The search of a cheap flight is the modern traveler, epopee, a cyberspace experience with all of the frustrating dead ends, the promise of ridiculously cheap damned fares, and an overall sense of futility. We hear ghost stories of a friend who only had to fork out the dual cost of an expensive dinner in order to purchase a round-trip ticket to paradise, whereas we get prices that clearly do not exist on this planet. Yet, the internet is filled with the simplified, sometimes historical, tips: Always book your flights on a Tuesday at midnight, clear your cookies or the airlines will increase the price, Buy 54 days before the flight. As much as there might be a grain of historical truth in some of these maxims, they cannot really embody the intricate, dynamic, and continuously changing reality in the airline pricing. The thing is that it is not a one-trick magic trick or the secret incantation to figure out the day with the lowest airfare. It is also about how to learn to read the complicated relationship between supply and demand, think like an airline pricing expert, and to equip yourself with the knowledge and tools necessary to work their own system to your favor. It is both a science and art and one needs to be adaptable, have strategic thinking, be open minded and not only be concerned with the surface.
The basic tenet behind this activity is the rotation of the week. The widespread knowledge that you will have a cheaper flight price on Tuesday or Wednesday is mostly correct, however, the explanation does matter. Aire travel industry is quite categorically separated into two customer categories, business and leisure travelers. Business travelers travel according to a business clock and a less price-concerned budget. They usually require to be in their destination place on the first day of the working week, this implies they fly out on Sundays or Mondays and would also wish to be home on the weekend, they fly in on Thursday or Fridays. Instead, the leisure travellers are interested in making the most out of their off days, and they will congest the airports on Friday evenings and on a Saturday to start their holidays, and on Sunday so they can be available to go to work or school on Monday. This develops a foreseeable rise in demand, and thus higher pricing, during the start of a week and end of a week. The midl week, i.e., Tuesday and Wednesday, and frequently Thursday, is a pause. There would be less traffic on the airplanes to fly during such days and hence the airlines would have to reduce their prices to attract people and occupy these vacant spaces on board. It helps you when you commit to flying on a day that is less preferable because you can take advantage of this decline in demand and usually save so much money as opposed to leaving on a weekend.
The same reasoning happens with the day of the week as well as the time of the day. Like most individuals do not like to fly during weekdays, they also like not to fly at times that are not convenient. The early and late morning flights, which fly in the dark before the sun rises and late at night, the infamous red eye, are always cheap. The popularity of these flights is negatively attributed by either having to wake up at an unholy time or reaching your destination in the middle of the night all tired. They interfere with the sleep patterns and may be logistically demanding. But in the case of the economical tourist this inconvenience is a currency, which can be exchanged against considerable savings. By accepting a morning alarm enthusiastically or a late call, you will once more be going out of peak demand window, and benefiting by the financial results. This willingness to bend your travel to fit the airlines schedule is a very effective weapon and when coupled with somewhat low priced Monday to Friday or “mid-week” travel can open up the very bottom (base) fares on your desired travel path.
Moving out of the daily and weekly periods, seasons determine the most dramatic price changes. Each destination has high season, low season, and the in between shoulder seasons. Tourist demand rises to its maximum during the high season; in Europe, summer, in most of the Christian world: during school holidays and perfect weather conditions. Travelling at this time will require one to pay a massive premium on air-fare. The low season on the other hand is the period during which the demand is lowest usually because of unfavorable weather like the monsoon season in Southeast Asia or cold winters in Northern Europe. Although you may have to deal with more precipitation in terms of rain or snow, the difference in prices on air tickets and hotels can be overwhelming, up to 50 percent and more. However the real sweet spot is the shoulder season (the few months before and after peak season, such as April, May, September and October ahead of a Mediterranean destination.) Weather is still nice at these times, crowds are thinner and prices are much cheaper than the summer rush. In addition to the overall seasonality, you have to do a research on special occasions and local events as well. Making attempts to fly to Lahore or Karachi in the days right before Eid will end up costing you to the moon. The same logic applies to booking flights to a city which is hosting a major event in the world such as Olympics or a colossal tech conference because prices will go high. The serious step to evade these price hikes is a five-minute search of the holiday calendar and a schedule of major events of the destination you are visiting.
