On Orbitz, Mac users steered to pricier hotels - Fox 2 News Headlines

Orbitz Worldwide has found that people who use Apple's Mac computers spend as much as 30 percent more a night on hotels, so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see.

The Orbitz effort, which is in its early stages, demonstrates how tracking people's online activities can use even seemingly innocuous information -- in this case, the fact that customers are visiting Orbitz.com from a Mac -- to start predicting their tastes and spending habits.

Orbitz executives confirmed that the company is experimenting with showing different hotel offers to Mac and PC visitors, but said the company is not showing the same room to different users at different prices. They also pointed out that users can opt to rank results by price.

Orbitz found Mac users on average spend $20 to $30 more a night on hotels than their PC counterparts, a significant margin given the site's average nightly hotel booking is around $100, chief scientist Wai Gen Yee said. Mac users are 40 percent more likely to book a four or five-star hotel than PC users, Yee said, and when Mac and PC users book the same hotel, Mac users tend to stay in more expensive rooms.

"We had the intuition, and we were able to confirm it based on the data," Orbitz chief technology officer Roger Liew said.

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. Orbitz lost $37 million in 2011 and its stock has fallen by more than 74 percent since its 2007 IPO.

The effort underscores how retailers are becoming bigger users of so-called predictive analytics, crunching reams of data to guess the future shopping habits of customers. The goal is to tailor offerings to people believed to have the highest "lifetime value" to the retailer.

Orbitz first confirmed Mac users' preferences in October and began working them into the complicated mix of factors that determine its search results. The effect is not always obvious. In tests performed by The Wall Street Journal, search results for hotels in cities including Las Vegas, Orlando, Philadelphia and Boston were the same for both Macs and PCs. A New York search turned up more expensive hotels for Mac users, but only after the first 20 listed.

Rival travel sites Expedia, Priceline.com and Travelocity, which is a unit of Sabre Holdings Corp., do not use a person's computer operating system when suggesting hotels, spokesmen said. Apple declined to comment.

SOURCE LINK: http://online.wsj.com