Save up to 30% on holidays

Booking a summer holiday can sometimes feel more stressful than the actual travel. You sit down, coffee in hand, ready to browse sunny escapes, and suddenly the prices start creeping up before your eyes.

Sound familiar? Well, it turns out there’s more going on behind the scenes than you might realise—and something as simple as where you’re sitting could be costing you hundreds extra.

That’s right—your online location can make a huge difference to the price you pay for flights, hotels and even car hire.

It’s not just a theory; new research by NordVPN has laid bare just how much your physical location—or, more accurately, your digital location—can shape the deals you see online. They’ve found that travel websites like Booking.com, Airbnb, and DiscoverCars.com often change their prices depending on the country you appear to be browsing from. And the price swings aren’t minor. In some cases, it can mean paying up to 30% more for exactly the same holiday, just because you’re searching from your usual spot in the UK.

See how your digital location impacts holiday costs

Here’s where it gets interesting. NordVPN’s team ran a little experiment. They picked a few dream trips and looked at how the prices shifted depending on where their computer said they were.

Let’s start with a family in Mexico, hunting for flights to Disneyland in Orlando. They looked up the same tickets from their home, then tried again—only this time, they used a VPN to make it look like they were browsing from Moldova. The result? A difference of nearly €700—all for the same flight. Without the VPN, the fare was around €2,334.50. With it, it plummeted to €1,644.36. That’s a 29.5% saving just for “changing” countries.

Europeans are seeing the same thing. Some Swiss holidaymakers searching for a Deluxe hotel room in New York noticed a price of €1,376 when checking from Switzerland, but when they switched their virtual location to Croatia, the very same room dropped to €1,268. That’s over €100 staying firmly in their wallet, just for making the internet think they were somewhere else.

Why does this happen?

The answer’s simple, but a bit cheeky. Travel sites and booking platforms use clever algorithms to tweak prices based on where you are, your browsing history, and sometimes even which device you’re using. It’s all about squeezing a bit more out of different markets—sometimes because they think you can pay more, or because they know demand’s higher in one country than another.

And it’s not just an occasional glitch. While sometimes the prices do stay roughly the same, NordVPN’s tests show that it’s always worth trying a few different locations before you lock in those holiday plans. Who knows what hidden deal is waiting just around the digital corner?

The easy holiday hack: How to trick the System (Legally!)

Here’s the good news: you don’t need to be a tech wizard to level the playing field. All you need is a VPN—short for Virtual Private Network. It’s a simple app you can install on your laptop or even your phone, and it lets you choose the country you appear to be in when you’re online. In seconds, you can go from browsing in London to “surfing” in Lisbon, Berlin or even Moldova, just like in those NordVPN experiments.

Before you finalise any booking this summer, take a few extra minutes to check prices from a handful of countries. It might sound fiddly, but the savings could be enough for an extra night out or a cheeky upgrade.

And there’s one more travel hack—clear your browser’s cache and use incognito mode while you’re searching. This stops booking sites from tracking your search history and bumping up the prices just because they know you’re keen.

With summer just around the corner, it’s worth remembering that the price you see online isn’t always the best price out there. By changing your digital location, you could unlock deals that other holidaymakers never see.

So next time you’re about to book that sun-soaked escape, give the VPN trick a try—your wallet will thank you later.

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