How a VPN Got Us a Better Hotel Deal
On the road to San Marino, a forgotten VPN setting revealed how your virtual location can shape hotel prices and exposed the digital borders we live within.
What a VPN glitch on the road to San Marino taught me about digital borders
We were somewhere between Rimini and the hills of San Marino, just past a fuel stop where I’d connected to free Wi-Fi to load a map. I had my VPN switched on — a habit by now, part of my basic toolkit for digital resilience when travelling. I didn’t think much of it. The VPN was set to Argentina, purely because it happens to be first in the alphabetical list.
An hour later, while searching for a hotel in San Marino, we noticed something strange. One phone — mine — was showing lower prices than the other. Same hotel, same dates. The only difference: my VPN was still routing traffic through Buenos Aires.
And that’s when it clicked.
A glitch that made sense
I’ve heard of this before. Airlines adjusting ticket prices based on your location. Booking sites showing different deals depending on where they think you are. But it hits differently when it happens to you. Two devices, side by side and the VPN makes one of them look like a better guest.
We ran a quick experiment. Switched the second phone to Argentina as well. The same price appeared. So we booked.
Almost.
Payments and permissions
First, the credit card declined the payment. Four, five times. Then I remembered: some cards require you to pre-authorise usage in specific countries. Apparently, Argentina was considered unusual enough. Once I allowed it manually, the payment went through.
It wasn’t effortless. But we had time and a kind of curious focus that road trips often bring. We weren’t gaming the system so much as discovering it.
What changed? Nothing visible.
We weren’t physically in Argentina. The hotel wasn’t in Argentina. The payment, too, wasn’t tied to an address. Everything about this booking, the request, the offer, the fulfilment, was digital. What changed was a signal: where we appeared to be.
That signal was enough to alter the terms.
It reminded me how little sovereignty we truly have in the digital world or perhaps how distributed that sovereignty has become. Countries still matter. Your virtual location, inferred through IP addresses, quietly reshapes what you’re offered, what you’re charged, and what you’re allowed to do.
San Marino: 61 square kilometres of sovereignty
It was a fitting reflection for the place we were headed. San Marino, a microstate perched on a rocky hill, claims to be the world’s oldest republic. For over 1,500 years, it’s held onto its identity. A dot on the map, but a full participant in diplomacy, law, and the quiet assertion: we decide who we are.
In contrast, the digital realm seems to blur these edges. We appear where we are not. Offers are shaped not by who we are, but by where we seem to be. The sovereignty lies elsewhere, in servers, algorithms, and pricing models.
San Marino
A borderless web with invisible borders
The internet was supposed to be borderless. And in many ways, it is. But not in the ways that matter economically. What we access, what we pay, even how we're tracked, all depend on a cartography we rarely see.
That brief detour through Argentina, virtual though it was, revealed something real. We were not just travellers on a road through Italy. We were also crossing a very different map: the one behind our screens.
PS – I might try this again
This experience got me curious. I’ll experiment a bit more with geo-pricing, VPNs, and the logic behind these invisible borders. If you'd like to follow along, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter.
I’ll share more as I go.
Rob Hoeijmakers
Rob Hoeijmakers