Rhythm of the week and the season is half of what comprises the initial layer of your strategy, however. The other dollar is in knowing the exact moment to buy, the moment to click the buy button in the massive unstable timeline of air tickets prices. Although the notion of the last-minute deal is romantic, to put it mildly, it is very much of the past as far as scheduled airlines are concerned. The problem is that airlines exploit the desperation of last minute business travellers and people with family emergencies resulting in an increase in price due to last minute rush in the last few weeks and days leading to departure. The trick is to see a reservation done on a sweet spot during which fares are least competitive. In the domestic flights, this should be within three months or even a month before one travels. In case of global travel, the window is broader and farther, usually two to eight months before departure. Early reservations are just as expensive as late ones and airlines usually put up the most expensive classes first and only lower pricing later as they begin to test their market and revenue models against that of competitors. During peak holiday travel, e.g. Christmas or most of the summer holidays, this whole timeline is ahead. It might be necessary to book up to six to twelve months in advance to have a decent price as soon as the demand cannot but skyrocket.
With so many choices and this highly unstable digital marketplace, you are in need of some strong tools to use to assist you. The best and the only assistant you have is a powerful flight search engine such as Google Flights or Skyscanner. Such websites pool information of hundreds of online travel agencies and airlines to provide an insight into the market, so a full picture is made available to you. Yet, their real strength is those additional features that include more than a date search. The display on calendar is groundbreaking. As opposed to looking at the price at a particular date in time you may look at a whole month at a time that is usually displayed in a very basic colour table or a bar chart. This will enable you to have an immediate clarity on how by changing the day you are leaving instead of a Saturday to the next Tuesday you can reduce your fare by half. It brings such abstract notion of the term cheaper days into a solid visual form. To those who have the ultimate free will, the ability to go anywhere you like, the Explore or Fly to everywhere is an entry to impulsive destiny. Just enter your home airport and the month you want to travel in the future you would like to travel, and the engine will display a map of the world with the lowest fares you can visit, which more often than not creates amazing offers to destinations you might never have thought of going. As soon as you have a route and a vague timeframe analyzed, it is necessary to organize price alerts. It is not something that can be compromised. Using the alert feature, the search engine will keep checking the flight on your behalf and as soon as the fare goes down, a notification email will be sent to you and you can be quick enough to book the flight before the offer runs away.
With this holistic vision and these digital tools on their side, the savvy traveler can now start to become more sophisticated and imaginative in the application of strategies. Take an example of a positioning flight. Direct long distance flights could be extremely costly especially if your city is a smaller one. It can be much more cost effective to buy a long distance ticket out of one of the main international hubs say Dubai, Doha or Istanbul and then a low cost flight out of your home town to that hub. As far as it takes you one step, the total price of two single tickets sometimes might cost you several hundreds of dollars cheaper than direct ones. There is also another pattern, which is considered to be a high-stakes tactic, called hidden city or skiplagging. This would mean that you book a flight schedule in which you would be going to the city which has the layover as the destination and not the destination. E.g., when one is interested in flying between Lahore and Dubai, the flight with a stop in London with lay offs in Dubai can be lower than a direct flight to Dubai. You would just get off at Dubai and you will not board the subsequent flight. This is an infringement of the contract of carriage used by the airline and you are not supposed to check any baggage, which will be delivered to the final point. This is being clamped on by the airlines and there is a possibility of getting caught, hence it is only an option that should be accessed by experienced travelers. Moving on to wider-risk: one thing you should always question is whether or not it is least expensive to buy a round-trip. It has become relatively less expensive to search low-cost airlines and buy two one-way tickets since you can interchange airlines and airports to get the least expensive combination.
