One travel site, two answers on flight prices

Why did my flight price go up overnight?

Almost always because the cheapest fare bucket on that flight closed while you were asleep, not because a system watched you looking at it. That is also what the sellers themselves say, once you read the right page. The awkward part is that one large seller of flights online publishes two pages on this question and they do not agree with each other.

So this post does not settle the question by argument. It prints four passages from three public pages, read on 15 September 2026, each with its path and its own date, then puts one route reading beside them. The storefront you land on is the one thing a VPN genuinely changes, and it is not what the tracking claim describes.

Does searching for a flight more than once raise the price?

Trip.com answers this twice. Its US storefront guide, dated 19 January 2026, opens by listing tracking as the first cause of a rising fare and then tells the reader to change their IP address. Its global guide, dated 9 January 2026, tells the reader close to the opposite. Skyscanner answers the same question flatly on its own advice page and denies doing any of it.

Three of those four passages match the public record. Fare buckets close, inventory moves, cached numbers refresh, and both companies describe that accurately somewhere. The fourth matches nothing. No seller has published evidence that repeated searching by one person raises the fare quoted back to that person, and the page making the claim contradicts it further down.

Why does one page say both things?

The US guide is not two articles stitched together. One page, one byline, one date. The tracking claim sits in the first block, under a heading asking why prices increase the more you search. The denial sits three headings lower.

In between, the advice block tells the reader to use incognito mode, to switch devices or browsers, and to use a VPN to change their IP address, with a table offering Japan or Singapore as the worked examples. The stated reason is that this "lowers the risk of being flagged as a 'high-intent user.'" Then the later block says airlines only care whether someone actually buys, and that the number of searches does not directly affect ticket prices.

Both cannot be operative at once. If the number of searches does not affect the price, then appearing to be in Singapore cannot lower a risk that does not exist. A reader who stops at the top installs a VPN. A reader who reaches the bottom does nothing, and only one of them pays for it.

Why is the same flight a different price on different websites?

This one is real and has nothing to do with you. Two sites quote different numbers for the same aircraft because they are not quoting the same thing at the same moment. Each pulls from different suppliers, caches for a different length of time, includes different fees, and may sell a different set of fare classes.

Skyscanner's own route pages say as much in their footnotes, and both storefronts read for this post carry the same wording. The deals block says the figures are the lowest prices "found in the last 4 days, and are subject to change and availability." The foot of the page says "Prices shown on this page are estimated lowest prices only. Found in the last 12 days." Those are not bookable quotes. They are the low water mark of a recent window, which is how two sites can both be accurate and still print different numbers.

That distinction is the whole basis of this site. A figure with no observation date and no window behind it is not a price, it is decoration. How Fareband reads and dates a price sets out the rule.

Does a VPN get you a cheaper flight?

A VPN changes exactly one thing, which storefront you land on. That is a real mechanism, called point of sale, and it is not the one the tracking claim describes. Sellers do publish different numbers in different countries, for tax, currency and distribution reasons. So the honest test is whether the country you appear to be in changes the number in front of you.

On this route, on this day, the return barely moved. The Australian storefront's cheapest return converts to GBP 361 against the British page's GBP 360, a gap of about a quarter of one percent. The one way readings sit further apart, AUD 389 against the AUD 411 that the British figure converts to, roughly five percent, and in the direction that favours the Australian storefront rather than the British one.

So what actually moves the number?

One route on one day settles nothing about every route. What it does show is the size of the thing being sold. A quarter of one percent on a return to Bangkok is about one pound, and that is the whole prize on offer from appearing to be somewhere else. The same page then tells you the effect is not there.

Nothing in the four passages contradicts the boring answer. Fares move because seats sell, because the departure date gets closer, and because a cached number gets refreshed. None of that is personal, and none of it is fixed by hiding.

• Compare checkout totals, never headline numbers. A route page figure is a recent low over a stated window, not an offer. Carry it into the search and see what your actual dates return.
• Check the airline's own site once. It sells its own live inventory, so it settles quickly whether an aggregator number is simply stale.
• Set an alert instead of refreshing. Repeated checking does not move the fare, and both sellers say so in writing somewhere.
• Change the date before you change your IP address. On the British page read here, April showed GBP 217 one way while the cheapest direct flight, in May, showed GBP 470. Moving the date is worth multiples of anything the storefront switch returned.
• Keep incognito mode if you like it. It costs nothing and, on Skyscanner's own account, changes nothing.

What is worth setting up before a long-haul trip?

If the trip is the one read for this post, the thing worth arranging first is data, not a way to appear Australian. The eSIM guide for Thailand carries the current plans with the day each price was read, and how a travel eSIM works covers the mechanics if you have never used one.

The money that actually goes missing on a booking tends to go after it rather than before, when a refund is owed or a claim has to be filed. The rest of the blog follows those cases the same way, one dated figure per page.