You might use a VPN for any number of reasons
from accessing region blocked content
to logging into your school's library from off campus
to obfuscating your IP address
when you're legally downloading backups
of your movies and games.
But did you know that a VPN can be used
to potentially save thousands of dollars
on your next airplane ticket?
We are gonna show you guys how in just a few seconds,
you can completely stymie the airlines algorithms
and get the best possible price for your next trip.
Oh, and by the way, it works for hotel and car rentals too.
Now, full disclosure,
this works with just about any VPN of your choosing,
but we will be using Private Internet Access VPN,
one of our sponsors here on the show.
So if you like what you see,
you can check them out at the link in the video description.
To demonstrate how airlines and flight booking services
show different search results
depending on who you are and where you're from,
we're gonna do a test where we book a flight
from London to Denver and see if we get different prices.
So the first thing we're gonna do
is our regular old search as if we live in London.
So if I type, show my location into Google,
it's telling me I'm in London.
Now, if I go to the Expedia UK site
and book a flight from LHR to DEN
for September 11th to 15th and choose business class,
the cheapest result I get is a direct flight
from Iberia Airlines for 5,935 pounds.
That's over 7,500 US dollars.
Pretty steep.
Okay, so now let's see if we can get a better price.
The first thing that you need to do
is clear the cookies from your browser.
Remember that cookies are messages
that web servers pass to your browser
as you surf the internet,
creating a record of your activity online.
Travel sites use cookies to help them drive ticket sales.
So if you search for a flight,
but then you leave without buying,
the cookies will tell them that,
and then the next time you search for that flight,
they might increase the price that you see
by maybe a small amount, 10, $20.
At that point, human psychology compels you
to buy the ticket right now out of fear
that the price will continue to go up.
Fortunately, we're not gonna have to worry about that.
Unfortunately, you can get browser extensions
that help you delete cookies as you go.
We're using auto cookie delete,
which clears all the cookies generated by a tab
as soon as you close it,
or it can dump them automatically as you browse.
Cool.
Next, we're gonna use our VPN
to make it look like we're browsing from somewhere else.
Now, there are differing theories
as to what the best location to book flights from is.
I've heard that booking from the US
always gets the best deal.
I've heard that booking from a less affluent place
like the Midwest instead of the coast,
or a less affluent country like India instead of Germany
is the way to go.
And then there are those who swear
that booking from the destination country is the best,
or even that it's the local currency
of the airline itself that matters.
Naturally, the only way to test these theories
is to run your own experiments.
And this is where your choice of VPN makes a difference,
because there's an amount of VPN that has servers
in lots of different locations all around the world.
So you can see that PIA has a decently long list here,
including some countries with multiple servers within them.
So, since we're flying from London to Denver,
I'm gonna choose the Denver server.
So now I'm going back to my browser,
making sure my cookies are cleared,
and now when I tell Google to show me my location,
you can see that it thinks I'm in Denver.
Going back to Expedia, and searching for the same thing,
or the same flight again, bam!
There's that same nonstop flight from Iberia Airlines,
this time for 49.16 US dollars instead of 7,700,
a full $2,800 cheaper.
That is all there is to it.
If you travel a lot,
obviously the savings can end up adding up pretty quickly.
For us, booking from the destination
definitely looks like a winning strategy,
but let us know in the comments below,
after you've tried it,
if you've had success with some other way.
Regardless of all of that,
having a good VPN is definitely worth it,
especially considering that this is only one
of the many things that a VPN can be used for,
and they're cheap.
PIA can be had for as little as $2.91 a month.
So be sure to check them out at the link below.
You only have to save $2,000 on a flight,
like once, to pay for an entire lifetime of PIA.
So guys, let us know if you disliked this video,
you can hit that button.
But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed,
or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff
we featured at the link in the video description.
Also down there is our merch store,
which has cool shirts like this one,
and our community forum, which you should totally join.
And leave a comment if you wanna see more videos
about the uses of VPNs, just like this one.
Maybe we could make this into like a series.