Orbitz: We offer same hotels to Mac and PC users

— -- Orbitz said Tuesday that online travel shoppers shouldn't worry if they log on using a Mac or a PC, because it's offering the same hotels in search results regardless of computer type.

The online travel booking giant faced an uproar after widespread blog posts highlighted the headline and first sentences of a Wall Street Journal story about Orbitz's research into customers' habits based on computer type. The reports said that Orbitz was steering Mac users to pricier hotels in its search results.

"Not the case," says Orbitz CEO Barney Harford. "We are not using Mac vs. PC to drive different sort order."

What Orbitz is using the information for is to personalize results for an optional list of hotels called "Recommendations for you" that show up on another screen once you click on one hotel for more information, says Harford, who first revealed Orbitz's interest in computer type in a blog post for USA TODAY in May.

Last fall, Orbitz says, it started factoring in computer type after crunching data from millions of searches. The research revealed that Mac users are 40% more likely to book four- or five-star hotels.

That's now reflected in the recommendations, Harford says. Mac users spend an average of $20 more a night on a hotel stay, he says. The Journal said Orbitz's average room rate is $100, but Harford said that Orbitz doesn't release that figure. Orbitz does not dispute the rest of the Journal story.

Other major travel booking sites — Expedia and Travelocity — say they don't display different search results based on the computers that shoppers use.

Retailers have increasingly targeted Mac users because research has shown that they make and spend more. According to a Forrester Research survey, the average household income for Mac users is $98,560 compared with $74,452 for PC users.

"It would be expected that (Mac users) would make their decision based more on service and other attributes than on price," says Bjorn Hanson, dean of the NYU-SCPS Tisch Center.

Hanson says that "this type of data mining has been in existence for decades. I think there's just more awareness of it at the same time that there's more use of data in business decisions and strategy."