Searching the best flight bargains is one of the most common activities of contemporary tourism. It is an experience online, full of stress, doubt, and the constant worry that there is a cheaper deal coming up somewhere down the line. To press the confirmation booking button is to make a huge financial investment and even in the few seconds that follow an unavoidable thought runs through the mind, had I waited a day longer would I have managed to get it at a cheaper price? Or should I have made a booking a week ago when the price was a bit cheap? The vast ocean of personal opinions opposing the other, the gossip given by blogs about travelling, the numerous myths about travelling that are known since the times immemorial, contributes to this dance of indecisiveness. We have heard that we should book on a Tuesday, clear our browser cookies, wait until last-minute deals are available or we should book six weeks in advance. The reality, though, is that there is no single adage applied to cheap flights or ideal day of scheduled departure.
The airline pricing world is not a static retail world; it is a living, hyper-complex ecology with well-armed algorithms, exquisitely revised revenue management principles and the most basic laws of supply and demand. There is really not best time to book flights per se as it all depends on one where they are going, when they are going and of course one individual tolerance to risk. Nevertheless, that does not imply that getting a good deal is just a game of luck. The opposite case. There might not be a magic bullet but there is certainly a science to it. Being aware of the core forces that determine flight prices, becoming aware of the trends of the booking windows of various kinds of traveling, dispelling the numerous myths and equipping yourself with the proper tools of strategies, you will be able to go through this complicated market safely. In this guide, we will lift the veil of pricing secrecy on the airline industry and give you a fair idea of the airline pricing structure so that you can make the wisest choice possible and be able to get the latest fare on your next flight, wherever it will take you away back home in Lahore or in any other part of the world.
Until we fully understand the reasons as to why the prices of a flight behave in a particular manner, we can not figure out when to book. The cost of an airline ticket will not be determined as the cost of that flight plus profit target. Rather, it is directed by what is termed as Revenue Management, a complex expertise meant to magnify the absolute revenue of each individual flight. An airline seat is the end-product par excellence; after the cabin door is closed there is no use having a vacant seat. Hence, the aim of the airline is to get the highest price that a customer is ready to pay at particular time per seat. In order to do this, airlines use a fare system based on a system of fare buckets or fare classes. Suppose that a flight between Lahore and London has 150 economy seats and the airline company does not offer one single economy price. instead it has a dozen or more various price points, represented by letters of the alphabet (e.g. Q, K, L, M, B, Y).
The lowest fairs are in the first trays (we would call them the S or even T but) the airline puts few in number seats in the first trays. After the small number of those seats is sold, that fare bucket is closed, and the price automatically goes to the next, a bit more costly one (perhaps, the L class). This process goes up the ladder. As the travel date approaches, and the seats are sold, the lower numbered buckets run out, leaving only the most expensive, flexible fares (such as Y or B), that are often sold to those individuals such as last minutes business travellers who have no option but (pay) to pay the premium. This is the mechanical ground as to why prices nearly always increase as the departure date draws near. All this work is not organised by people but by super-powerful computer algorithms which are operational 24/7. The algorithms constantly work over a flood of data: past history of bookings into that route, competitive pricing, volume of searches being done on that flight, large local events at the destination (sporting event, concert, major conference) holiday schedules, even price of jet fuel today. That, pure and simple, is dynamic pricing, which is to say that the price you see on the page at this moment might well be different five minutes hence, not out of any personal targeting on the airline, in most instances, but because what you or I are looking at is only one fare bucket, and somewhere in the world someone recently bought the last seat in a different fare bucket, forcing an automatic price increase to everyone who was in that fare bucket.
Now with this knowledge on the mechanics we can get on to the main question of the ideal booking window. Such is not a particular day, but is instead a sort of sweet spot in time, a time far enough ahead of date so that the lower fare buckets have not been filled yet and it is close enough to the date of departure that the airline understands demand well and has set an attractive price on the flight. This window differs greatly, based on what kind of travel you are doing.
