Don't know whether folk have experienced this but thought it worth flagging up in case.

I was investigating car hire rates for Italy for our summer break yesterday and got a good one through AutoEurope who flagged up a Thrifty quote for £115.

I did a bit more research then came back to the same site a few minutes later but the deal had disappeared and been replaced with the same car/conditions for £156. I recalled this happened to us a few years ago while staying in NY with family, and two different laptops drew similar disparities so I booked it on the cheaper one

So yesterday I fired up Mrs. Ed's lappie and sure enough the cheaper quote reappeared, not recognising that device as belonging to a returning "sucker" client.

"Thumb-to-nose" smiley

You can spend your savings on an ice cream when you are there Simon!

Yep, seems pretty commonplace amongst a lot of online companies now.

A note on Thrifty.

When I rented a car through them in the US (their sister company was Dollar) I queued for nearly two hours at the desk to collect the car. Reading some reviews upon our return it seems that this is fairly normal.

They were significantly cheaper than the competition though.

Potential solution

There's more and more "device dependent pricing" going on too. For example if a site sees you visiting from the latest Ipad or Iphone they surmise (with some justification ) that you have more money than sense and you see the highest prices. If you visit from a desktop PC running XP then you see the base pricing, with variations between the 2 extremes.

No chance of that





MacBook Pro though......

Heard all this before. It's a load of beau locks, certainy in the travel industry. The reason the prices change by machine/minute is the way in which the antiquated TPF type systems work and how, in the case of cars, the stock is managed. For flights its a case of who else has just purchased(or cancelled) a ticket and at what price, class, they did that. This is massivley complex and putting any process on the tinternet above this would blow the hugely expensive inventory control systems and create havoc.

Amazon on the other hand may be more advance with their selling tools as they don't have the complexity of inventory.

So you're saying it's a glitch in the system which causes a price to be different on one laptop to another?