Orbitz, with a little intuition and some evidence from their data analytics team, realized that
"Mac users on average spend $20 to $30 more a night on hotels than their PC counterparts, a significant margin given the site's average nightly hotel booking is around $100, chief scientist Wai Gen Yee said. Mac users are 40% more likely to book a four- or five-star hotel than PC users, Mr. Yee said, and when Mac and PC users book the same hotel, Mac users tend to stay in more expensive rooms."
Being a savvy business, Orbitz is now experimenting with tailored their search results to display higher end/more expensive options to users who were searching from a Mac (ostensibly identified through the data that the browser reports to Orbitz servers when requesting search results), though according to the article, this is not the only, or even primary criteria used to tailor the results. It's important to note that the lower-priced options were still available, but may not have been as high in the search rankings.
The article has a little poll on the sidebar asking "Should your computer's operating system (PC vs. Mac) be used to serve you differentiated search results?
At the time of this posting, the voters lean heavily (70.1%) in favor of NO.
As a savvy consumer, I don't mind a business's attempts to tailor its product to what it thinks would work for me, as long as I have the option to, without too much additional effort, decide and choose for myself which is best.
I'm with Erica Spayd, a store designer from Queens, NY who, in a quote from the article, says
"It's clever. As long as there's an option to sort by price I'm fine with it."
The original article (behind a paywall):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304458604577488822667325882.html?mod=djemalertTECH
2 comments:
We want too so much at the same time: we want privacy, at the same time we want the system to be smart enough to figure out what we want before we even tell it. I agree with Eric that as long as we have options (for better or worse), we are okay. At the same time, digital marketing gets so competitive, that whether you want it or not, they install those little not-so-cute “cookies” to your computer, that if you keep on looking for the same flight, they will hype up the price by the time you are ready to enter your credit card #. As digital marketing is such a new and fast developing strategy, the lack of regulation can be a problem in the future (or now already).
While this seems underhanded at first, it's not such a new concept. In 2004 I was planning some corporate travel. I logged onto our provider's website and began to book my flight. I was interrupted by a phone call and when I returned to the computer, the time ran out on the travel site, so I had to restart from scratch. On this second attempt, I accidentally put in the day after I needed to fly. No big deal, I thought, since I could select "see prior day's flight options". Thus, the computer viewed the day that I really needed to fly as a compromised flight the day before. It turned out to be cheaper, and I believe it was for that reason. To test this, I tried a third attempt and filled out the itinerary preferences the right way, and sure enough, it was the high price again. This story about Mac users reminded me of that experience; the only difference is that this Mac issue sort of distinguishes by demographic than likeness to preference. Good Show Ed!
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