Mac users referred to better hotels

There was a news item recently that Expedia is detecting when a user is contacting them from a Mac platform. If so, they sort the list of hotels so that more upscale ones are featured.

I'm thinking that unix users are given camping sites.

A few years ago, our local supermarket chain was giving purchase data to the cable TV company (Safeway and Comcast). The cable company had thee different type of commercials that they would insert into local feeds, with the selection based upon what you bought at the supermarket. I gather the method didn't catch on.

lol, it's b/c they know mac users don't mind paying more for the same thing.

At 7/9/2012 4:38:36 PM, mattrodstrom wrote:
lol, it's b/c they know mac users don't mind paying more for the same thing.

Uh...what?
A more upscale hotel is not the same thing as a...Motel 6.

And a Mac is not the same as PC. Both the premise and application of that are wrong.
But I won't deny that they may be willing to pay more.

At 7/9/2012 4:42:29 PM, Apollo.11 wrote:

At 7/9/2012 4:38:36 PM, mattrodstrom wrote:
lol, it's b/c they know mac users don't mind paying more for the same thing.

Uh...what?
A more upscale hotel is not the same thing as a...Motel 6.

And a Mac is not the same as PC. Both the premise and application of that are wrong.
But I won't deny that they may be willing to pay more.

yeah, yeah, yeah...

Mac people are silly :P
That was the real premise I was getting at.

Why? just look at the price of Macs- very expensive. Only those willing to pay lots of money would buy Macs, so they would also be willing to pay lots of money to those better hotels.

Orbitz does the same thing. Basically, it's based upon research that suggests that mac users/owners are willing to A) buy rooms at more expensive hotels and B) buy more expensive rooms at the same hotels.

Going to those sites from a Mac will have the more expensive results filtered to the top. You get the same results as with a PC, they are just ordered differently.

At 7/9/2012 4:36:42 PM, RoyLatham wrote:

I'm thinking that unix users are given camping sites.

LOL!

How do the websites know what computer they were accessed on? I'd think the most the sites could know is that they were accessed via Safari or IE or something along those lines.

At 7/25/2012 12:45:57 PM, lewis20 wrote:
How do the websites know what computer they were accessed on? I'd think the most the sites could know is that they were accessed via Safari or IE or something along those lines.

Part of a browser's identification generally includes the operating system.

At 7/25/2012 12:45:57 PM, lewis20 wrote:
How do the websites know what computer they were accessed on? I'd think the most the sites could know is that they were accessed via Safari or IE or something along those lines.

Magic!

No, like Always said, when you access a web page, a LOT of stuff is going on in the background by way of communicating between computers.

Much of this is contained is what is known as a "User-Agent String" and contains things like: what brand and version of browser you are using, what brand and version of operating system you are using, and other information.

This is the way a web site knows whether or not you are browsing from a desktop or a mobile device and delivers up the appropriate content.

Macs are more expensive, and the very east more stylish. So it makes sense to target ads that way.

The problem I have with Macs is that when something goes wrong it's very difficult to find the problem and fix it. Most users are doing things like e-mail and Office, so problems are not so likely as they are if many diverse alps are being run. The concept of paying more for quality is sound.

There is reason for transmitting user info like the browser type. Web pages are in html, and theoretically every browser should interpret the html the same way. In practice, browsers sometimes interpret html in different ways. So to make a web page that works on different browsers, you end up testing for what browser is being used and changing the code accordingly. I think this is less of a problem than it used to be because now there are standard test pages that are used to see if the browser is conforming to intended specs.

The users screen size is also sent. When the we started there were a lot of 640 x 480 monitors, and it was dangerous to assume even a 768 page width. Now it's common to just assume 1024 or wider.