Expedia Revenue Management at Check-out or Rule Compliance

We have all been shopping online for something only to be told after making the purchase decision that it is no longer available or no longer available at that price. This often happens when buying flights, as prices can change minute-to-minute and you can be left with a much higher ticket price which makes you abandon your purchase. Disappointment all around.

However, the opposite happens from time to time as well! The price of a London to Seattle flight, when I found it was £649.07 (including all fees). I clicked to start jumping through all the purchase hoops, but after a couple steps into the check-out process, it flagged up, rather alarmingly, as £616.07. That's a 5% decrease in price. (See, I'm not making it up!)

I was pleasantly surprised, of course. But why would they do that?

I've got 2 suspicions.

1. Revenue Management / Yield Management / Consumer Psychology

In the weeks prior to this screen capture, I've been to the site a few times already looking for the exact same flight. Even though I'm not logged in, I'd venture to guess that the site has looked up my cookies and knew that I've been looking for these flights. Therefore, it should know that I was a likely buyer, rather than a window shopper (pc pun intended). I've been at the check-out stage before, but have abandoned the shopping cart eventually. It would be quite logical for the site to entice me with a lower price as a 'pleasant surprise' to finally get me to spill my moola. Not to mention the positive impression it's left with the shopper (look what I'm doing now - free advertising!).

However, is it worth the 5% price drop? How does Expedia decide 5% was the right balance of customer incentive and revenue loss? I was already a willing customer, ready to bite. Isn't it just giving the 5% away for free? In my case, it's difficult to say whether the move has gained my loyalty to Expedia, because I was already a frequent visitor and buyer there. It may have re-enforced my loyalty though. It would be very interesting to analyse a few year's purchase and cart abandonment data of customers where this has happened to, versus a control group. Would we observe a lower purchase completion rate, which would drive a higher lifetime revenue per customer?

2. Airline price adjustment rule compliance

There could exist such a regulatory rule in the online airline pricing world to protect consumers, such that the vendor must notify the buyer of last minute price changes before the final purchase is completed. Now, I don't know if such a rule exists, but it is possible. However, it sounds extremely difficult for the regulators to enforce and monitor compliance.

I personally think it's more the former than the latter. One way to test the real reason behind the price drop could be to see if it's always a 5% decrease. Time to do some more flights window shopping!

P.S. In a previous article where we observed operational inefficiencies at London's Gatwick Airport, we erroneously stated that the airport operator was BAA (British Airports Authority). In fact, BAA was forced to sell Gatwick to please regulators seeking to break a monopoly on UK's airports. Our apologies to BAA. The current owners are Global Infrastructure Partners, who also owns 75% of the London City Airport.

Update:

Responding to two unconstructive comments, one of which was downright rude and was deleted, we thought we would add to this article.

The commenters suggest that Expedia is not a price setter, but just a re-seller making possibility one above unlikely. That said, the question still stands, "What's going on here?". If the prices that Expedia gives you when you search are cached and not live, that seems to be to be a surprising shortcoming. If they are, why offer a lower price to someone who appears to have already made the decision to purchase?

There are probably a number of factors at play that someone from the online travel community could answer.

If I were reselling through Expedia, I would want my price-updating algorithm to give the higher of the two prices at the point of payment, i.e. more profit. Both Expedia and the vendor are motivated to collect a higher price and therefore a higher commission as a percentage of the selling price.

The commenters may be very correct in saying that Expedia doesn't set the price, but merely re-sells at whatever the price the vendor names. That's why we said there were two possibilities, the second being not revenue management. However, if Expedia is not practicing revenue management in this way, they probably should at least experiment with it. Their commission represents a headroom within which they can optimize and the goal, after all, is not to make the greatest profit on each sale, but instead the greatest profit across all possible sales.