It is the kind of thing that has made most people with interests in traveling see red in Lahore. During your lunch break, you search the flights to a long-anticipated family vacation to London, and you get a seemingly perfect schedule on a Gulf carrier at the reasonable price. You call your spouse at a quick pace to check the dates. You go back to your computer and you are ready to make a booking but lo and behold, during the thirty minute book time, the same flight has flown up in price, irrationally by 20,000 rupees. The short-term response is the combination of anger and paranoia. Are someone watching me? Were they aware that I was interested and jacked up the price? Is it a conspiracy to extract the last bit of cash out of my pocket? As much as the idea of being directly targeted can be grasped, the situation is more complicated and not as individual. You have now experienced first hand the dynamic pricing engine in action, the mighty beast that determines the price of almost any airline fare that has been sold in the world. There is no magic switch called off that can prevent with greatest punishment and the only way to do this is to know the beast, and learn its manovuvres to outsmart it.
Let us first clear the air on what dynamic pricing is all about. It is not someone sitting in and office and manually manipulating prices to deceive you. It is a very advanced, algorithm based approach airlines use to dynamically control its revenue (due to dynamic changes by means of changing the fares in real-time in regards to a vast and ever-shifting amount of data points). Just imagine it as a no-frills robotized stock exchange of seats on a flight. Real-time supply and demand is the one, and the most influential factor that implements these changes. The supply remains constant in an aircraft with regard to the number of seats. The algorithm continuously keeps track of the number of individuals that are searching and reserving those seats (the demand). Say it notices an unusual spike in the demand of a particular Lahore to Toronto flight on a particular date, it will properly guess that there is a high demand and will automatically push the price into the top-notch by its own. On the other hand, when the flight is approaching in a few weeks and the plane is already full of empty seats, the algorithm can artificially decrease the price to encourage booking and fill the flight.
Other important factors are superimposed on this principle. The distance until takeoff is an astounding factor; rates will nearly always sky rocket during the last few weeks before a flight to take advantage of last minute business persons or family emergencies. The system is also concentrated on prices of the competitors in an excessive manner. Suppose Emirates decides to hold a sale on the Lahore-Dubai-New York route, there is absolutely no doubt that the algorithms in both Qatar Airways and Etihad will pick that up very quickly and possibly raise their own prices in response. Seasonality and other big events result in peaks of demand that the algorithms are set to take advantage of. Attempting to make a flight booking to Jeddah immediately before the Hajj season or to the city of Dubai at the peak of a shopping extravaganza will expose you to the system in its most violent form. Lastly, the idea of fare buckets i.e. having separate price points to an equivalent economy seat implies that once the final seat occupancy is reached by a bucket of a lower price, the price automatically and immediately goes into the next higher price bucket. The fare that you were viewing an hour earlier may have been the last available one at one of the lower fare categories and another customer just outbid yours. That is the case, and this is the reason why the common tale that one can always clean their browser cookies and everything will be fine is rather bogus. Although cookies can be employed in advertising, these asymmetric, in-real-time changes in price are hugely caused by these cards of power played out across the market, rather than by your personal search profile.
Learning this system does not mean giving up; it means compiling intelligence to come up with a counter-strategy. Your initial visions as a first strategy are to blur the first intelligence excursions out of the direct sighting of the airlines. Although cookies are not the source of the evil, it is still a first-rate move to engage in optimal digital cleanliness. You should clear the browser cache and cookies or open a Private or incognito Browse window after undertaking a new search. This makes sure that you are loading a clean profile of the booking site and not the side that the airline may be running a tailored advertising or user experience analyses. A more sophisticated way is to apply VPN (Virtual Private Network). Running VPN will enable you to hide where you are, and fake like you are located abroad. This may open up different price levels as airlines are operating in a market oriented pricing where they do not offer the same packages in different countries depending on the economic status of a country. It is not an assured saving but a weapon to have in your quiver towards high ticket prices in long haul travel.
What is more important than concealing your identity is concealing you are intent. Rather than going to the sites of all your various airline potential destinations and making multiple checks on availability, rates and fees, do your scouting work using a meta-seek engine such as Google Flights, Skyscanner or Kayak. These tools are commonly referred to as aggregators, and they access data of hundreds of different sources without a concentrated signal of a high intent providing a specific flight to the algorithm of a particular airline. You may compare flights, airfare and the dates anonymously and in general. picture it out like surveying the battlefield where you are at a high position before engaging your troops. Now that you know the exact options of the best combination of airlines and dates, you can visit the web page of the flight and book directly on the airline with minimal digital footprints available during the high-value research stage.
