Why Clearing Your Cookies Won't Guarantee Cheaper Flights or Hotels
Many travellers re-check a flight or hotel room only to discover the price went up hours later. That common headache fuels the widespread belief that booking platforms track your search history and deliberately hike fares when they detect your interest. Switching to private browsing or clearing your cookies is often suggested as the quick fix, but testing shows that strategy does not reliably deliver lower prices.
While price variations regularly appear across different devices, browsers, and user accounts, there is no conclusive evidence that repeated searches or stored cookies alone cause travel costs to climb.
What the Search Tests Revealed
To test whether tracking search history drives up fares, independent US non-profit consumer organisation Consumer Reports conducted a study analyzing 372 flight searches across nine booking and comparison websites. Researchers ran simultaneous searches, comparing rates displayed in standard browsers holding search history against browsers where cookies had been wiped entirely.
Price differences emerged in 42 of the comparisons. However, the results directly contradicted the idea that cookies force prices upward:
- In 25 cases, the fare was higher in the browser where cookies had been cleared.
- In 17 cases, the fare was lower in the cleared browser.
