When is the best time to buy airline tickets? Summary and booking

by Grant Martin on

So when should I book my ticket?

In my opinion, praying for a fare sale is wishful thinking. In addition to the airline needing to discount your specific fare, you have to be aware and quick enough to jump on the ticket before it disappears.
Knowing now how fare availability and pricing tiers work, it only follows that you need to book as far ahead in advance as possible. I know, it’s hard to schedule all of your vacation and holiday travel in advance, but there are always fixed schedules that you’re going to keep. I’m always going to go home for Christmas. Usually I know what state I’m going to live six months in advance. Book it.

Aside from the obvious, keep the basic fare searching tricks in your queue.

  • Try searching on days before and after the holiday window (leave Tuesday or return Monday for Thanksgiving). Also try searching on the day OF the holiday.
  • Leave early in the morning or late in the evening.
  • Try flying on a Low Cost Carrier (LCC) to save a few bucks; most of these carriers are not covered by the canonical search engines, so you’ll have to go to their websites to run specific searches. If you’re in Europe, try flylc.com
  • Consider flying to an alternate airport in the area (Ontario or John Wayne instead of LAX, Toledo or Flint instead of Detroit, etc).
  • Search for coupons on Ebay. Airlines don’t really like it when people sell/trade vouchers and coupons, but few have a way to track it. I myself have never done it, but I know a guy who does it all of the time and he’s never had a problem.
  • Buy frequent flyer miles off of a friend. No, the airlines don’t like this either, but if you find a ticket for 800$ online and can pay your buddy 500$ for the miles, nobody will know the difference.
  • Keep an eye on Gadling. Occasionally I post ridiculous deals ;)

Do your homework first too. Check the online tools and make sure that you aren’t paying way too much for a fare. Find an appropriate time, check with your friends and family and commit.

And I know it sounds ridiculous, but mentally prepare yourself before investing. I like to think of it this way: if the price of my ticket goes down and I can’t recoup any of my money by rebooking the ticket, I invested any extra money in peace of mind for these few weeks that the ticket has been booked. If you think about all of the time that you spend stewing at your cubicle and bitching to your friends before you book your ticket about the price fluctuations, it’s really not that bad of a payoff.

When is the best time to buy tickets? Fare buckets and pricing page 2

by Grant Martin on

It’s important to realize that these are automatic price tiers in the system. Once all of the K fares are sold out, the cheapest tickets automatically revert to the next highest fare, T or V or whatever it’s called on your airline. So often when the price you’re looking for shoots up all of the sudden, it’s often because Tuan over in IT just snagged your ticket out from under you.

Orbitz just updated their software with this sort of availability checking. You’ll notice when you book a ticket that it will say “Hurry! Only x tickets left at this price!” That’s them automatically checking the fare buckets and telling you that there are only that many tickets left in that category. So although it’s in their best interest for you to book your ticket immediately, in many cases it’s also yours as well.

Fortunately, most airlines have a return policy on their tickets within the first few hours of purchase; typically this is set at 24 hours, but will vary by carrier. So if you see a ticket that you’re pretty sure that you’d like, go ahead and book it. After you go home and sleep on it, you can decide if you really want the ticket.

Continue on to Timing >>

When is the best time to buy tickets?

by Grant Martin on

Have you ever been shopping for a plane ticket online, found the ideal itinerary at a fair price, returned the next day to purchase your fare and found that the price has skyrocketed? It’s happened to everyone I know, and if it makes you feel better, it even happens to me once in a while. But when is the best time to buy tickets? Should I wait longer and hope that the price goes down? Should I have booked last weekend?

Unfortunately, predicting airfare trends and knowing when to purchase tickets is like black magic. There is no science involved, nor ISO flowchart to follow, nor oracle to consult. Predictability and common sense go straight out the window, replaced with speculation, rumors and a great deal of finger pointing when things go south.

But there are a few tricks you can use to help you on your journey to Eden. A variety of online tools, combined with some common sense and a little patience can almost help garner a fair price on the ticket that you purchase and a little peace of mind. And if you’re lucky, you may even get a great price.

Below, we’ll show you what to keep your eyes open for among market trends and a few online tools to help in your journey, as well as basic timing and logistic rules. With those and a little patient planning, you should be in shipshape for your next ticket to see grandma next Easter.

But I’ll tell you this right now. There is no foolproof code for when the cheapest time to buy tickets is. Neither myself nor any travel agent has a crystal ball that says when ticket prices should and will go down. But we keep our fingers on the pulse of the market, know roughly how much a city pair should cost and know damn well when a fare is on sale.

Follow along to Fare Buckets and Pricing >>>

Or, skip ahead to:

10 tips for smarter flying


Using Facebook to find cheap airfare (and stalk people)

by Jerry Guo on

The hit social networking site Facebook recently introduced third party applications that serve various purposes. Some are useful: trading music tips. Some are more frivolous: killing zombies. Now there’s a nifty little tool that could save you cold hard cash. It’s an app called “Where I’ve Been,” which mainly serves to show your friends, well, where you’ve been.

But one of its newest features is “flight finder,” which lets you select a departure city and then view a visual representation of the cheapest fares to hundreds of international destinations. The best part is you can narrow the results based on how much you’re willing to pay. For instance, I wanted to go somewhere cheap in late December, so I selected Newark, NJ as the departure city and then used the slider to put a $500 max on airfare. Most of the dots that popped up were in Europe or the states, but I also found a $400 ticket to Lima, Peru.

One thing to keep in mind is the service is in beta right now, so important details like dates of travel haven’t been worked out. Come to think of it, I don’t even know which travel sites they get the data from. That hasn’t stopped rumors that the app has been purchased for $3 million by TripAdvisor.

JetBlue turns to travel websites for booking

by Catherine Bodry on

In the past, JetBlue sold most of its tickets through its website. But last year, the budget airline listed its fares on “global” distribution systems, which mainly serve travel agents.

Now, JetBlue has gone all the way online; it started selling tickets on travel websites like Orbitz, Expedia, and Priceline. The company explains that with rising fuel costs and a slower economy, it needs to “expand its reach and step up competition.”

And perhaps gain back some of the customers it lost during all those crazy delays and cancellations last February?