Gadling

It’s pretty rare, but occasionally tickets will go down in price. Usually this is because of a fare sale (advertised or UNadvertised) or change to the market that dictates decrease in demand. Southwest Airlines’ entry into the Detroit – Baltimore market a few years back caused prices between the two cities to plummet because supply went way up and demand stayed the same. These days I can get away with a ticket between the two for about a hundred bucks, where earlier it was almost twice that much.

Carriers often have seasonal sales when demand goes down (so book tickets in the high season even earlier!). Three to five months before the winter “low” season starts, you’ll often see advertised fares a little lower than market on some of the major carriers. In my experience, however, these are minor in comparison to some of the larger “unadvertised” sales that will sneak into the fare schedule.

Airlines will also occasionally squabble among one another for demand among a particular city. Last year Delta suddenly dropped fares between Chicago and Buenos Aires (a United hub), prompting a miniature unadvertised fare war between the two carriers. Those in the know jumped all over the tickets and ended up getting 600$ tickets to South America.

The point is that fare sales are fairly few and far between; the primary factor for pricing is still volume of open seats, so its foolish to assume that a great ticket will swoop in and save the day.

One trick that few travelers keep in mind, however, is that most airlines have a reticketing policy on their tickets. That is, if the price of your ticket goes down, you can call, reprice your ticket and they’ll give your extra money back. Often there is a reticketing fee and occasionally they’ll only refund your money in a voucher form, but it’s still currency you can use at a later time. Check with your carrier to see what the specifics are of their reticketing policy.

Knowing this, it’s best to run a search every week or so to see if a miracle has occurred and your ticket price has gone down. If the discrepancy in sale price is great enough, give the airline a call and make some changes to your fare.

It’s always handy to know how much you should be paying for a flight between two cities. Many professionals can pick a random city pair and availability window and give you a price off the top of his or her head. Until recently, that was pretty much the way to do it. With the age of the interwebs upon us however, several sites have started compiling and comparing the wealth of airline fare data that has been accumulating over the years.

• My favorite, Farecompare, is a powerful tool that not only tracks legacy data but keeps uber-accurate track of the current fares. It takes a fair amount of interpretation to garner the best data from their database, including airline feeds and international taxes. Be patient and tinker around with the software during your weekly management meeting and you’ll learn a ton. Farecompare also has a pretty neat guide for buying tickets on their frontpage, although most of that is geared around their site.
• Although Kayak is no longer the secret that it used to be, this metacrawler is the one of the most efficient, well-written search engines out there. In addition to a powerful flex search, you can also look at basic fare trends. If you guys are watching, don’t sell out!
• Yapta and Farecast are two tools that are just coming out of the starting gates. Still in their infancy (Farecast used to be only for select city pairs) they’re now expanding their service to some of the larger markets. One neat thing that Faretracker does is give you a probability that your ticket is going to fall in price. As I said earlier though, it’s a black art; not even the professionals will commit to any prices.

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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.

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.

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