Yet more expedient information

Almost forgot...when purchasing flights from the likes of expedia.com never accept the first price that is offered. I've noticed that these services like to drop a cookie and will sometimes award you with a cheaper price for the same flight the second time you search for it.

Shop! Shop! Shop!

Today has certainly been voucher day as my friend TC has emailed me discount vouchers for Selfridges, Borders and GAP, to add to the Threshers voucher I picked up over the weekend.

Here's another trick that's worth sharing. Towards the end of the day Waitrose often individually reduces items that are already offered on a £X off when you buy two type of discount. At check-out the two reductions are combined and last week they actually paid us 50p to buy two ready meals! I suspect that the game would immediately be up if one only bought those two items, as they surely wouldn't put their hands in the till and give you the 50p, but it can make a handy little freebie + discount on a larger shopping basket.

Ebookers v Expedia

This weekend we were exploring costs and options for our Christmas visit to Guatemala.

Over the course of the past couple of years it has become clear that online at least, Expedia and Ebookers have the most competitive prices, though the final choice has tended to depend on the season. Expedia were best over the summer for example, but in winter Ebookers appears to have the edge. (Travelocity and Opodo are generally around 20% more expensive.)

A couple of years ago, around March, I bought a return via LA with United through Ebookers for just under £400. That looks like a bit of a one off. The best price for a return flight in the middle of next month is around £670 and a month later the same flight costs almost double. This is where we usually need to get creative with our routing.

One thing I have learned this year however is that the Expedia fares have a significant catch: you cannot, at any price, change the return date on the ticket once you have purchased it. (On the same flight on the same dates EBookers will permit a change for £100. )

This can be a huge problem for V whose time out there is often dependent on factors she cannot predict with 100% accuracy when making reservations online from London, and caused her much grief earlier this year when she discovered the restriction on her Expedia fare and had to return to the UK leaving some of her projects half-finished. It looks like Ebookers now stands alone in this sector!

Odd Marketing

The marketing team Oddbins have made a couple of decisions recently that, from my perspective at least, appear counter-productive.

Firstly, they have decided to only offer discounts when you buy six bottles or more. As an occasional Oddbins shopper in central London, I am rarely in a position to carry half a dozen bottles home, and anyway tend to use their stores (in preference to say Waitrose, Majestic or a long-tailed online stockist, which are all at least equally well-stocked and convenient) to try out 'odd' bottles of wine that take my fancy or are needed for a social emergency. (I wonder how many of their urban customers can easily park outside...or are strong enough to manage a half-case?)

Worse still they have simultaneously come up with their first budget-priced own label bottles of white and red. "So good...we decided to put our name on the bottle." Except that the red is so bad I am unlikely ever to trust the brand ever again. Instead of one of the few undrinkable wines from the Languedoc, why couldn't they have chosen a blend that would associate a bit of delight (as well as value) with their name?

I was going to have a rant as well about Screenselect's online transition to Lovefilm.com, but aside from the fact that their bright new website is still a bit clunky, my initial suspicion on arrival on the home page that they might be turning private content into social content by stealth was entirely unfounded. In fact, I dare say that I would actually be prepared to voluntarily devote some of my time to contributing to a more social movie recommendations space, so it now strikes me that the new DVD rental entity could be missing a trick here. Meanwhile my decision to reward Netflix for their decision to run a $1m recommendation-algorithm competition by buying more of their stock seems to be (mutually) paying off.

Sacando el jugo

Two economics professors, David Laibson at Harvard and Xavier Gabaix at MIT have revealed how firms help 'sophisticated consumers' take advantage of the less sophisticated ones by offering cheap basic products with lots of shrouded extra charges. So for example (perhaps a rather bad example in this article), you can buy an HP printer and then amaze yourself at the savings you can make by not buying any expensive ink cartridges.