Targeted advertising: how does it work? The Wall Street Journal made waves in the Apple community on Monday night by publishing a piece implying that travel company Orbitz had been "steering" Mac users towards higher prices on its website. The news took off on Twitter immediately, with Mac users pronouncing that Orbitz had lost their business and others retweeting claims that Orbitz was actually charging Mac users higher prices than Windows users for the same services. The frenzy, at least from my perspective, was in full force.
Upon further investigation, it turned out that things were not as they first seemed. In the piece, Orbitz talks about how it has identified Mac users as being more willing to spend higher amounts of money on hotels than their PC-using friends. Mac users might spend $20-30 more per night on a hotel, and are 40 percent more likely to book a four- or five-star hotel than PC users. The demographic data is there, and it's not even that surprising—Macs have long been associated with a slightly wealthier demographic, and it's hardly a shock to see that a travel site's usage data seems to reflect that.
As such, Orbitz has begun showing nicer, more expensive options—in some cases—to Mac users performing hotel searches. The Wall Street Journal found that its searches in a number of major cities showed the same results for Macs and PCs. Other cities, like Miami Beach, resulted in boutique hotels for Mac users on the first page of results, while those same hotels were not on the first page for PC users. "Overall, hotels on the first page of the Mac search were about 11% more expensive than they were on the PC," the newspaper wrote.
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