Not chocolate chip or peanut butter cookies. Cookies on the Internet that capture a bit of data from your visit to a website only to use it against you later on.
On our east coast road trip last month, I booked our Hampton Beach hotel room as we drove in that direction. This involved looking up places and prices through Expedia, TripAdvisor, and direct-to-hotel sites, to compare prices and amenities. The websites I didn’t book through are still sending me updates on the hotel we stayed in. Duh! We stayed and we left. Get over it!
I’ve written before about how annoying it is when ads for things we’ve researched follow us around the Internet. But when it comes to travel, shouldn’t it be a little more obvious that we’ve moved on?
If I’m looking up specific May dates, and those dates are long gone, shouldn’t TripAdvisor get over it by now? This relationship isn’t going to happen. Hey TripAdvisor, maybe you should put yourself on Tinder and try and find someone new to hound.
Perhaps you can explain to me why a website’s tracking mechanism can’t differentiate between looking for a new area rug or a hotel room. It’s kind of stupid, if you ask me. As a consumer, my next trip isn’t going to be to the same place as my last trip. And if that last trip was a month ago, what does the site think I did? Slept in my vehicle? In the words of the great Greta Garbo, “I vant to be alone”!
Yes, cookies, the ones you don’t eat are a pain in the ass. When simply browsing, explore the private browsing settings built into most browsers these days before you start. If you’re not logging into a site this feature shouldn’t affect your browsing, it can if you’re trying to log on to the site.