[UPDATE: 10:00 AM, 18 Jan 2024] AirAsia has responded with its Dynamic Pricing FAQ page, insisting that the price for add-on fees is not exclusive to a certain platform or device and that “the price is subjective as it is influenced by a combination of factors such as the current market condition and whether that flight has high ancillary demand.”
[Original story: 15:10 PM, 17 Jan 2024]
We’re all aware that flight tickets are dynamically priced, meaning the cost of a flight depends on a myriad of factors that can cause it to fluctuate. However, a vexed customer of low-cost airline AirAsia has claimed that even the cost of checked baggage can differ for the same flight booked at the same time depending on what device you’re using.
According to Kelvin Liew’s post on Facebook, he was booking an AirAsia flight for his mother-in-law from Johor to Kuching and noticed that the carrier quoted varying prices for checked baggage add-ons depending on the device. His screenshots showed that that the add-ons started from RM62.44 on an iPhone, RM43 on an Android phone, and RM49.46 through the desktop website.
Naturally, we tried to replicate this situation and here’s what we found. Oddly enough, we couldn’t repeat it where the cost of checked baggage was cheapest on the Android app, but we did find a price discrepancy.
In our testing, we found that the prices were the same on both AirAsia’s Android and iOS apps for several domestic routes, including the route used by Kelvin. However, the checked baggage fee was consistently lower on the desktop site compared to the mobile apps. The differences in pricing between desktop and mobile varied but it could go up 18% higher on the latter platform, depending on the route.
AirAsia practices dynamic pricing for its add-ons, meaning that the price can fluctuate even if two people book the same flight on different devices at the same time. However, this does not explain why, during our testing, the baggage price was always cheaper on the website while the two mobile apps quoted the exact same higher prices every single time.
Of course, a price difference for digital services between platforms is nothing new, as we’ve seen with X’s Premium subscription that costs more on iOS than on the site itself. This is usually because of the commission fees imposed by app stores for in-app purchases, but it’s unclear if that’s the cause for this particular case.
We’ve reached out to AirAsia for comment and are waiting on an official response.
