Article: "Hacking" Cheaper Fares Through Location Spoofing

[shmuels2]

Newbie here, and I'm not sure if this has been discussed, but here's an interesting post about finding cheaper fares by making it appear that you're from somewhere other than the departure city.

http://www.josecasanova.com/blog/how-i-hacked-kayak-and-booked-a-cheaper-flight/

Edit: from the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7105307

"No. I work for an OTA (not Kayak). First of all airlines file their fare rules and OTAs don't change the prices, and generally airlines pay around $10 to us to book a RT fare so there is little room to discount. Kayak is a meta which means all they do is present prices they are given from their partners (either via a feed or scrape) and then send them to the partner who shares the fee. Southwest (as others have mentioned) is not available in the US as a business choice. Kayak also heavily caches the fares (everyone does to make performance better) and inventory changes a lot especially in close by dates. Seeing cached prices of a cached price means the actual price can change a lot from searching to booking. Note the final price is only determined when you hit a booking page, everything before that is cached and might be fairly stale. Of course they can be errors in pricing since the fare rules are crazy complicated and often the difference in fares might be all the taxing entities. Each country, county, city, airport and cow pasture might affect the final price so it's possible that a country where you are booking might affect this (our customers are mostly in the US) but I doubt it.
tldr - lucky "hacker""

[ariIs]

Basically the canadian portal for Kayak was getting the southwest fares, while the US version did not.
Kayak usually does not get southwest fares, as they don't publish them to Kayak, expedia, etc.
Perhaps Kayak was running a test in Canada of scraping the southwest fares off of their website.
In any case, I doubt it has anything to do with searching from the originating city.
(Besides, why would Kayak do that? They want to present a cheapest price to get you to buy tickets - they make a fixed fee on the booking no matter what the price is)