I'm off on vacation in March and booked my trip to Dallas for a pinball tournament last week on Expedia. To my surprise, after saving the flight, hotel and rental car package I selected to give it an hour or two to confirm some things, the price suddenly changed...a lot.

I get that prices are fluctuating constantly with airline tickets, but a jump in total package price of $400 in the span of an hour or two seemed a bit much to me. That's when my girlfriend told me to clear my cookies. "What?" I said.

"Just do it."

So rather than clear my cookies, I opened an incognito browser that doesn't save cookies, and didn't login to Expedia. I selected the exact same flight, same hotel and same rental car. Sure enough, I got my original price back. What's going on here?

It seems that Expedia and other travel and airline sites are giving you a false sense of urgency. Through the use of cookies, they save your searches so when you go back to them, they know you're interested in it and suddenly the price is more. They'll even throw in a notice in big red letters "Only 4 left at this price!"

So how do you get around this and make sure you truly are getting the best price? The easiest way is to open an incognito browser. You don't have to worry about clearing your cookies this way for sites where you want them to stay.

I've included a link here to WikiHow which gives you detailed instructions on how to open an incognito browser on desktop and mobile on the most popular browsers.

I can't help but feel like this is a bait-and-switch on the part of Expedia and I'm not the only one. For now though, you can beat them at their own game by booking your flights with an incognito browser.

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