Preferential treatment
Posted on May 01, 2003 @ 17:27 in General
Heh... it seems that Travelodge is out to screw users of the Opera browser for at least 20 USD. I've tried booking the same room as before with Netscape 4, Mozilla 1.3, IE6 and Opera 7.03 (identifying itself as Opera and accepting all cookies) and only when you use Opera, you will not get to see the cheapest available rate.
When you select Seattle as location and search for the "Best Available Rate", all browsers will proceed to the next page, where you will be offered a number of Travelodge locations in Seattle. When you click on the "Check Rates" button, it will take you to that location's page and show you a number of different rates for different rooms.
ONLY when using Opera, the second page will show for all locations in red "The requested rate is not available" and you can click a button that says "View Other Rates". These other rates start at 20 dollar above the cheapest rate offered to the other browsers.
But now for the double-check: I set Opera to identify itself as IE6. Surprise! Now Opera gets the cheap rates too! I don't know what Travelodge is doing, and it probably is a stupid bug and not intended behavior, but it sure seems like they're trying to stiff Opera users.
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