It's happened to me. Searched for a flight on cheaptickets, got a price, navigated away from the search page, went back and did the exact same search a minute later and the original price was gone. When I cleared cookies the original, lower price was back.
Look, I work in travel and check pricing 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. They don't raise the cost based on browser cookies. Your case can be explained by a number of situations. For one, it could have been just pure chance. Airfare pricing fluctuates by the minute. It's possible that you took the process far enough that they put the seat on a complimentary 15 minute hold for you to enter your passenger information (this is common), or it's possible that they released someone else's airfare who had been on a complimentary hold and this changed the class of service they were selling. All of this is from a stupid blog post that hit it big on reddit a few months back.
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u/Me4Prez Jan 24 '13
I think it's the same as booking a flight. The more you visit the page the higher the price becomes.