I'm very surprised they're not already doing this. I guess in the future I will have to use Tor and play around with various exit nodes until I find the best fare.
Any decent algorithm here would be tailored to give rebates to anyone they can reliably pin an identity to, and only if that identity is also known to be price sensitive.
Anyone they can't identify reliably they'd want to charge the most expensive price. Meaning that only would you need to hide your identity, you'd have to manufacture or hijack a completely different identity.
Because they'll know with what confidence they have your identity pinned. You better use a small number of IP numbers for the same credit card, and they better not be known TOR nodes. They better find their tracking cookies in your session or their confidencie in your identity will rank as 0% and your price will be the default no-rebate price and so on.
An even simpler trick would be to "log in to get the best deals". Crap prices shown until you log in, and after that, some customers will see rebates, and others will not. But at that point you are completely known.
I get, very often, ‘this flight is no longer available at this price’ after filling all pages. That is the same thing but presented in an infuriating manner.
True they can't change the price at that point, but I just tried out for S&G's and apparently all of the major airlines now block Tor. There goes that idea!
