Anatomy of a Scandal
The scandal of the week in the tech media industry is, of course, the Wall Street Journal’s intrepid reporting of Orbitz’s seemingly insidious practice of showing higher price hotels to owners of Apple products.
The Atlantic’s Megan Garber called it a ‘scoop’ and defended the “discriminatory” practice. Travel site Tnooz reported that “all hands are on deck at Orbitz today as it looks to diffuse the impact of [the] article.” CNN wrote about how Twitter was awash with angry illiterate Orbitz customers. PC Mag covered the backlash on the Orbitz Facebook page. Using Twitter, the Chief Executive Officer of Orbitz forced the Wall Street Journal to remove their paywall from the piece, so people would understand the extent of the program and not jump to laughable conclusions about Orbit price-gouging wealthier MacBook owners.
The backstory, as explained in the original Wall Street Journal article, is quite simple. On a hunch, Orbitz ran a complex query on their database to see if the kind of computer one owns results in different patterns of choosing hotels. Using the scientific method, researchers for the company concluded affirmatively that Mac users tend to spend 30% more on nicer hotels, and tend to choose 4-5 star hotels more frequently than PC owners. Therefore, Orbitz chose to chose different initial results to Mac users than PC users.
This is not the first time a company has performed academic research on the habits of owners of Apple products. An OKCupid blog post from 2010 revealed that iPhone users have more sex than their Blackberry and Android counterparts. (Of course, the infographic I helped create using the dataset of the Little Black Book app underscored just how sexually active some iPhone users are.)
But to be honest, the facts reported bore me. I’m more fascinated by the genesis of the original article.
It does not seem Dana Mattioli, the WSJ writer, simply stumbled upon different results when she happened to be searching for flights on Orbitz on different computers. The story reads like Orbitz actually provided Ms Mattioli with data and interviews with Orbitz executives. In other words, the brilliant Orbitz PR team likely created this story to create buzz around how Mac users care more about comfort and style than PC users, an utterly shocking revelation.
The article informed the reader that Barney Harford, the Twittering chief executive officer of Orbitz, actively recruited statisticians after making data mining a priority upon his arrival in 2009.
After being made aware of this practice, Orbitz’s competitors Expedia (Mr Harford’s previous employer), Priceline and Travelocity denounced the process of using other potentially discriminatory data points to create a more seamless experience of searching for a relevant hotel. I wonder if they would also not base the order of hotels shown based on postal code of the traveller or look at data from their social graph to identify smarter patterns.
While, as a public company, it is laudable for Orbitz to employ any legal means necessary to raise revenues, it is idiotic for them to share the “secret sauce” in an attempt for some short lived PR gains. Reddit founder Alexis Ohanion’s travel site Hipmunk allows a traveller to sort by “agony” of the trip before sorting by “price” of airline flights, and “ecstasy” of the stay before sorting by the “price” of hotels. The aboveboard nature of Mr Ohanion’s company can be held in contrast to that of Mr Harford’s.
The goal of the PR pitch and subsequent article was obviously to capitalise on the popular stereotype of the urbane Mac user. It was meant to assuage the collective ego of the denizens of the Cult of the Mac. To paraphrase the 19th century American poet John Godfrey Saxe, people don’t want to see sausage being made. They just want it to be tasty.
Open-source is not for everyone. The chronic oversharing of data, be it on a corporate level or a personal one, is frightening and the resulting openness usually tends not to work out in the intended way.
But, on the bright side, Orbitz manufactured a scandal which only money could buy.