A question that frequently slides across our desks regards the purpose of pAiback given the existence of alternative Price Protection schemes offered by major travel agencies such as Google and Expedia. It’s an important part of our mission to demonstrate to fliers that at our core we have a unique belief in pricing transparency that drives pAiback to be a wholly different service.

Existing Services

Expedia - Price Drop Protection

Once a customer books a flight through Expedia, they can choose to add Price Drop Protection for a post-purchase fee. Each day, Expedia will compare the initial ticket fare to the current advertised price. Every time there is a drop, Expedia refunds the difference to the customer’s original payment method.

Google - Price Guarantee and Tracking

For select ‘Book on Google’ itineraries, Google now offers ‘Price Guarantee’: a badge that marks flights Google are confident will not drop in price. Given this claim, Google then refunds travellers the difference via Google Pay should that flight drop.

This builds on an existing Google Flights feature that allows users to mark flights for price tracking. Whenever a new lowest price is seen, Google will notify the customer, allowing them to personally make the purchasing decision at that time.

Limited, Inconvenient and Ineffective

The aforementioned post-purchase protection schemes are only offered on a subset of flights, moreover, this subset is defined by flights that are historically unlikely to drop, so in most cases, customers will never realise any value from the offering. For bookings with Expedia, travellers might have paid an extra fee that goes entirely to waste.

Notifications require customers to take manual action in re-booking or contacting customer service. This can occur at inconvenient times and is often a painful time-sink regardless.

Prices are only checked once per day, meaning fleeting price fluctuations can easily pass by undetected.

Fliers are forced to deviate from their existing and familiar behaviour of booking directly with their chosen airline. This can result in unfamiliar customers missing out on benefits when purchasing certain agency fares that do not contribute to their loyalty programs. Furthermore, extremely frequent fliers are ineligible to earn miles when purchasing via airline credit cards if they do not purchase first-party.

Building a Comprehensive Savings Service

Our goal is to simplify the experience of navigating pricing dynamics for all travellers by building a fully automated and comprehensive price protection program built on transparency and trust. With fully automated price monitoring and refund retrieval end-to-end, travellers can trust that pAiback will guarantee them the lowest possible price for their booking. Transparency then, is taking them out of the dark, enabling them to either explore the pricing dynamics of their bookings or simply ignore them entirely. In this way, we offer an effortless protection program, customers can maintain all their existing behaviours, however, no longer with the ongoing concern of optimising their booking window.

By monitoring these flights with greater frequency we construct far more accurate pricing histories than alternative schemes. Since pAiback’s service is automated, should a drop occur in the middle of the night, a refund will still be retrieved at that very moment, with no need for customer input.

We believe in showing users the complete data for all their bookings — at no charge. Visualising these time series has alerted many to the alarming nature of dynamic pricing, but with full transparency at their fingertips, our fliers no longer feel at the liberty of the algorithm and are empowered to make travel decisions in their own time.