I always read on the internet a few “tricks” to buy plane tickets - x weeks before your departure if you are going to europe, it is cheaper to buy tickets on a wednesday, or whatever… Is there any proven data that shows the best day to buy plane tickets? I am departing from Brazil and going to Europe with my boyfriend, probably in june-july.
There’s no guarantee for plane tickets. Once, three of us at work were all flying to the same place and made our plane reservations independently. Two of us made our reservations about an hour apart on the same airline and got very different prices. The third wasn’t able to get on the same flight but was able to book two one-way tickets cheaper than either of us got our round trip tickets.
That said, generally speaking, tickets are cheaper if you buy them in advance. If you wait until the last minute the price does tend to go up as the flights get full, but only if the flights get full. If they are underbooked they will sometimes lower the prices to try to fill the seats.
Also, business travelers fly during the week and come home before the weekend, so round trip tickets that don’t include a weekend will often be significantly more expensive as the airlines know that business travelers will pay more.
NBC News report from a September broadcast.
So I can believe the day of the week bit, but “ticket prices go down at 3PM”? What does that mean? GMT? EDT? Does it depend on where the airline is headquartered?
To mis-quote Jimmy Buffet, it’s always 3 o’clock somewhere!
Considering the number of error fare websites and similar schemes that help you buy cheaper tickets, I doubt a fixed time (such as Tuesday 3pm) when cheap tickets are actually available for sale in significant quantities could be maintained. Airlines would simply anticipate increased demand for tickets at this time as soon as such a rule became widely know, and would not lower their prices at this time in the first place.
Having said that, I do think there is some truth to the recommendation to fly in the middle of the week. Much of the very complicated art of pricing air tickets is intended as a sort of quasi-price discrimination, by separating the business travellers (who don’t care about how much their tickets costs, and can therefore be charged much more) from the tourists (who are much more price sensitive and therefore need to be attracted with low fares).
You also need to take account of public holidays at both end of the trip. Not just the obvious ones like 4th July for Americans, 1st August in France and Bank holidays in the UK, but school holidays as well.
A flight out of the UK at the end of July will be a lot more expensive than one a couple of weeks earlier, because that’s when schools break up for summer.
It’s not just air fares either - We went to see our daughter in the South of England last summer and on the weekend we went, all the accommodation in Portsmouth was booked solid, and this was from a month away. All because it was the first weekend of a holiday and there were loads of families booked in for one night before catching their ferry to France, or their cruise round the Med.
I recall hearing evidence presented that accessing various airline/travel agent websites via an Apple computer (vs a PC) resulted in higher prices. Theory being Apple owners paid considerably more for their computers and were, therefore, prepared to pay more for their tix.
Anyone else hear this?
I’ve heard the same thing about Amazon, but only as hearsay, not supported by any sort of evidence. It is true, though, that the prices displayed on the Amazon website for one and the same product vary considerably.
I had to book myself a flight recently. Once I had my dates in mind, I started checking travel websites and then plugged in different departure dates (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), different airports (their are two close to my city) and then different return dates to get the best price. I did this a couple of times to see what fares came up and which airline generally had the best prices, then I took the plunge and booked my trip.
My travel agent friend seemed to think she could have done better on price because there was a possible seat sale coming up, but I needed the certainty of a booked flight on set days far enough in advance to request holiday time from work and arrange dog care, so waiting and hoping for a last minute sale wasn’t an option for me.
Tuesday noonish until Wed. morning used to be optimum for me, but the last alerts I set at Kayak, showed the best fares showed up in the wee hours Sat. nite, when I wasn’t awake to take advantage of them, and were gone by Sun. morning.
We vacation in January each year, and always but our plane tickets in October. Two years ago we were looking at airfares and were surprised they were less than the years prior. The next day I sat down with my credit card to pay, and they had jumped considerably.
I read an article that analyzed millions of plane ticket prices and came up with the conclusion that the most expensive time to buy a plane ticket is the day before you fly. Surprisingly, buying a ticket on the same day you fly isn’t quite as expensive, but you run a higher risk that the flight you want will be sold out. The cheapest day is harder to identify because the price curve is much flatter out there, but they came up with 4-8 weeks as the cheapest. They said:
1st place most expensive day: 1 day before flight
2nd place most expensive: day of flight
3rd place: 2 days before
4th place: 3 days before
5th place: 4 days before
6th place: 5 days before
7th place: 6 days before
8th place: 7 days before
So, the week before the flight, the prices start going up every single day that you wait, and then on the day before the flight, they reach a maximum, and then prices actually go down on the day of the flight (assuming unsold seats still remain).
But this is all based on AVERAGES, and the particular flight you’re looking at might be a special situation. And they cautioned against using the megadata from regular commercial flights to try to make conclusions about special charter flights.
I’d always heard that the cheapest time to buy tickets is 90 days in advance, but they said it’s more like 4-8 weeks. However, I gather that the difference between those options is only something like 10%.
So many factors.
Here are a couple of blog posts I found that discuss this extensively.
I guess it really depends on the route, the time of year and the maximum date of advanced booking. Each airline will have its own pattern.
They review the mix of cheap and expensive tickets they release onto the market every day with the intention of maximising the sale price of the tickets, yet leave few unsold. Airline companies buy ticketing systems that use sophisticated algorithms to maximise the yield. There are some obvious factors that can predict the popularity of the tickets: maximum advanced booking window, day of week, avoid holiday travellers and business travellers. Avoid national holidays and weekend breaks (very busy out on Friday afternoons return Sunday evening). Even time of day of booking and location of buyer. As it gets closer to the departure date, the airlines will take a close look at what their competitors are doing and price accordingly.
Train companies in Europe also do the same sort of sophisticated price balancing and you can predict the slow moving dates and times when there is a greater likelihood of cheap tickets being available, usually up until a couple of weeks before travel. However, during the fallow months between New Year and May, there are often promotions (but also less flights). Those in the travel business will be familiar with these annual patterns.
There are some dates, like Christmas Day and New Years day. You can get a cheap flight on those days to London. But the city closes ALL public transport on those days. So you may well find you end up paying for the worlds most expensive taxi ride.
You win some, you lose some.
:smack: