules, and if an agency breaks the rules, they pay steep penalties.
So, as much as an agency like Expedia might like to sell everything everywhere, they are probably limited by what their airline contracts allow and what local rules in each country dictate. As a consumer it’s obviously in your interest to book on whatever Expedia site is cheapest, and from Expedia’s perspective, they probably don’t care which of their sites you book on, either.
I’ve always been able to click through to the .com site manually when I get directed to .com.tw based on a Taiwan IP, and I’ve never had issues booking on the .com site from Taiwan. Like you, I find the prices there to be cheaper.
