What Is Opaque Pricing?
Let me explain opaque pricing to you directly: it's a strategy where companies provide hidden, lower prices to attract customers who focus mainly on cost. As a form of price discrimination, it targets those price-conscious buyers who prioritize savings over things like a company's amenities or reputation.
How Opaque Pricing Works
You'll see opaque pricing most often in the travel industry, where sites like Hotwire and Priceline use it to move unsold hotel rooms, flights, and car rentals. If you're looking to use this, you go to one of these sites, pick your location, dates, and for hotels, a star rating. You pay upfront, and only then does the site reveal the specific hotel or provider, with no options for refunds, changes, or cancellations.
This setup helps hotels fill empty rooms without hurting their brand image, and it locks in revenue since the booking can't be altered.
Important Benefit for Hotels
Here's a key point I want you to note: the main advantage for hotels with opaque pricing is that it lets them sell rooms that would otherwise stay empty, all without damaging their brand integrity.
Benefits of Opaque Pricing
Ideally, as a seller, you'd charge each buyer the absolute maximum they're willing to pay, but you don't know that amount, and buyers won't volunteer it—just think of negotiating with a car dealer. That's why sellers like me in this context create segmented options to capture higher payments from some customers.
Take airlines, for example: they offer first-class seats at much higher prices, giving buyers more space and status while earning the airline far more revenue per passenger on the same flight, often ten times as much.
Key Takeaways
- Opaque pricing enables companies to offer products or services at concealed lower prices.
- It focuses on price-conscious customers rather than those valuing reputation or amenities, and it's prevalent in travel.
- Additional opaque techniques involve age-based discounts, channel-based discounts, volume discounts, and geography-based pricing variations.
Types of Opaque Pricing
Beyond the travel examples, other opaque pricing methods include starting with a high price and then applying reductions like age-based discounts for movie tickets aimed at kids or seniors. You also have channel-based discounts, such as lower prices online versus in-store, volume discounts through programs like frequent flyer miles, and pricing that varies by geography, as seen in enterprise software.
Special Considerations
In most markets, the clearing price leaves sellers with excess inventory, like empty seats on a plane, but the marginal cost is so low that selling it at a discount can still be profitable. The risk is that buyers who would pay full price might switch to the lower one, cutting overall revenue. By using opaque methods, such as bundling a hotel room in a vacation package, you as a seller reduce the chance of cannibalizing your own higher-priced sales.
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