Can You Really Save Money By Booking Flights In Incognito Mode?
With websites serving us advertising cookies daily and our phones tracking everything we do, many travelers swear by a hack that involves looking up tickets in Google Chrome's incognito mode. It makes sense in theory: We're constantly being bombarded with ads so closely tailored to our needs that it can be easy to assume that our phones, tablets, and laptops are eavesdropping on conversations that they shouldn't be privy to. Why wouldn't our search histories and other telemetry be applied to something with as much price volatility as airline tickets?
Few industries have been changed by e-commerce more than the travel industry has. Before some of the top websites used to book flights like Priceline, Expedia, and Kayak changed everything, the average person bought airline tickets through local travel agents, who used to be a one-stop shop for air travel. Now? We have sites like Skiplagged, which specializes in finding "hidden-city" fares intended as layovers on longer trips. The existence of sites like this certainly helps explain why travelers often think that airlines are trying to rip them off: If an airline would charge you less to fly from New York to Dallas with a layover in Chicago than it would for you to fly from New York to Chicago, what other hidden fees and shady schemes are going on behind the scenes?
It sounds plausible that the airlines are tailoring pricing to the user, but is it true? Let's find out.
Not much evidence behind the incognito theory
Consumer Reports looked into cookies and flight pricing in 2016, searching for 372 different flights. Of those searches, a whopping 330 returned the same prices in both a lived-in browser and a browser running in incognito mode. "Cookies or no cookies, it is impossible for us to show different prices to different users," a Kayak spokesperson told Consumer Reports upon hearing the findings, adding that the variances could easily be explained by price changes that happened in the seconds between the lived-in and incognito searches.
A National Bureau of Economic Research study released in November 2021 came to a similar conclusion: The popularity of a given flight might affect the pricing, but your personal level of interest won't. As Yale economist Kevin Williams, who worked on the study, told Gizmodo in March 2024: "Your search behavior almost surely does not affect anything. But if you booked the last seat at the lowest price, then you could affect that flight for everyone else."
Finally, a third study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in October 2023 had similar findings about not just the incognito mode myth, but also other folklore deal hacks like looking on specific days of the week. "There are so many hacks out there for finding cheaper airline tickets," said study co-author Olivia Natan, an assistant marketing professor at the Haas School of Business. "But our data shows many of these beliefs are wrong."
Overall, the evidence suggests you can use your main browser window. You'll be fine.