Imagine the joy recently when those that ordinarily spend a lot of time criticising Ryanair apparently discovered a loophole in its system to get cheaper flights.
All of sudden, pay-to-pee, standing room-only etc was forgiven and Ryanair could be gamed by simply deleting cookies after a search was carried out, apparently giving users a fare costing less than the previous result.
This rumour – spread, inevitably, by Twitter – gained even more acceptance from those that love to hate Ryanair after many had suggested that prices were going up if a user takes a break between searches.
When asked about this a few weeks ago, in typical fashion, a Ryanair official had this to say:
“This is complete rubbish, but then there are a lot of twits on Twitter.”
Not content with letting such a wild and fascinating rumour going unchecked, flight metasearch widget provider InvisibleHand [TLabs Showcase - InvisibleHand] decided to investigate.
Over the course of two days the company search 52 routes in two different browsers.
On the first day and using Firefox, IH ran 52 Ryanair flight searches on randomly selected routes, including  return and one-way trips, logging the prices throughout.
The following day, using Firefox it ran the same 52 searches and noted down the prices. However, it also carried out identical searches using Google Chrome – simultaneously with the Firefox searches. All cookies were cleared from Chrome after every search. Cookies were not cleared from Firefox at any point during the experiment.
The company says:
“If the price manipulation allegations were true, we would have expected to see price discrepancies in the results between Firefox and Chrome on day two. What we actually saw were exactly the same prices on both browsers.”
IH says the test is obviously not definite proof of a wider issue, but although Ryanair – like other airlines – changes its prices constantly using a sophisticated pricing system, “manipulation via browser cookies doesn’t appear to be one of them”.
In short, IH claims: it’s an urban myth.
NB: Raw data from the test is available here.
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About Kevin May
I wonder how this myth started? Why would anyone come to the conclusion, that the change of prices is due to use of different browser?
@Julie
When something confuses users, they tend to look for an explanation, and Ryanair’s website has several funny behaviours that can puzzle people, so it is not that far-fetched to believe that Ryanair might be using cookies to do something unusual.
For instance, if you browse the Ryanair website on two or more browser windows, you can have problems (http://www.ryanair.com/en/questions/using-ryanair-com-in-2-or-more-internet-browser-pages) and some users have experienced mixups of the two sessions’ data.
Want something cuter than that? Go to the Ryanair’s website, reach their FAQ, and type something like “easyjet is better than Ryanair” (http://www.ryanair.com/en/questions/search?q=easyjet+is+better+than+ryanair); there seems to be plenty of pages mentioning that…
Fancy foreign languages? See the non-English versions of some Ryanair pages and cry…
Because on the web – everybody can hear you scream….
Can’t believe people didn’t give the Ryanair the benefit of the doubt
Whether it’s true or not, invisiblehand’s test is analogous to finding some cookies missing from the jar, setting up 24/7 video surveillance of the jar and then judging a child’s guilt by whether they steal any cookies from that point on. Totally worthless. And you can’t even say this on their blog as comments are disabled, which just makes them seem like astroturfers.
Granted, Chrome is known to track its users for Google’s benefit.
Google is the biggest of hundreds of companies tracking your online experience.
This experiment is invalid.