In case of flights within a country, e.g. fare between Lahore-Karachi or Lahore-Islamabad the most suitable booking time is about one-four months earlier of the required date. When you book less than four months in advance, you can be sure you will only see higher there-and-here fares, since the airline has not added all its prices and there is thus little benefit to it to drop prices. The difference will be in the last month (or which is much worse in the last two weeks of booking) where the biggest rises in prices will be as the cheap buckets of fare are sold out and the algorithms get to work finding ways to cash in on last minute demand. This is because in practice, that sweet spot of domestic travel can be somewhere between 45 and 90 days, when the best prices are available.
With regard to international flights, timeline is stretched far back. These are trips of a larger scale and people make their travel plans well ahead of time, also the demand trends are more fixed. The domestic sweet spot of travelling internationally falls between three to eight months in advance. When you are a Pakistani resident and want to visit Europe or North America during the summer time the best time to start the search is earlier in January or February of the same year. Leaving a flight booking trip to a destination that is famous like London or Toronto to May will nearly put you in a position to have lost the best deals. The magnitude of complexities and increased price of international renditions consume a lot of caution and much longer period of time in one of the inventory controls management conducted by airline companies. When you book last three months, you are usually at the time when prices are soaring not to fall soon.
Nonetheless, all these general windows are hugely affected by the most noted variable of them all; the fact that you are in peak or out of peak season. Peak season can be described as high demand seasons, and they occur during such seasons like during summer when people feel the need to travel; June to August, Christmas and New Years as well as holidays in the region like Eid breaks. In such periods, the whole booking window moves a long way forward. When it comes to traveling during Christmas, you had better hopefully book your flights in August or even September which is four or six months in advance. When you travel in peak seasons of summer, February and March are the months to book your tickets. At such peak seasons, the airlines are aware that their flights would be sold out and they have barely any incentive to partially their prices. The lowest fare buckets associated with these flights are extremely tiny and are misused very promptly.
Travelling outside the peak season (ie going to Europe in October or Thailand in May) on the other hand, offers you a lot of flexibility. The normal booking windows are allowed and the rivalry over seats is reduced. Prices are more stable in such situations, and the cost of squeezing in a reservation a bit will be also less punitive. The last-minute deal is the only circumstance which may come true during the off-peak season, but even then, it could only happen on a route that is oversold- and that is a very risky approach to the game. The key issue, by far, is comprehending at what point of this spectrum you find yourself travel-wise: peak or off-peak.
No explanation of the booking times when it comes to flights will be fully complete without taking into account the myths that surround it and that keep on appearing in the travel forums and discussions constantly and inaccurately. When we do away with these, we are able to switch off this unconstructive noise and pay attention to what is more important. Its best known is this urban legend that the cheapest day to book a flight is always a Tuesday. The genesis of this thought can be traced back to an earlier time of air travel when airline workers would physically plug in new fares in the system once a week usually on a Monday night or Tuesday morning. That would form a temporary opening. But in the modern-day of working 24 hour a day algorithm pricing, this is practically a dead concept. Though small changes on a daily basis will be present, they are overshadowed by the significance of the booking window. It is much more probable that the price will be set by the fact that you are booking 90 days on, as opposed to 30 days on, as opposed to whether it is Tuesday or a Saturday.
The next myth is that you should go into the incognito mode or the one where they say that you should put your browser in a private mode and this will somehow give you the cheaper fares. The idea is that airlines are using cookies to trace your searches and will then increase price on the routes you search and seem to be urgent. It is true that airlines use cookies to do advertising and improve user experience but there is no consensus on the fact that they are tracking down users on an individual level and then abuse this information to artificially raise prices by making the argument that there is no empirical evidence that airlines are working in this systematic price manipulation. The reason that it is more likely that you will see a price change on the second search is that in the time between when you searched the price in the corner of the cheapest fare bucket was booked and the algorithm showed you the price in the next available fare bucket. Clearing your cookies will not do any harm but not to the level that some people think it is.
