Orbitz.com, purveyors of cheap travel and hotel accommodations, has finally figured out how to capitalize on the expensive tastes and smug sense of superiority of folks who choose to do their computing with Apple products. In a report from the Wall Street Journal today, the business paper notes that the travel site has begun steering Mac users looking for a cheap place to crash towards different and sometimes more expensive travel options than their Windows counterparts.

In their analysis of users' browsing data, Orbitz found what market researchers have known for years: that folks using Apple computers tend to spend more money already. The logic then, goes something like: "why not just show them more expensive options to begin with?"

While searching for two nights in a Miami Beach hotel, the Wall Street Journal found Mac users were given a list of more pricy boutique hotels — which actually sound like the kind of places you'd find a lot of frequently traveling Mac users anyway.

The Orbitz effort is only part of the larger trend of retail sites and advertisers combing through the massive piles of user data they've been amassing for years in an attempt to predict user behavior and eke out a couple extra bucks here and there. The WSJ calls it predictive analytics, but what it ultimately amounts to is creating an online stereotype so retailers can sell more of the same thing to the same sorts of people. Which is more or less how we ended up with so many MacBooks using the hotel lobby WiFi in the first place.

[WSJ]
[Atlantic]
[Full disclosure: This blog post was written on a Mac. Just like every other blog post on the Internet.]