Travel site Orbitz has segmented its website into Mac and PC users based on the fact that Mac users will typically be willing to pay $20 to $30 more per night for a hotel room, reports the Wall Street Journal.
“The sort of targeting undertaken by Orbitz is likely to become more commonplace as online retailers scramble to identify new ways in which people’s browsing data can be used to boost online sales,” notes WSJ.
Forrester Research places the average household income for Mac computer owners at $98,560, as compared to the $74,452 average income for PC owners.
“From an analytics perspective, targeting by operating system and pricing accordingly may not be such a bad idea,” adds CNET. “The bonehead move of the century is Orbitz yapping about it. Orbitz did note that pricing by OS is just an experiment.”
Execs at Orbitz point out that the experiment is merely highlighting different offers to Mac and PC visitors, not offering the same room to different users at different prices. According to Orbitz CEO Barney Harford, the news has been misinterpreted since the full story was hidden behind the WSJ pay wall for many readers.
“[It’s] nonsense that we’d charge Mac users more for the same hotel, which is unfortunately the incorrect impression that many readers seem to be drawing from this article’s ‘subscriber content preview,'” he writes via email to NPR. “However, just as Mac users are willing to pay more for higher end computers, at Orbitz we’ve seen that Mac users are 40 percent more likely to book 4 or 5 star hotels as compared to PC users, and [that’s] just one of many factors that determine which hotels to recommend a given customer as part of our efforts to show customers the most relevant hotels possible.”
Travel site Orbitz has segmented its website into Mac and PC users based on the fact that Mac users will typically be willing to pay $20 to $30 more per night for a hotel room, reports the Wall Street Journal.
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