Last of all is the romantic, yet suicidal myth of last-minute deal. It is also an opinion held up by many travellers that by waiting and hoping that it is only in the last week that the airlines will panic and reduce their ticket prices to sell their last minute unoccupied seats. Although this may occur in very rare situations in certain flights which are undersold (in generally undesirable routes or at and awkward time), the picture is precisely the converse. During the days preceding the flight is the time when prices are at peak. These are times when airlines rip off last-minute business travellers and those in family emergencies who have no antipathy to prices and need to travel at any cost. Waiting and hoping that there is some last minute deal is a paradigm that you have a high probability of losing a huge amount of money say hundreds of dollars or even thousands of dollars as opposed to making the booking at the right sweet spot.
By clearing the myths and grasping the theory, we are now ready to move to the action, the strategies and tools which make the modern traveller a powerful creature. In the era of the web, you come with a strong weaponry that can assist you how and when to book. The one most effective tactic is to make technology work in your favor by establishing a fare alert. Such websites and applications as Google Flights, Skyscanner, or Kayak can be used to stipulate the route you want and the dates, and the app will check the fares on your behalf. You will get updated by email or a push as and when the price varies. A single action can make the best difference and turn you into an active, educating customer, as opposed to a frenzied-searching one. Within a number of weeks, you are able to determine the price trends and in case the price goes down into a range you are comfortable with, a range that you know better suits the booking sweet spot, then you can book this, and sleep well because you know that you are not making an impulse booking.
Flexibility is the golden rule in terms of getting cheap flights and now more is it convenient to take advantage than ever. These search engines have proposals of calendar or price graph functions. Take advantage of them on the condition that your dates of travel are not fixed. They show a graphical illustration of the way the price is altering on a daily basis over a whole month. You will find that very often on changing your departure date or your returning date by one, two days only – you would make tremendous savings. The reason is that, Travelling during Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays is usually affordable as compared to travelling on Fridays and Sundays, during which, people are going to or coming back home at the end of the week.
This principle of flex can be used in your destination also. In case you are curious about where to go outside of Lahore and you are ok with any of them, then apply the Explore or anywhere feature. You can also enter your airport of origin and type a search destination as “Everywhere” and the search engine will indicate to you a world map with the lowest available fares to any destination of your dates choice with several dozens countries. It is also an excellent idea to explore different spots that you would not usually pay attention to and save on traveling costs. Moreover never forget to check the presence of nearby airports. It can be very much cheaper to fly into a secondary airport: one that is a short train journey from where your main destination lies.
Lastly, there must also be the 24-hour rule. The rules in various jurisdictions, such as the United States, obligate airlines to give customers the option to cancel a flight reservation 24 hours after the reservation was made and make a full refund so long as such a reservation was made at least seven days before the departure. This has been a common policy in most airlines worldwide. Such a rule is an effective means against booker remorse. This is an ability to pre-reserve a fare that appears to be good without the fear of losing it. In the event that you stumble upon an even better deal than the one you made in that 24-hour timeframe, you may consequently risk-free cancel the initial booking and rebook yourself at the new lower price.
To sum it all, the search of the most advantageous time to buy an air ticket is not the search of some special day in the calendar. It involves a pro-active interaction with a complex dynamic market. It starts with good fundamental knowledge of the reason that prices operate in the way they do the inexorable logic of revenue management and the subtle tango of the fare buckets. It necessitates recognizing the wide booking windows, where to make reservations months in advance in case of international and peak-season travelling or be a little less strict when the trip is domestic and not in the tourist season. It requires us to do away with the old-fashioned legends of magic booking days and “incognito” searches and instead to learn to use the dazzling proactive tools that we now have available. The new, smart traveller is no longer guessing, he plans. They exploit fare alerts, they are open to flexibility in dates, flexibility in destinations and see through the rules of the game such as the 24-hour cancellation tactic. With this knowledge you will know what to do to wisely book a flight with confidence and with the knowledge that your adventure is under way not with the feeling of regret; no, but with the silence from knowing you obtained the best possible start in life.