Finally, there are no special golden days as you search to find the lowest fares. It is a process of strategic compromise which is both multi-faceted and hard work. It is a matter of learning that flexibility is the best currency which you have. What you will always save you the most money is a willingness to fly at a different time on a Wednesday rather than on a Friday, or at 6 AM rather than 10 AM, or in October rather than July, or flying into an airport an hour further away. Learn the ideas of supply and demand, get adept at using the latest resources in searching possibilities, and think imaginatively about your trip and you become your own player on the travel market rather than a passively price-taking man. You no longer are under the mercy of the system, on the contrary, you begin to use the logic of the system to seek the gaps and opportunities. The amount you save goes directly to your cleverness and hard work and can be utilized either to prolong your trip, to enable you experience more things at your destination, or just to begin to finance your next great adventure.
Learning to be this savvy traveler requires going past the limit of being aware of the general rules of the game to the understanding of the underlying mechanics which decide its every step. It entails moving another layer of the onion back and coming out after the go-to-market site and seeing the complicated machine behind the airline revenue, which is data-driven. The fare that you pay to travel in a certain flight, is not a random figure, but the final outcome of a high-tech mechanism called yield management tool which is driven by algorithms that are always striving to achieve one particular objective namely, to generate the highest amount of revenue out of every single seat on every single flight. In order to excel in the art of locating the cheapest days, you need to be thankful to understand the specificity of the operations of this mechanism. A cabin in economy class, as an example, is not a single block of seats, of the same price. It is separated into many invisible categories known as fare classes or fare buckets, each of which has a letter name of the alphabet (Y, B, M, H, Q, K, L and so forth). They are all economy tickets but with each letter there would be a different price and different rules in terms of flexibility, refund, and frequent flyer mile. The rates posted are the lowest available fare bucket which is the cheapest rate you will see advertized. As soon as the few seats in that bucket are sold the price goes to the next lowest bucket and so forth. That is why there is a price rises on the difference of the few minutes that it took you to get a proven travel plans; someone at the Internet has secured the last available ticket of L class and currently only the tickets of higher price of K class are left.
It is due to this fare bucket system that airlines base their pricing concept upon and said pricing concept is reactive as well as predictive. Their algorithms will interpret large sets of past data on that particular route and time of year, however, they also keep track of the booking pace in real time, pricing trends of the competition, changes in fuel prices and even holidays and current events that may influence travel demand. Herein, lies the reason as to why there are no foolproof formulae of booking. The whole system is meant to be unlike that which can be easily anticipated by casual consumer. But having an idea that it exists puts you in an essential lead. It validates the need to be decisive when you see a good fare, and in particular a good fare found after receiving a price alert, which may indicate there are fewer available seats in a low fare bucket, and these few seats will also go quickly. It also creates an asset, risk-free strategy, accessible to a great number of travelers: the 24-hour rule. The rules in the United States require that airlines have to permit your flight booking cancellation within 24 hours of buying it at diminutive fee no more than seven days preceding departure. This policy has been voluntarily taken by a lot of international carriers. It is an effective instrument. When you want to book a fare which appears to be great, then you can book it straight away to secure that booking, then continue searching the various and varied places to get a more comprehensive search made over the next 24 hours to make sure there is not a better make of fare. In case you get it, it is possible to book the new flight and cancel the initial one without loss.
To the hardcore flight hacker who is eager to bend the rules further there are even more fringe tactics which use the worldwide scope of air transport to their advantage. Among these strategies is the idea of manipulating the point of sale and this can be thought of as being the country upon which the transaction is thought of to be occurring. An airline Internet site cannot be considered one and the same, there are sites serving various countries, and the prices sometimes can be shown using the local currency. Owing to fluctuations in currency and local market situations and complications to do with price agreements, the same exact flight on the same exact plane can be considerably cheaper when it is bought through the airline web site in a different country. To give an example, a flight between Lahore and London may be relatively cheaper when booked in the airline site in Brazil and in BrazilianReal, as compared to booking it in the airline site in Pakistan or the UK. This will need a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to look like you are clicking around through that country and a credit card that does not have foreign transaction fees so it does not pose a problem against what you are saving. It is a relatively complex (trial and error) process; however the possibilities of savings are high on long-haul flights which can be quite expensive.
