The Alviator is in Mythbusters mode today, as it’s been around the seventh time I’ve seen an Instagram post on my 4U page. Setting your VPN to another country (especially a lower-income country) is not going to affect the pricing of your airline tickets. However, airline tickets do tend to be location based. Here’s how it works instead.
Proving that a VPN won’t get you a cheaper airline ticket
A VPN (virtual private network) allows you to transfer your network messages from one location to another. This means that you can be based in the U.S., but your computer thinks you’re in the Philippines. Virtually every major VPN network is marketing that you can find cheaper flights by turning on your VPN, and setting your location elsewhere. This is not true.
I can’t go on every single airline, turn on my VPN, and prove to you that this is not true. I can only do it once. However, my greatest point of proof would be you just searching “vpn airline ticket” on Google – there are tons of guides from VPN companies, lots of Reddit posts about whether this is true or not, and a couple of ghostwriters propagating information, but exactly zero customer success stories.
I will do it once. I’m based in the UK, so let’s say I’m booking a roundtrip Cathay Pacific economy flight from Hong Kong to London.
I then set my VPN location to Vietnam. Turns out Cathay Pacific won’t even let you load your booking page with a VPN, so the closest I could get was via Google Flights (which funny enough, had mislocated the server as in Iran). The total fare came to 22,424,396 dong…or HK$6,619.
I travel fairly often and book flights from abroad all the time, and I’ve never had a price fluctuate just because I was physically in a different country. So don’t let the VPN marketing technique fool you – 99% of the time fares aren’t location based.
There is one exception – a couple of airlines (particularly in South America) offer cheaper fares for locals. You might be tempted to try and book these local fares, however these are genuinely intended as local economy aids – they will cross check your nationality at some point, so I wouldn’t recommend booking those fares.
How does location-based pricing actually work?
We’ve written about this at The Alviator before, though the point of sale always factors in the origin airport, not the location in which the ticket was booked online.
For example, let’s say I wanted to seek out ANA’s premium economy from Tokyo Haneda to London. I don’t necessarily want to pay £1,200 for a one-way premium economy ticket from Asia to Europe.
However, if I fly out of Seoul Gimpo, the ticket is charged out of ANA’s Korean office, which prices the ticket more cheaply (without the use of a VPN). The catch is that I have to fly from Gimpo to Haneda the night before, and presumably stay overnight – the Keikyu Inn goes from £40/night.
Fortunately in the era of low-cost airlines, the positioning flight could be as easy as a <£100 one-way flight from the airport that you intend to depart from.
I’ve also taken advantage of this recently – I took a flight from Seoul to Hong Kong to London. I managed to slash my one-way premium economy fare in half just by originating out of Seoul, when the Hong Kong to London flight itself would’ve cost double the amount of money. My ticket was also charged in Korean won, instead of in Hong Kong dollars or pounds, even though I booked in the UK. Have a look at this post to see how this works, and which origin airports tend to have the cheapest airfare.
Seoul Incheon is my prime location for cheap airfare lately
What about cookies and incognito tabs?
Incognito tabs also don’t lead to cheaper airfare – that’s simply not how airline pricing works. Airlines sell routing-dependent tickets from an origin airport to a destination airport, and they sell in fare “buckets” (or RBDs).
For example, Cathay Pacific’s economy class has eleven booking classes – Y, B, H, K, M, L, V, S, N, Q and O. While the lettering is mostly arbitrary, all of these fares are different, and come with different terms and conditions (for example, Y is the highest fare class, and might come with free cancellation or rebooking). Generally speaking, the airline will sell the cheapest publicly available fare bucket in each cabin class, and move onto the next fare bucket after the cheapest bucket is sold out. This has nothing to do with whether your cookies are being tracked, or whether you’re on an incognito tab.
All of these different fare buckets will get you a seat in Cathay Pacific economy class
However, airlines will sometimes adjust pricing of each bucket dynamically based on perceived demand of their tickets. For example, if you and a few friends are looking to book separate flights on a group trip, the airline you’re booking with may note that there’s a lot of interest for the route on a particular date, and trigger a fare increase. This isn’t common, but I’ve had this happen before with certain airlines. So, if you’re booking a ticket with friends, realise that this is a risk, or avoid making too many dummy bookings before actually going ahead with your payment.
Similarly, if you get past the passenger details page and want to pay for your flight, but close the tab, the airline may “hold” your reservation for you for a while. This means that if there was one seat left in the fare bucket, the price may show as unavailable until that seat is released. If this happens, that’s no big deal – just wait for around 12-24 hours, and the seat should be released back to you (if you’re taking a high demand ticket or participating in a fare sale, avoid clicking through until you’re ready to pay).
Conclusion
There are a lot of VPN marketing schemes which advertise that using a VPN will get you a cheaper flight. These schemes miss how airline pricing works entirely – airline tickets are priced out of their origin airport, not out of the place where the buyer pays. Using an incognito tab also won’t help, though an understanding of dynamic pricing and airline fare buckets will help.