Orbitz Mobile Proxies: Hotel and Flight Rates as a US Phone User

Orbitz is a US online travel agency with a loyalty program and a mobile app that gets its own prices. What a shopper sees depends on whether they are logged in, whether they are on the app, and where the site reads them to be, with departure airports, currency and regional deals all following the connection. For a hotel revenue manager, a rate-parity analyst or a traveller keeping their own account at home, a day pass on a carrier line in a US city shows Orbitz exactly as a local shopper on a phone sees it.

What Orbitz changes by location and device

Orbitz reads a metro from the connection and uses it to suggest a home airport, to set currency and to pick regional promotions. It treats mobile visitors differently, with app-only prices and member rates that are not shown to a logged-out desktop visitor. A carrier address on a real phone inside the United States is the shopper those prices are built for.

Hotel rates on Orbitz are supplied by the properties and their channel managers, so a difference between what you see from two cities is usually a regional promotion or a device-specific rate rather than a different base price. That is exactly what a parity check is meant to catch.

Jobs that fit a day pass

Rate checks, QA and own-account work.

• A hotel revenue manager checking their own property's rate on Orbitz as a US mobile shopper in a feeder city sees it, including member and app-only prices.
• A rate-parity analyst comparing Orbitz against the hotel's own site from the same city line at the same minute.
• A travel marketing team checking which regional deals and suggested departure airports appear in each of our eight cities.
• A developer testing an Orbitz affiliate link or a booking widget from a US carrier network in a specific metro.
• A traveller keeping their own Orbitz Rewards account logged in from their home city while abroad or on the road.

Sticky or rotating for Orbitz

Sticky for your own account and bookings. For rate checks, one line per city and rotate only between passes; rotation has no wait and no limit, but a rate check gains nothing from it and a search session that changes address mid-way can lose its results. Orbitz's terms forbid automated bulk rate collection and multiple accounts per person; follow them and run only accounts you are entitled to run.

City and carrier

Pick the feeder market your guests come from: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, North Carolina or Boston. Every carrier reads as mobile; Verizon in Boston keeps the address reading as Boston. 4G at $4 is plenty for a rate search; 5G at $5 if you load many hotel galleries at once.

The three Orbitz views a revenue manager needs

A property's rate on Orbitz exists in at least three versions at any moment: the public rate a logged-out visitor sees, the member rate for a logged-in Orbitz Rewards account, and the app-only rate shown inside the mobile app. Add the regional deals layered on by the shopper's market and the version count grows. A revenue manager who checks only the public desktop rate sees one version and may miss that the app is selling the room cheaper than the hotel's own site, which is the parity breach that matters most.

From a day pass in a feeder city, the full check takes a quarter of an hour. Search the property and dates logged out in a clean browser profile and record the rate. Log into an Orbitz account you own and record the member rate. Then open the app on a phone through the line and record the app rate. Finally open the hotel's own booking engine from the same line and record that. Four numbers, one city, one timestamp. Repeat from a second city if the property draws guests from more than one region.

Over a few weeks the log shows which version drifts and when, which is the conversation to have with the channel manager or the market manager. It also catches the regional deals that appear for one feeder city and not another, which the property may or may not have agreed to.

The same routine works for a travel agency checking that the Orbitz rates on its own pages match what a local mobile shopper is shown, and for a developer testing an affiliate link from a specific metro.

Running a clean parity check

Search the same property, the same dates and the same room type from each city line within a few minutes, once logged out and once logged into an account you own, and once in the app on a phone through the line. Record each rate with a timestamp and note which were labelled as member or app-only. Three views from one city tell you more about parity than ten views from one desktop.

Setting up a Orbitz proxy on Mobile Proxy Zone

1. Buy a day pass in the feeder city you want to see from the locations page; pick Verizon in Boston.
2. Put the login into a clean browser profile, and onto a phone for the app view.
3. Confirm the carrier address and city on a what-is-my-IP page.
4. Open Orbitz, note the suggested airport and regional deals, then search your property and dates.
5. Record logged-out, member and app rates with timestamps.
6. Keep your own Orbitz Rewards account on a single sticky line in your home city.

Orbitz proxy questions