Professor: Don’t Rely on VPN Travel Trick

Insight from Michael Nizich, Ph.D., adjunct associate professor of computer science and director of the Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation Center, is featured in a CNET article about using virtual private networks (VPNs) to score cheaper airline and hotel fares. While setting your VPN to a different country may have previously allowed users to score better travel deals, as Nizich explains, this workaround is no longer feasible.

“It used to be very possible to pretend to purchase from another country and capitalize on region-specific pricing,” he says. However, vendors have since caught on to this practice and now use specialized techniques to see where users are truly connected.

While VPNs might not work reliably for travel deals, Nizich says they are still “a great and recommended way of securing your traffic over the Internet and, more specifically, directly to your organization.”