AIRLINE TICKETS ON THE INTERNET

The CNIL and the DGCCRF have investigated the practice of artificially increasing the price of plane and train tickets to encourage purchasing. They did not find any French merchant sites using this method.

It's decided, this summer, you will go to New York! However, there is no question of paying for your ticket at any price. You compare offers from different airlines, and one of them catches your eye. By reconnecting to the airline's website, you notice that the price of the ticket has increased slightly. And this increase continues day by day. Panicked, you immediately take your tickets. But the next day at the office, bad surprise: the airline always offers seats at a price lower than what you paid.

This mishap is far from rare for those who regularly travel by train or plane, and it quickly found its responsible: "IP tracking". With this method, the merchant site would spot, thanks to the “address” of your computer, that you have logged in several times to look at the price of a ticket. To encourage you to buy, it would then artificially increase the price. For Jean-Daniel Guyot, president of Capitaine Train, an independent train ticket sales site, “this practice is not an urban legend, and has been used a lot around the world since the early 2000s”. But are these methods used today by French travel sites, including the giants Voyages SNCF and Air France? No, the CNIL and the DGCCRF are responding today after a joint investigation.
"None of the techniques observed takes into account the IP address of Internet users as a determining element or does not aim to modulate the price of products or services offered to consumers", indicate the two organizations after having surveyed distance selling companies, and from their technical service providers. Jean-Daniel Guyot confirms. “We connect to the SNCF reservation centers and we never have to provide the client's IP address”.

Different administrative fees depending on the time of day

Other methods of price modulation were however detected by the CNIL and the DGCCRF. The existence of the famous “yield management”, assumed by all tour operators, is confirmed. This method consists of varying the prices of a ticket according to the date of reservation, the filling rate of the train or plane, etc. The latter explains why, in the same train, few passengers have paid the same fare. But the CNIL also discovered that the administrative fees that customers sometimes have to pay to buy a plane ticket vary depending on the time of day. “Internet users benefit from more advantageous fees when they buy a ticket during off-peak hours, determined by the merchant,” she wrote in her press release.

Even more problematic, the CNIL and the DGCCRF have noticed that the price of a plane ticket can vary "depending on the website previously consulted". Thus, the Internet user going through a price comparator rather than through the airline's site will sometimes be offered a very attractive call price. But, when paying for your ticket, the application fees will be higher than those usually charged. In the end, the promotion is not necessarily that interesting for the consumer. Given the opaque nature of this method of calculation, the CNIL and the DGCCRF will continue their investigations to determine whether this practice is contrary to the law "Informatique et Libertés".

But for MEP Françoise Castex, at the forefront of the protest against IP tracking, "the investigation does not remove the doubt about the obscure prices charged by the major transport operators on the web". The practice of IP tracking, which is too imprecise - computers from the same company can share the same IP address - has in fact been replaced by the use of "cookies". These little "cookies" collect information on Internet user behavior, and could therefore be used to modulate prices. An aspect on which the investigation of the CNIL and the DGCCRF does not look into.

source: Le Figaro