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Travel Company Highlights More Expensive Deals For Mac Users
Customers buy Apple products, secure in the knowledge that they are buying a reassuringly expensive product. Now, when users browse the web, unless specifically blocked, the computer (PC, Mac, Android mobile etc) will transmit basic details (make, model and version number) of the operating system and web browser that's being used. Many website admins monitor this information and collate it into nice stats to scratch their heads over while they wonder what to do with it. One such company, online travel agency Orbitz has been doing just this with their travel website and has noticed a rather interesting fact: Apple Mac users tend to spend $20-$30 more per night on hotels than Windows users. This represents up to 30% of the average cost to stay overnight on one of the hotels on their website, so is significant. Also, Mac users are 40% likelier to book high end four-star or five-star hotels compared to Windows users, which is again, significant.
Rather unsurprisingly, they have started to capitalize on this by highlighting different deals for Mac users and Windows users when they search the site, with Mac users having more expensive options highlighted and showing higher up the rankings. These are typically 11% to 13% more expensive than the deals offered to Windows users, helping to maintain that experience of purchasing something reassuringly expensive, which Apple customers are so accustomed to. At the moment, only search results for hotels are being manipulated this way, but in time, Orbitz hopes to extend it to other areas such as car rentals and flight bookings. It should be stressed that all of the same deals are available to both Mac and PC users, it's just the way that they are presented that differs.
Orbitz executives confirmed that the company is experimenting with showing different hotel offers to Mac and PC visitors, but said the company isn't showing the same room to different users at different prices. They also pointed out that users can opt to rank results by price.
Posted by | Tue, Jun 26, 2012 - 07:35 PM
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