The best defense weapon however is to allow technology to fight technology. Rather than frantically reloading your web browser on a regular basis, you will have to utilize price notifications. Each of the large flight consolidators provides this feature. After you have picked the route you want and a budget of a few days that suit you, make a price alert. Then the servers provided by the aggregator will keep tracking on the price of the flight on your behalf 24/7 sending you an automatic message or an email automatically as soon as the price of the flight reaches your preferred price/ or when it falls below it. It is a strategy that changes everything. It moves you out of an active, frantic search, which is sometimes an indication of even more demand, into the waiting patiently mode. You allow the volatility of the system itself to work in your favour, sit back and wait until there is a short term fall in price and when you receive notification you can step in and execute.
When you finally do get a fare that is so good to be true, or just one that fits your budget like a glove, then you have to be ready to go on the offensive. The most powerful weapon that you have during this stage is the 24-hour rule. Though this is only a legal requirement in the United States most of the major international carriers such as the Gulf based carriers frequented in Pakistan have an equivalent policy where you can cancel your reservation free of charge within 24 hrs of placing your reservation. The rule serves as your last line of defense, against fluctuation in prices and buyer remorse. If you find a good price grab it now. Heck with lock it. Now you are safe because of any further price devaluations. The following 24 hours will then enable you to be one hundred percent sure about your plans, check out once more to see whether there are any other alternatives, or just score a rest. In case the price, due to some reason, decreases even more during such a window, you are released to cancel the original booking with a full refund and to reschedule booking at the lowered price. Inaction is an adversary to a successful fare; the 24-hour rule is just the thing that will enable you to be positive but not hasty.
Finally, the best approach to defeating a system built to extract the target demand is to become the sort of customer who cannot be captured, the versatile traveler. The dynamic pricing algorithms work best when it is targeting the passengers that have to take off on a particular day and must reach a particular airport. You will be able to gracefully avoid these traps through being flexible. There are tricks on Google Flights to view a whole month of prices at once; the change in the day of departure (Sunday to Tuesday) may cost you tens of thousands of rupees; take advantage of the calendar view or the matrix. Take a geographical option. Every citizen of Lahore should keep checking the flights fares of both Sialkot (SKT) and Islamabad (ISB). A two-hour transportation to one of such airports could be minor inconvenience compared with the enormous savings that you may get, because the airlines could be operating various promotions or could have larger capacities in those cities. When you are even more open in your plans, access the Explore map functions of these websites. Perhaps, you will find that a flight to Milan can cost half the price of a flight to Rome, or that a journey to Kuala Lumpur can cost much less than a journey to Singapore and with this you would have had an equally amazing vacation at its cheapest.
It is also prudent that travelers in Pakistan also take into consideration the role of a credible travel agent. Although the world has gone online, good agents continue to get access to Global Distribution Systems (GDS) both of consolidated fares as well as inventory that are not publicly available. In case of complex multi-city trips they can serve as a human cushion, to overcome these complexities and to insure you against the tumultuous online market. To conclude, dynamic pricing is a fixed phenomenon of contemporary travel. It is impossible to turn it off but you can get to know its rhythms, guess its steps and employ some clever mixture of machineries and gambits to protect yourself against its caprices. As an educated and patient traveler who is also flexible enough to take different options, you will become less of a price-taker and a more of a smart manager of the road, who has the knowledge to make sure that you would always be on the front-winning side of the fare scale.
This basic knowledge of dynamic pricing will be your protector. It provides you defensive cover against paranoid outbursts in ambivalent market and gives you a different deal of relaxing and calculated approach to flight search. However, defense is just half-battle. In order to really learn how to buy air fare, you have to shed off the reactive mode in buying air fare and learn how to manipulate systems and bend the very rules that airlines use to create their fares. This entails moving to an advanced level of tools and ideas, which require in-depth understanding in the architecture of flight ticketing to create value where others only see a price label. It is at this point that you become a real travel hacker and not just a savvy consumer.
The least known but most effective in airline pricing is what is known as a married segment. Once you type in a connecting flight, i.e. Lahore to New York, via Dubai, the computer system of the airline does not simply add the cost of flying between Lahore and Dubai with the cost of flying between Dubai and New York. It as an alternative, unites the two segments and sells them as a one-way trip origin-destination (LHE-JFK). In many cases, this married fare will be much less expensive as compared to the cost of two separate flights. Airlines do so to safeguard lucrative long haul flights. They are much willing to sell a seat in Lahore-Dubai flight to a passenger onward to reaching a profitable destination such as New York than a passenger going to Dubai only. This forms an interesting paradox whereby the shorter leg, that of the single leg, may be costlier than the whole journey, longer. This may become frustrating but it can also be exploited. You can break these itineraries down using advanced search tools such as the ITA Matrix software which is the engine behind Google flights. Through its sophisticated routing language, you can define layovers, airline and even individual flight numbers and have a view of the structure of fares. That enables you to find these lower-cost, married-segment fares and even use multi-city booking tools to literally engineer stopovers that the bread-and- butter search engine simply would not provide, literally unmarrying the segments in your favor.
