Apple device users tend to book pricier hotels than Android folks. (Image: trivago.com)
Techies will spend hours arguing the benefits and shortcomings of Apple products compared with Android devices, but what about the people who use them? A study by the hotel search site trivago.com found that there are distinct differences between the two user groups when it comes to their travel spending patterns.
Apple users in the U.S. tend to spend more and book higher-end hotels than the Android crowd, the study found. Specifically, “The average price selected by trivago.com users with iPhones and iPads is $166/night. For Android users, the average price for a searched hotel is $134/night, a difference of 24%,” the site said.
On the lower end of the accommodations spectrum, 52 percent of Android users on trivago.com picked hotels that cost less than $100 a night, vs. only 39 percent of Apple users.
Rooms that went for $200 to $250 a night were selected by 20 percent of Apple users, but only 12 percent of their Android counterparts, Trivago said.
“While 40% of both Apple and Android users first select three-star properties when searching for hotels, their second most popular choice for accommodation is quite different: 29% of Android users opt for two-star properties after first searching for a three-star hotel, while 36% of Apple users favor hotels with four and five stars,” the study found.
Spending comparison, Apple vs. Android users. (Image: trivago.com).
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Those low brow Android users. Nothing but a bunch of riffraff. Probably fly Spirit airlines too!?
Dan, I read about this trick on one of the web sites.
So, when I was shopping for tickets on TGV from Paris to south France, I specified “Greenland” as my home country. As a result, I bought 2 first class tickets for about 75% of the cost of two 2nd class tickets on the same itinerary.
You’ll recall that Orbitz taught us this (and took a bunch of heat in the media over it) in 2012.
http://viewfromthewing.boardingarea.com/2012/06/26/why-orbitz-charges-mac-users-more-for-hotels-and-why-thats-a-good-thing/
I’ve also read that some travel sites actually detect the device you are using and then then will dynamically adjust their prices. For example, if you use your iPhone to go to a travel site, they will see you are coming in from an Apple device, assume you are a more affluent consumer, and display higher prices.
There is a well-known travel site for European trains that does (or did) something like this based on your country of origin. When you enter the site, you must specify your home country, and the prices of the train tickets varied based on which country you were coming from. I once read about a well-known hack to beat their evil system: you specified “Antarctica” as your home country and the prices were much lower than if you specified “USA.” (Why anyone would allow a user to specify a home country of Antarctica is really beyond me.) I got stung a few times by this, but fortunately other web sites have appeared recently and seem to offer fairer and more transparent pricing structures for European trains.