Mostly no. A controlled test of airline websites in 2014 ran more than 130,000 searches at 25 airlines from New York and Leuven. It found no systematic price discrimination by location or by profile. A 2021 study of Alitalia, Ryanair and Lufthansa found none either. Where a fare did move with the location, a tax, a currency, a resident-only fare or a sold-out seat explained it. A proxy changes a traveler's fare no more than a VPN does. Its real use with flights is reading fares across many markets for a business.
The evidence is below, study by study, with what each tool costs from its seller's own page. The sector background is in travel fare aggregation. The two most-read fare sites have their own guides: proxies for Skyscanner and proxies for Google Flights.
Does a VPN get you cheaper flights?
Not in the controlled studies. In January and February 2014, researchers from KU Leuven and Inria queried 25 airlines' websites twice a day for 21 days. They searched from New York and from Leuven at the same time, with 66 browser, cookie and shopper profiles. That came to more than 130,000 queries. Their verdict: "we do not find any evidence for systematic price discrimination". Nearly all airlines showed similar prices in both places.
The study found one real location gap. United's San Francisco to Brussels fare cost more from Belgium for the first 15 days, by up to $67.92. Near the end of the test, the Belgian price dropped below the American one several times.
A 2021 study, with a co-author from the Italian Competition Authority, tracked Alitalia, Ryanair and Lufthansa for six weeks. It searched four times a day from four device profiles, each held to one address through a VPN. It checked the prices against the same flights in Amadeus, the booking system travel agents use. It found "no evidence" that the airlines discriminate in price. Near departure, Lufthansa's own website was often cheaper than the Amadeus price, and never pricier.
What did recent VPN tests find?
Small gaps that ran both ways. In May 2025, a Tom's Guide writer in the UK searched three return flights on Kayak and Skyscanner. Each was searched with no VPN, then from 10 VPN countries:
- No VPN
- Best VPN country
- Worst VPN country
The best VPN country beat the no-VPN price by $0, $7 and $7. The worst cost up to $37 more on the London flight. The writer reported that "Almost every non-UK VPN server I connected to actually made the price of flights rise". The same article links to VPN offers, which makes that result more telling.
Two more tests point the same way. EXPERTE, a review site that earns commissions on VPN links, searched four routes on Skyscanner from four countries. It got identical prices every time. X-VPN, a VPN seller, priced one SWISS flight from San Francisco to Zurich from 15 countries on September 28, 2025. The US came out cheapest at $2,577, and the spread was about 5.5%, partly from currency conversion.
Why does a flight price change between two searches?
Because seats sell out of fare classes. A 2024 study of a large US airline's own data found that each fare belongs to one of about a dozen fare classes. A given fare changed a median of once in two years. What moves is which classes still have seats, so the cheapest open fare can jump between two searches.
The 2014 study saw it happen. KLM flights vanished and reappeared between measurements about a minute apart. Travel sites also show cached prices, so the price at the last booking step can differ from the first screen. A "VPN test" run a minute after a normal search can catch the sale of the last cheap seat.
When does the country you book from change the fare?
In a handful of cases, each with a cause you can name:
| What changed the price | Where it was seen | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A local tax | American Airlines, Argentina | 20% tax on card buys. |
| A resident-only fare | some airlines in Peru | Sold to residents only. |
| A missing airline | Kayak from Canada | Southwest flights showed. |
| The currency | X-VPN's 2025 check | Local prices converted. |
| A sales rule | fares with Category 15 | Sold in named places. |
The Argentine site of American Airlines showed fares about 19% above the US site in the 2014 study. The authors traced the gap to a 20% tax on card purchases that Argentina added in March 2013. A widely shared claim of a cheaper Kayak fare from Canada had a simple cause. Southwest flights appeared in the Canadian results and were missing from the American ones.
Fare rules make point-of-sale fares possible. In the industry's rule set, Category 15 can limit a fare by "countries/currencies of sale". It can also name the "locales where the fare may or may not be sold". A public fare without that rule can be sold anywhere.
For flights from EU airports, the law bars fares that depend on where the buyer lives. Article 23(2) of Regulation 1008/2008 covers fares open to the public. They must be offered "without any discrimination based on the nationality or the place of residence of the customer". The same article requires the final price, with every unavoidable tax and charge, to be shown at all times.
Are hotel prices different?
Yes, at some booking sites. A 2017 study searched Booking.com, Hotels.com, Hrs.com and Orbitz through proxies and VPN gateways in several countries. Booking.com and Hotels.com priced the same hotels differently by the searcher's country, with US searches getting lower prices. Orbitz treated every country the same. The authors found the differences real but "within a limited range only".
Other things moved travel prices more than the country did. A 2014 study found lower hotel prices for members at Cheaptickets and Orbitz. Expedia and Hotels.com ran A/B tests that steered some users to pricier hotels. Travelocity showed mobile users different results. Every request in that study came from the same block of addresses. Our guide to scraping hotel prices covers what that means for a monitor.
