Update: It seems the ZDNet article was a bit off (and I didn’t do as much research as I should have). Here’s a Wall Street Journal article which explains that what they’re changing is the order in which they display hotels based on price.
Continue reading: Orbitz to segment consumers by operating system!
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
You missed the point. They're showing the same price for the same hotel. They're just changing the default presentation order to put nicer/more expensive hotels at the top for Mac users since they're more likely to book them.
Uh...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304458604577488822667325882.html
Orbitz executives confirmed that the company is experimenting with showing different hotel offers to Mac and PC visitors, but said the 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.
The ZDNet story seems a little mangled. From what I've read elsewhere, the situation seems to be that Orbitz will highight fancier rooms / fancier hotels to Mac users. Everybody sees the same price for the same rooms, so it's not classic price discrimination. Rather, since the Mac users on average go for higher-end offerings, Orbitz will push those up front.
http://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/25/orbitz-presenting-more-expensive-hotels-to-mac-users/
Also, this comment wins the Internet tonight.
https://twitter.com/paleofuture/status/217414577619607552
"if you visit from a linux machine orbitz automatically narrows your search to kaczynski-style cabins"
What a fuss about nothing. Orbitz are trying to tune their results to their audience. Hats off, good job, smart thinking.
If I turn up in a Bentley, offer me a suite. If I turn up in a Chevvy, offer me a discount single bed.
The problem is?
Op totally missed their point. Just showing higher rooms/hotels first on Macs. Price is identical across OSs.
To me, this seems nothing different than charging different amounts via zip codes (Amazon did it, most catalogs "back in the day" had multiple copies). As consumers give more and more of their data and information to companies, we can expect companies to get better and better at targeting and charging different amounts for different products to different customers.
@Mark, I've seen a lot of people on twitter make that mistake today. I don't know if it's a mistake in comprehension or if they're just spinning misleading headlines for effect.
In case anyone wants to read the WSJ article but can't see more than the paywall preview, click the link in the Google redirect page here:
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304458604577488822667325882.html
Not good....as in the fact checking by either ZDnet or yourself, but we move on.
@Lucky: You think you could FIX the title of this post instead of leaving the completely misunderstood and unresearched version intact?
Thanks for the fix Lucky!
Anyone can make a mistake, but it's important to see the record set straight when the original assumptions are discovered to be false.
-Dax
@Gary: That's a very interesting article about Hotwire you linked to. Oh, wait...
So I wonder what order I'll get when I use XP/7 that's running in a vm inside of Vmware Fusion...or lets mangle the http headers for different results too!