One can expand this concept of special preparation of a journey to its elements to make sense of the complicated network of air alliance and codeshares. When you find a flight that operates under one airline for example Turkish Airlines, it may be sold by its partners under its alliance names as well which may be Air Canada or Lufthansa so under their flight names. This is referred to as codeshare. The absolutely same seat on the absolutely same plane can have a different cost depending upon the code under which you book it because of various agreements and pricing approaches. Once a particular good flight has been located on an aggregator, it is worth taking an extra effort and seeking that flight on the websites of its key alliance partners. You can come to the conclusion that a lower price is offered when you book the flight carried by Turkish Airlines via the Air Canada site. This gives you an extra level of comparison to your search, and this is one responsible action that might reveal to you some considerable savings that others overlook.
To the hardcore adventurous traveler there are more radical approaches where one capitalizes directly on the pricing strategy of a particular route. A good example is the pronouncement of hidden city or skiptagging. As it has been mentioned above, a service between Lahore and Dubai may be very expensive because of high direct demand. There are however other fares where the airline may be tangling with price wars when flying passengers between Lahore and Muscat. In this regard, they may provide a discounted rate between Lahore to Muscat which may stop on the frontier in Dubai (LHE-DXB-MCT). In case this connecting flight is less costly compared to the direct LHE-DXB flight, you might buy the Muscat flight ticket with plans of merely stepping out of the plane in Dubai and getting rid of the last part of the trip. It is a risky move and should always be exercised with a lot of caution. You do not have the ability to check any luggage because this will be tagged on the way to the last destination. One-way ticket booking should be done only in this case since failure to take one of the segments will cost the airline to void the rest of the ticket. Although it is against the conditions of carriage of the airline, it is not risk-free and a strong, but controversial method to counteract high dynamic pricing on commonly used direct routes.
You have to improve your toolkit to implement these sophisticated strategies. Google Flights is amazing when you just have to buy a flight, but flight hackers need more than that, they need the heavy-duty tools. The afore mentioned ITA Matrix is the industry reference. It is not a booking engine, it will not sell you a ticket but it is the greatest flight search engine on earth. It has a command-line interface that permits pseudo-atomic searches. You will be able to give preference to a specific airline and/or impose connections with certain cities, and/or refuse to use this or that type of aero plane, etc. It is the ideal instrument during the research stage by which you can locate the precise itinerary that you desire prior to booking an online travel agent or first with the airline online agency. Those who wish to dig further down the system would take up a sub-service, such as ExpertFlyer. ExpertFlyer enables one to view exact number of seats in each individual fare bucket, on a particular flight. It gives you the precise percentage of how full a flight is and whether the low-cost you got is one of tens, or it is the last of such seats available. You can also use it to place an alert on which you will receive when the award seats become open which is a very necessary tool by the people who earn frequent flyer miles.
Another thing is that such digital strategies become necessary to be grounded in the local market situation in Pakistan. The travel industry, in this case, continues to rely largely on the traditional travel agents, and with a reason. Most established agencies, especially those that deal with big VFR (Visiting Friends and Relatives) market, are able to avail what is referred to as consolidator fares. They are bulk tickets issued by airlines to agencies in a highly discounted manner, and which are further on sold to the general population. These are fares that exist in parallel market, which is not visible to the online search engines and their dynamic pricing technologies. And make such enquiries via a little chat with a few good travel agents in case of popular destinations like the UK, USA or Canada. As a surprise to you, they can match any price you come across online and in some cases with more favorable terms. This element of humanity offers a good protection against this cold, hard, logical processes of the Internet algorithms.
Moreover, as a symbiosis of both intuitive and analytical thought, strong familiarity with local demand patrons is the only way to know when dynamic pricing will be most vicious. The algorithms will be coded to recognize the cultural calendar of Pakistan. They are aware that just before the Eid-ul-Fitr and the Eid-ul-Adha weeks, there will be an inelastic demand of domestic flights and travel to the Gulf and the price will shoot up. They do not need to be told when the Hajj season is as it is almost like the law of gravity where the probability of getting an inexpensive seat to either Jeddah or Madinah is almost zero unless it is booked early in the year. They consider the December wedding season which is a specifically Pakistani thing where the expatriates all over the world come back home and this creates a crazy surge in demand of inbound flights towards the end of the year and outbound in January. The expert flight hacker does not struggle against this current; they schedule schedule around it, opting to fly during those less busy, but nevertheless very enjoyable and less hectic months of October, November or February or March when the algorithms are more at ease, and competitive factions are more readily available. Being aware of these predictable, culturally inflected bangs in demand, you can plan your travel activities in the flat parts of the graph between the unpaired mountains of high prices. And this is your last step evolution a multi layers and subtle process. You do not consider a flight as a single product with a single price anymore. You look at it as a combination of pieces, where a complicated set of rules applies, it gets sold in a variety of platforms, and the human behavior is predictable. It is no longer a case of just evading dynamic pricing but being able to make your way through it with the deftness of a test pilot, finding your way through its confusions so as to make your own path toward an affordable leisure travel world.
