Holidaymakers could end up paying double when booking flights, car rentals and more, according to new research.
If you’re shopping online for a holiday, then it’s no secret that the website you use for that trip will have an impact on the cost of that trip.
As with all elements of finance, shopping around is crucial in order to find the best possible price, whether you’re shopping for flights or fridges.
However, there’s more to this than just comparing particular holiday websites, like Hotels.com, Expedia, and the like.
It turns out that using the UK version of a particular website may end up costing you substantially more than you would pay for the identical deal from a different nation’s version of that website.
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The British premium
New research from NordVPN makes clear just how easily travellers can be ripped off if booking elements of their trip through a UK website, rather than an overseas alternative.
For example, booking two weeks of car hire from Avis, with the car being picked up from Auckland Airport, would cost £2,484 if using the UK Avis website.
However, heading to Avis.co.nz would see that price fall to £1,226 ‒ a saving of almost half.
Alternatively, a seven-day stay at Disneyland Paris for a family of four in December would set you back over £6,500 if booked from the UK.
Yet booking through the French version of the Disneyland Paris website would see the cost drop by 17%, saving you more than £1,100.
These were just two of a host of examples identified by the firm, in each case where the British traveller would end up paying upwards of 10% more just because they purchased through a website with a UK address.
NordVPN pointed out that firms use all sorts of information about potential customers to come up with their pricing, and “cater to the purchasing power of different countries”.
It suggested that the factors most likely to impact the price you’re likely to have to pay include your location, how often you’ve visited the website (which is tracked using cookies) and whether the search coincides with a school holiday at your location.
The VPN option
If you’re looking to get around this pricing rip-off, then an option may be to make the most of friends and family living abroad.
After all, if you’re heading overseas to visit them, then perhaps they could book the car hire or hotel for you, and could then pay them back.
That isn’t exactly convenient though, which is why you might prefer to opt instead for a VPN, or ‘virtual private network’. As the name suggests, this is a way of protecting information about precisely where you’re accessing the internet from.
It’s an absolutely legal way to protect your IP address, and therefore open up the option of utilising international websites.
While some might use a VPN in order to do things that aren’t above board, like watching football broadcast by overseas TV channels, it can be used for more legitimate means, such as cutting the cost of your next holiday.
By using the VPN, it can appear to the holiday website that you are actually based somewhere else, therefore qualifying for that cheaper rate,
So when picking out a hotel, you don't just have to look at prices you can get from UK websites - you can also check out the prices available to shoppers using the website from a different country, and potentially land yourself a big saving.
Nothing changes in terms of the details you need to use either, it's simply a way around some of the 'dynamic' pricing used by these sites.
NordVPN isn’t the only option here ‒ you can enjoy similar services from the likes of Norton 360, Express VPN and Hotspot Shield too.
Different VPN providers have their own pricing options ‒ some will allow you to try their services for a period for free, while others have fee-free memberships, though you’ll have to put up with ads.
Can I not just go incognito?
Generally, if you want to surf the internet without saving your browsing history or cookies, then you might want to use incognito mode on your web browser.
You might think that this is a way to get around the location-based pricing employed by international holiday retailers too, however, this would be a mistake.
While incognito mode can help you ensure that the pages you visit aren’t stored in your history, it doesn’t hide your IP address.
In other words, the retailers you use still know exactly where you are, meaning you’ll face largely the same price as if you had used your browser in regular mode.
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