Proxy or VPN for flight prices: what is the difference?
They route different traffic and bill in different units. Both sides below come from the sellers' own pages, read on October 25, 2026:
| What you compare | Consumer VPN | Residential proxy |
|---|---|---|
| Billed by | month, on long deals | GB of traffic |
| Price, October 2026 | $2.49 to $3.49 a month | median $3.50 per GB |
| Location | one server at a time | country or city per login |
| Covers | the whole device | one program or browser |
| Built for | one person browsing | a program reading markets |
The VPN prices are two-year deals. Surfshark Starter cost $2.49 a month, $67.23 for 27 months. ExpressVPN Basic cost $2.99 a month, $83.72 for 28 months, then $99.95 a year. Proton VPN Plus cost $3.49 a month on two years, and Proton also offers a free plan.
Residential traffic cost a median $3.50 per GB on the smallest plan. That is across 66 sellers in our price records, July 2 to October 22, 2026. At the median web page weight of October 2026, one GB covers about 327 page loads. Our residential proxies cost $0.50 per GB on Lite, falling to $0.23/GB at 10,000 GB+. Premium adds state and city targeting at $1.45 per GB.
Which should you use, and which loses?
For a traveler, a VPN bought to find cheaper flights loses. The controlled studies found no systematic location pricing at airlines, and the consumer tests found savings of a few dollars that ran both ways. If you already have a VPN, a second look from another country costs nothing.
What does help a traveler is checking the airline's own site and the fare's conditions. A resident fare or a local tax shows in the fare rules and the final price.
For a business, the consumer VPN loses. It shows one country at a time, and the 2021 study had to discard data when its VPN switched servers on its own. A program that reads fares from 20 markets needs an exit in each one. Each series keeps its exit, and the address is stored next to every price.
What do businesses use proxies for with flights?
Reading the fares a traveler in each market is shown, for fare comparison, price tracking and travel research. Those jobs need many in-market addresses at once, and that is what a residential pool supplies. Our guide to scraping flight prices covers the setup, and proxies for price monitoring covers traffic and cost.
Airlines guard their fare data. In 2004 a US court held, in Southwest Airlines v. FareChase, that a scraper gathering Southwest's flight information was unauthorized because it interfered with Southwest's use of its site. Read each site's terms first, and use an official feed where one exists. You can try a tool's proxy settings on our free proxy list, and the free proxy checker tests any proxy before you buy. The residential pricing page lists every step of the ladder.
What this page could not check
- No fare test of our own. We ran none, by rule, and measured nothing at any airline or travel site.
- Older studies. The two controlled airline studies date from 2014 and 2021 and covered 25 and three airlines. The hotel study dates from 2017.
- Seller tests. Tom's Guide, EXPERTE and X-VPN each ran one test, and all three publish VPN offers.
- One refusal. NordVPN's pricing page refused our server, so it is missing from the price table.
- Introductory prices. The VPN prices are two-year deals that renew higher.
- Check by January 25, 2027. VPN and proxy prices move often, and every figure here needs a fresh read by then.
Sources
- Thomas Vissers, Nick Nikiforakis, Nataliia Bielova and Wouter Joosen, "Crying Wolf? On the Price Discrimination of Online Airline Tickets", HotPETs, July 2014.
- Stefano Azzolina, Manuel Razza, Kevin Sartiano and Emanuel Weitschek, "Price Discrimination in the Online Airline Market: An Empirical Study", Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, September 9, 2021.
- Ali Hortaçsu, Olivia R. Natan, Hayden Parsley, Timothy Schwieg and Kevin R. Williams, "Organizational Structure and Pricing: Evidence from a Large U.S. Airline", NBER Working Paper 29508, revised September 2023; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2024.
- Thomas Hupperich, Dennis Tatang, Nicolai Wilkop and Thorsten Holz, "An Empirical Study on Price Differentiation Based on System Fingerprints", arXiv, December 2017.
- Aniko Hannak, Gary Soeller, David Lazer, Alan Mislove and Christo Wilson, "Measuring Price Discrimination and Steering on E-commerce Web Sites", ACM Internet Measurement Conference, November 2014.
- Regulation (EC) No 1008/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council of September 24, 2008, Article 23, as adopted.
- Travelport, Fares and Pricing help, "Cat15, Sales Restrictions", read October 25, 2026.
- US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, April 18, 2022, footnote 21, on Southwest Airlines v. FareChase (2004).
- Tom's Guide, "I spent 6 hours trying to get cheaper flights with a VPN", test of May 2025, read October 25, 2026.
- EXPERTE, "Cheaper Flights With a VPN: Does It Work?", read October 25, 2026.
- X-VPN, "How to Use VPN to Get Cheaper Flights", October 4, 2025, read October 25, 2026.
- ExpressVPN, Surfshark and Proton VPN pricing pages, read October 25, 2026.
- HProxy price records: the residential price lists of 66 sellers, captured July 2 to October 22, 2026. HTTP Archive page weight reports, crawl of October 1, 2026.
