I’ve heard tell that it is cheaper to fly mid-week than at the weekends. If so, what are the cheapest days to fly?
That would probably be Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Monday is bad because people will often schedule a week at a given place and friday is bad because people want to be home from wherever to enjoy their weekend.
Realize that prices are set by market forces. The more people who want a limited resource the more the resource will cost. Most people prefer flying on the weekends for vacations as it allows them greater latitude in when they can get to the airport and allows a bit of rest at the end rather than working around a work schedule.
Likewise red-eye flights are cheaper than day flights since most people don’t want to be moving about at 3 in the morning.
What I never understood are the price breaks an airline will give you for satying at your destination more than three (for example) days (or stay over a weekend). Why the hell should that matter to them?
Because the high prices are for business travellers, who often travel on short notice and stay for only the minimum time possible. The airlines are trying to have a two tier price system, one for business travellers and one for vacationers. Since they can’t ask you outright, they make their fare structure to penalize business travellers.
Flying out on T,W, or Th are indeed the cheapest flights, and you are usually required to stay over a Saturday night. If you go to www.orbitz.com or www.travelocity.com they have tips and tricks for getting the cheapest flights.
One way to get cheaper tickets on the flight you want is to buy a discount ticket for a flight, like a redeye or a less popular time, then show up at the airport early and see if they can shift you to an earlier flight. You can do this if all the discount tickets (there are only a few per flight) are sold out when you order. The gate people want to fill their flight so they will often move you to the earlier flight at no cost.
A friend of mine had to go on a business trip but had to be back on a Friday for something he needed to attend over the weekend. He found it was actually cheaper to buy two roundtrip airfares than it was to buy one roundtrip airfare that returned him home on a Friday. Mind you this was years ago but it still highlights the completely cryptic and usually senseless airfare structure (I wonder if the airlines even have a handle on all their airfares and discounts).
BTW: You can sometimes get a little holiday on the company’s dime due to this fare structure. If you’re in a nice part of the world and would like to sightsee for a day or two you can often show your company that it’d be cheaper for them to pay your hotel for two more nights and have you return on a Sunday than it would be to fly you home on a Friday.
The craziest shit I ever encountered was the following: I had to fly from Santa Barbara to Dayton through Los Angeles (and Chicago.) I met a collegue in L.A. who just took the L.A. to Dayton part. We met on the exact same plane. His flight was $500(!) more than mine. That’s right, if he had driven to Santa Barbara and taken the extra flight it would have been cheaper. Go figure.
Haj