Simple browser hack to save money on flights
How switching the .com to another country domain can save money
It is pretty common knowledge that companies use cookies and your search history to determine your browsing patterns and raise flight prices accordingly. Many people now buy their tickets using incognito mode or starting fresh on a new device after they find the flight that works for them. These are good steps, but there is an additional little trick when buying flights that can save quite a lot on the exact save itinerary by simply changing the county code top-level domain in the browser. For example, instead of searching for your flight at www.kayak.com you could search for the same fight on www.kayak.se where .se is the top-level domain for Sweden. As you can see in the example below, I first found the flight I was interested in using the US domain which showed the price as $312. Then after searching, I simply changed .com to .se and the same exacts results showed up with the price now at $287. Not bad for only having to change 3 letters. The only downside is the language and currency differ, but Kayak lets you simply change the currency back to US dollars if you would like. Furthermore, Chrome usually can translate back to English from the browser or you can simply translate yourself and enjoy the money savings in addition to a language lesson!
After I checked this hack on a couple other country domains I quickly realized that the prices were different with every country. What I then wanted to learn was what country typically has the cheapest flights and if there is a certain pattern. I will show in the rest of the blog my findings which I based off of three of the most common international flights out of the US and using all of Kayak’s 36 different country domains. The flights I chose were New York to London, Los Angeles to Mexico City, and Miami to Cartagena. I chose round-trip flights 1 month away with the return flight 1 week after and made sure to only obtain the price on the exact same itinerary (always in incognito mode and deleting cookies). Although I automated some of the process there was some manual work which I why is did not fully calculate more flights. However, I did check other common flights and found similar patterns.
In all cases, the flights from the US domain (.com) were the most expensive or pretty close to it and overall there was a pretty sizable variation between all of the domains. See below for the complete results of each of the three flights I calculated along with the airline in the itinerary.
The results show (see table below) that the US domain is about 5% more expensive that the average other domains with the cheapest domain ranging between 11–19% cheaper. Note that the cheapest flight was found on .se (Sweden) on two of the flights and on .ca (Canada) on the other. Also, on average, it was the European domains that consistently had the cheaper prices with .se, .dk (Denmark), .de (Germany), .it (Italy) and .es (Spain) being the best.
While 5%-10% does not sound like much, with flights starting at $300 USD that converts to savings of $15-$30. With more expensive flights these saving increase and simply with one quick and easy URL change, the potential for even more cost savings arises if you have the patience to check more domains. The nice thing is you don’t have to search again on the other domains since kayak uses the same paths for all of them, so I would recommend determining which flight you want and then simply change domains for purchasing (make sure to still use incognito mode). If you do, in fact, purchase flights in a different currency, make sure your credit card has no foreign transaction fees.
I checked Momondo and Google Flights as well. Momondo showed similar price discrepancies between domains albeit they only have a few domains, and sometimes I had to actually search for the flight again on the different domain. Google Flights shows the same price across all of their domains and their prices were sometimes better than all of the kayak domains and sometimes worse. So, I would recommend searching there in addition to all of the Kayak or Momondo domains. I focused mainly on international flights since that’s where I have found the most success in price discrepancies. I did find some cheaper US domestic flights on some other top-level country domains, but it is not nearly as consistent and flights itineraries are not always the same since many budget airlines will not show up on international domains.
Overall, I hope you find these findings interesting and certainly feel free to reach out or comment if you have any questions of feedback. Also check out my website www.dailyflightdeal.com to sign up to get emailed cheap flight deals daily for flights leaving out of the city of your choice!
Note: I have successfully bought tickets in the methods I described above and never had a problem, but I have not fully researched the terms and conditions of the websites regarding purchasing from different countries so any actions following the reading of this blog is at your own risk.
