I work for an OTA not Kayak. Kayak is a meta which means all they do is present prices they are given from their partners either via a feed or scrape and then send them to the partner who shares the fee. Southwest as others have mentioned is not available in the US as a business choice. Kayak also heavily caches the fares everyone does to make performance better and inventory changes a lot especially in close by dates. Seeing cached prices of a cached price means the actual price can change a lot from searching to booking. Note the final price is only determined when you hit a booking page, everything before that is cached and might be fairly stale. Of course they can be errors in pricing since the fare rules are crazy complicated and often the difference in fares might be all the taxing entities. Each country, county, city, airport and cow pasture might affect the final price so it's possible that a country where you are booking might affect this our customers are mostly in the US but I doubt it. Try and book it on QF or BA and the price might be substantially different, even though you end up sitting on exactly the same plane. Most likely because the fee arrangements are different or because Southwest is willing to pay them, probably to get exposure to markets that wouldn't otherwise know about them because they don't have a marketing presence there. This is definitely the most likely scenario. Kayak and other aggregating sites have different arrangements with different partners in different regions. In turn those partners have different arrangements either with direct connect or the GDS themselves who may also have different arrangements depending on the geographic market. You can get the same effect with other GDS products also, try rental cars for one. The other crazy thing is that different geographic markets are generally responsible for their own revenues, so you can have different promotions, and yield management strategies depending on who is trying to hit their numbers. Looks like the cheap flights were on WN Southwest and the expensive flights were on DL Delta. I just did an example flight search to fly later this week Jan 24-30 round trip from SLC to OAK, a route that both DL and WN fly direct. Kayak doesn't show me any WN prices in the USA, but might have some sort of pilot program or contract to show them outside the USA. Meanwhile ITA Matrix matrix. It's strange that those flights are shown since Matrix is usually very reliable. So what's the lesson here? Check the WN site directly instead of depending on search sites. Check both ITA Matrix and Kayak if you're depending on search sites; they don't have the same flights listed. Sometimes you need to check individual airline websites even though it's a pain because they have better flights and prices than search sites have; there's no reliable way to know when that's the case. Try to book at least a few weeks in advance. I can't stress the first point enough. When you buy anything, or if you need to negotiate a price, do your research, and know what it should cost. It's especially true when booking flights, because you don't want to see a price, think it might go lower, and miss a great deal. If you know the fair value, you can recognize a good offer when you see it, and book instantly. Being from Dallas Southwest HQ I know that Southwest doesn't allow other websites to use their booking and online flight pricing. Most airlines can be checked through Google Flights or Kayak but I know that I have to check with Southwest directly to compare their prices. BUMP: I guess I should have read the other comments as this has been said a dozen times. B6 is the IATA designator for JetBlue. People who travel heavily, or otherwise spend a lot of time talking about airlines, often use these to refer to airlines rather than writing out the full names over and over. After I noticed most places are cheap to get to but flights are expensive back. I noticed the same business model was in place from the other direction. So just fake the country of origin and you get cheap to and back. The other one is clear your cookies before booking. Places create fake demand by disappearing the cheap flights on you if you shopping around. If you clear your cookies the cheap flights will return. They recoup the costs on the return flight you need to take. That actual works as well, don't book anything from South Africa I found out as I was booking my mates flights. You could knock several hundred off by going through an Australian or UK proxy. I believe from memory it was the same agency as well. Just changing the domain brought up vastly different prices on the same flights. But no as I mentioned above lots of holiday destinations have cheap tickets inbound, but out bound are expensive. I first noticed it travelling from London to Croatia. I hopped on a proxy, and found I could get the reverse deal from Split to London. So I started gaming the system. The agencies are hedging on the fact you have to take the return flight. So they coerce you into the cheap flight to location X, but claw the money back with the return flight which I guess the vast majority of people have to take. The price descrimination that the airlines do is so opaque and manipulative, this is exactly why one needs to be cognizant of the technicals. We could, if we wanted to, require PII prior to bidding on tickets. Imagine if the NYSE priced publicly traded equities in this manner? For example, we can charge black people more based on zip-code demographics to discourage them from flying first class. A middleman like Kayak has no incentive to keep black people out of first-class. They do have