At very exceptional and memorable times, the complex systems in the airlines ruin. It can be caused by a human typo, currency conversion bug or a bug in a data download, introducing an error fare, an air fare so low that clearly, it is an error. They are the holy grails of low-cost business travel: It costs nothing to fly back to New York in business class or a trans-continental ticket is less than 100 dollars. Such fares are a one-time occasion with very little duration since within moments of making such mistakes, airlines are on toes to rectify such fares. They will not be found by simply googling through Google Flights. Instead, they are found and distributed by a devoted group of flight deal searchers on such blogs as Secret Flying, Scott Shirley Cheap Flights (now Going.com), or Jack flight club. There are two golden rules to take advantage of an error fare. One: reserve right now. Do not consider, do not take a vacation, do not even pack your suitcases in your head. The time frame of this window of opportunity can be very minimal, in minutes. Second: you should not call the airline and ask them whether the price is correct after booking. This will just warn them of the mistake and will most probably cancel your ticket. Simply wait. The airline will often honour the fare in most instances even where the ticket number has already been issued to prevent any bad publicity. It is a risk but one that is worth it because you can win the travel deal of a lifetime.
Distinguishing your strategy on the basis of the type of the airline is also important. Legacy airlines such as Emirates or British Airways operate on different rules as compared to low-cost airlines such as Airblue, Ryanair or AirAsia. The business model of budget airlines is totally different. Their headline fare reads like a joke, but it is combined with high ancillary fees that earn them their profit. In getting a cheap flight, an individual ought to be disciplined in their ability to wade through their booking process. Their basic services usually consist of just a seat and a personal piece that is of small size. Each step through the process of online booking will offer you some upgrades and add-ons: selecting the seat, priority boarding, travel insurance, and checking baggage. There are some items such as baggage which may actually cost you out of this world when you choose to pay at the airport. Should you wish to carry a baggage, then it is important that you purchase the allowance on the internet when making a reservation so as to get the lowest amount. Become militant on weighing and measuring your luggage that you are taking as a carry-on because these airlines are not only strict on the limits but will not hesitate to impose hefty charges at the gate. Learn their model and decline all non-vital extras and you will pay them a low base rate which means a real low total cost.
In this hyper-digital era, the idea that one may want to resort to the help of a human expert, a good, old-fashioned travel agent, may appear counter-intuitive, but sometimes this may be the smartest thing to do. Even though on simple round-trip tickets, you would almost always be better off booking yourself, an expert agent can become invaluable in more complicated route handling. When you want to travel through several cities on various continents, when purchasing a round-the-world ticket, or organizing the flight of a large circle of people, an agent can access the systems and consolidated fares unavailable to individuals. They are able to assemble intricate routings and manage the complex logistics in a way that to a person would prove madly frustrating. Besides, sometimes things go wrong, so when your flight is cancelled or you have missed a connection, it is a relief to know that you have someone to take up your case.
Last, but not least, you need to be well familiar with your local travel habits. As a resident of Lahore, you are the centre of special flows of travel. During the summer holidays, families visit relatives which rockets the demand of flights to the UK and Canada as well as the US. This peak period occurs in the month of December when wedding season large numbers of overseas Pakistanis come flocking in to spend their money, increasing the prices. The travel to Saudi Arabia and Gulf states experience massive surge during religious times such as Ramadan and Hajj. You can ensure that you are able to plan your trip during the intervening quiet times knowing that such times are accompanied with these regional tides. Another strategic point, on your side, is that you are geographically near the mega- hubs of the three leading carriers in the Gulf. That is why the positioning flight plan strategy is especially powerful because Emirates, Qatar, and Etihad provide competitive prices to almost every corner of the world since they have hubs in Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi. The last thing that a student needs to learn when they are learning how to find the cheapest flight is to incorporate this local knowledge into the general plans on the global scale. It is a learning and adjusting process that goes on and on and it transforms the stressful idea of having to book a flight into an interesting puzzle-one that you are now ready to crack wide open.