an incentive to price discriminate: charge people more who would be willing to pay more. Likely outcome: lower fares for economically disadvantaged groups. Except the middlemen are all required to charge the fare the airline sets, and can't compete on price. The airlines currently price discriminate primarily by separating the relatively price-insensitive business travelers from highly price-sensitive leisure travelers. This is why you'll generally see lower fares for round trips that span a weekend: if you're traveling for work you generally don't want to spend your weekend off away from your family. No incentive to keep black people out of first-class. They do have an incentive to price discriminate: charge people more who would be willing to pay more. Likely outcome: lower fares for economically disadvantaged groups. This is insanely naive. And who, pray tell, do you imagine they are trying to exclude? Y is typical a matrix, with quality as the main variation. In plain english, high quality leads are worth a premium. The business of assessing quality, at scale, is through indirect statistical techniques ie, loose correlations of observed characteristics to perceived quality. The nexus of fashion, dating, real-estate is pretty strong if you consider the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Alternatively, you are talking the more important parts of a hierarchy of needs pyramid. Expensive clubs, fancy cars, and flashy homes. Precisely the target market for 1st class travel, which is not business class obviously. This is a devils advocate position, but its worth thinking through. Airlines are masters of dynamic pricing via algorithms which they constantly tune. I've written some AirAsia scraping code in Java + Selenium web driver that runs every hour on a VPS - I use it just to discover the best time to buy holiday flights. Have noticed that prices for a particular route often change several times a day. This technique goes back long before the Internet. I recall working in a computer store where it was a standard practice to give someone a quote with an expiry date, and if they missed the time limit extra money would be tacked on with some made-up BS excuse We sold out of Foobars and the new shipment came in at a higher price. It was the exact same reasoning: The customer walked away, shopped around, and came back because we have everyone else beat. So now we need to raise our price as much as possible without making it worth their while to go back to someone else. And in fact, they probably are in our place because someone else raised their price on them, or disclosed hidden gotchas, so we have leverage. This has nothing to do with the VPN, unfortunately. The price difference comes from Southwest's price being different than Delta's. Southwest flights wont show up when searching Kayak's USA site, but they do show up on international Kayak pages. Southwest came in cheapest on both searches. As has been noted, Southwest did not appear in the same search using www. I was coming from a US IP. I wonder, if I had been coming from a British or Canadian IP, if I would have been redirected to the corresponding site. To my knowledge, ITA Software is where Kayak and many of the other booking sites get their data, so it's normally what I use when searching for flights. As such, I can beat it without trying very hard simply by going to direct to the websites of the likes of Ryanair or AirAsia if I know they're operating on a particular route, which is a shame, because I like their interface. Or, in this instance, Southwest. Some of the travel sites using ITA's QPX API to drive their booking engine get prices from these other airlines via direct feeds or web scraping, but as pointed out here, they can be quite selective in what they're willing or able to show It's still ludicrously easy to trip up the flight comparison services up with edge cases like the short domestic Yangon-Mandalay route, where ITA finds nothing, most booking engines offer ridiculously expensive flights connecting in China or Bangkok, whilst Innovata Quicktrip which you should use when you're convinced there are direct flights the big sites aren't showing you shows multiple direct flights a day with 6 different local airlines, provided you don't mind their clumsy twentieth century booking operations. TLDR: Use Quicktrip which doesn't give direct prices to check if there are budget airlines or local airlines also flying on direct routes that the big search sites might not be showing, and try these unlisted airlines' websites direct if they seem more promising. Google bought out itasoftware so I'm not going to assume that it's completely neutral, but I have consistently seen the best deals come through that. I can't confirm, but I assume from personal experience that kayak increases prices on flights as you search for the same flight multiple times. Of course it is legal. In the same way as it is legal to set the sale price for most things at any arbitrarily high, or low value - airline ticketing takes place in a free market. This means sellers can offer tickets at any price they want, and it is up to the purchaser to signal whether they think the price is appropriate by buying the ticket or not at some price. The alternative is government interference or regulation of the airline ticket industry, setting fixed prices, which would not be good for the industry. I have a similarly bizarre little story that's sort of the opposite: I recently added a leg to a trip and cut my fare. Just before the holidays, I was trying to get a flight from LAX to SLC. Mine, as it turned out, stopped over in... It's not even unusual. And it has a perfectly rational explanation. Suppose there are three cities: City A, City B and City C. And for simplicity's sake, suppose that City B is the hub for the airline. Let's say B and C are major business destinations with a lot of business traffic between them. Business travelers are less price-sensitive since they're not personally paying the fare they just have to stay within corporate travel rules , and more concerned with things like flight length and schedule. But City A, on the other hand, isn't really a major business destination. All other considerations are null. Now, suppose that you are the airline employee in charge of maximizing revenue. But what about pricing for trips out of City A? They need to connect at your hub in City B, but again you have to remember that price is the only consideration that matters to those passengers. My wife and I regularly use Expedia and other US travel websites to book Australian domestic flights - even after our exchange rate conversion it still works out cheaper often we save one or two hundred dollars. Australian airfare taxes are insane. The only downside is when things go wrong it is expensive to spend ages on hold while making an international call... They are much cheaper than actually placing an international call, at least in the US, it is only like 3 cents a minute US When I lived abroad I called home with Skype this was before Google Voice and I could talk as much as a wanted for only a couple dollars here and there, actually cheaper than my phone bill now. I like the idea. I think in general, you can get some things cheaper from retailers in other countries based on differences in the forex rate if the shipping + tax issues are not a problem. The downside is that things may be cheaper because they weren't subject to some type of import tariff that you may be on the hook for from customs when it arrives in the US. While booking flights in Europe I frequently toggle through kayak. Doesn't require a VPN, it's just that Kayak works through partners and the partners are country specific. You can often get better deals on one site or another, depending on the partner selection. I haven't used it that much in North America recently, but it seems to be the same dynamic. Every time I see phrases like this I force myself not to think the person is a fool but it's hard. People need to realize that ensuring security and privacy isn't fixed by installing just some tool and be done with it. Worse, they will do this and trust they are immune and then the damage will be worse. I experimented with this a few months ago using free Amazon Windows EC2 instances. The thought being that with EC2 instances I can come from far more IP end points than a specific VPN offers. Sites like Kayak, TicketMaster, even Healthcare. I imagine this is to stop third party scrappers or ticket scalpers. I have no idea why Healthcare. That is incorrect and unfortunate that it left the wrong impression in user's minds. Orbitz did not price up hotels based on OS, they chose to change the list of options presented to users based on OS. If a user found the Wynn on a Mac or a PC, they were the same exact price, all that was different was what position that hotel was in in the default sort order. One is standard personalization, the other is price discrimination, and the headline made it sound like the latter. No my goal is simply to evade the NSA wiretaps as well as my ISP who has recently started messing up my internet connection whenever I torrent, so I vpn overseas and torrent. But yes you are correct, in order to browse privately you should really use tails or something along with vpn and avoid say logging into facebook or anything linked to your identity. Flight metasearch sites have contracts with airlines and OTAs for specific markets, so you're likely to see different inventory if you visit a Canadian site instead of a US site, for example. Seeing different prices on the same inventory is much less likely disregarding taxes and exchange rates. Like others have said, Southwest inventory doesn't often appear on sites like Kayak because they want customers to book directly. That cuts out the commission to Kayak and conditions people to look for flights on southwest. OTAs have all kinds of weird tricks raising and lowering prices to get people to book sooner rather than later. Instead of realizing that providing good service with a nice clean interface is the way to go they use these cheap tricks. Sometimes it's as simple and clearing your cookies to get a lower rate. I used it a few times to get cheaper tickets: when you are buying long distance flight tickets, pick a city close to where you will depart this will add an additional flight transferring from your departure city. When you get multiple transfers there is a possibility that the offered price will be cheaper I confirmed this with an agency when I initially figured this out. If you get a cheaper price buy it and call the airlines to tell them you will miss the first flight, and have them correct the check in location to your departure city. BTW, I use the VPN to mask my internet traffic… sorry NSA That's okay. I'm sure the minor inconvenience of not seeing the data flow directly to your local IP is more than made up for by the data collection at both sides of that VPN... To be serious, I wonder if they apply extra scrutiny to VPN providers, and use traffic analysis to build correlations between TCP connections. The extra effort might be justified by a higher class of data going across the connections. Then again, it's probably easier to just use some form of evercookie injected into TCP streams on the fly...
