Today I was advised not to buy flight tickets on a weekend, but wait to until mid-week as they’d be cheaper?
Not cheaper because of the day of actual departure, because of the day of purchase.
Colleague swore that travel for the same dates by plane would be cheaper if I bought tickets on a Wednesday instead of a Friday/Saturday.
Is that bullshit or is that real? And why?
In: Other
Yes, it’s real.
Ticket prices fluctuate all the time. Airlines/travel companies/sport venues will increase prices when they know people are more likely to be looking to buy. Demand goes up, prices go up. It’s a standard industry practice.
Also, they use other mechanisms to manipulate prices. If you go to an airline site to look up prices, leave, then come back 4 hours later, the price will likely have gone up. That’s because the airline knows you are looking to buy and don’t want to drop the price. Always clear out the cookies in your computer and don’t log into an account until you are buying. Oh, and don’t use an Apple device (or take efforts to obfuscate the device). They know Apple user’s in general are willing to pay more. You may even want to use a VPN to shift your apparent location to a low cost of living region. If you live somewhere with higher costs they will jack prices to match.
It *can* affect the price, that doesn’t mean it *definitely will.*
Airlines often use a model called ‘dynamic pricing’, which really just means changable pricing. Instead of flights having a fixed price, they will try to get the best price they can.
That means depending on who you are, if you’re logged in or out, whether you browse on mobile or desktop, the number of seats still unsold, how long it is until the flight, whether or not you keep coming back to look or are a new visitor, and various other data points, are used to give you a personalised price.
So the day you choose to book *on,* definitely *could* have an impact, but it absolutely isn’t as simple as ‘it will definitely be cheaper to book on a Wednesday’. It could be, or it may be the same, or more expensive. There are too many factors to consider and we just don’t know how each airline operates their dynamic pricing model.
Real, but not 100% a sure thing. Ticket pricing is designed to maximize revenue for the company. They discount early, then raise prices to make sure they don’t run out of tickets. But sometimes they raise prices too much and demand falls. That means they end up with a bunch of extra tickets a few days before the flight. They want a full flight, so they discount at the last minute to encourage someone who is cost-conscious to change their flight plans to fill the seat. As a cost-conscious person, I frequently take advantage of this, and I’d estimate it happens about 50% of the time for all but the most desirable flights (e.g. direct flights, under-served routes, and holiday flights). It’s way more than 50% likely, if you’re flexible about your dates/times – like 95% likely, in fact.
As been explained above, they use dynamic pricing, often also called revenue management. So there are a lot of back end reasons for price changes based on things as basic as historical information based on demand, events that are happening that would draw more or less people to a destination, and others much more hi-tech based on if you’ve been searching that particular fight a lot.
Essentially, since individual flights and hotel stays cannot be sold after the date passes they try to maximize either the price, occupancy, and ideally both. So they have various pricing models to “sell to the right guest, at the right price”. They have various different prices at different times to maximize revenue and the number of tickets/rooms sold.
Essentially they’re trying to get the most money they can from each guest from the various market segments.
That’s why the common logic of booking earlier is still a decent rule of thumb. Basically rewarding people who book early with a lower price, and as it drives up demand you can charge subsequent guests a higher price (though with all the data companies have, it’s not as solid a tactic as it used to be).
As a side note, one of my least favorite terms in the hotel industry (I’m sure others do too) is call it the ‘Best Available Rate’. I mean, it is, but it is for the company as it’s the price set with no discounts or other perks. In hotels we call it ‘rack rate’ internally.
Using a not totally honest example of revenue management is literally the big marketing point for travel companies where they show two guests paying a different price for the same room on the same day. It has nothing to do with the travel company negotiating a better price. You could have two guests who booked through Expedia paying different prices. They don’t set the price for the room (the revenue managers do that) they are just a useful channel to help increase occupancy, even though they take a decent commission for selling the room on your behalf.
I never understood how this works, but it’s real. I gave up and just started tracking flights through google, if it’s enough in advance. At a certain point, I found it to be a waste of time to track them myself. Since it never works the “same way” every time
Your colleague is moron and it is a bullshit.
I worked for couple of legacy airlines and for high name VIP travel agents.
Day of the week has no influence on the price of the tickets. Cookies and other nonsense as well.
I’ll try to explain how it works behind the scene. Please bear in mind that these systems were introduced in 1970s and since that went only through graphic changes, so it definitely doesn’t track your cookies, timezone or whatever, just to increase price by a little bit.
Everyone knows that flights are having different travel compartments (economy, preme, busns, first) but each compartment is divided into so called RBDs (revenue booking designators). It’s a group of seats with individual pricing, always selling from cheapest in chosen compartment.
Let’s say there is 12RBDs for economy, 3 for premium economy, 6 for business and 2 for first.
The lowest economy price can be available for let’s say 10 seats, once these 10 seats sold out, the second lowest RBD is going to show price slightly higher (on short haul flight let’s say 15€, the higher RBD, the bigger difference) and it’s technically not possible to sell ticket from lower RBD, without manual entry from the airline agent, hence the price can’t go lower.
There is only one time it can happen that tickets will decrease in price and that’s change of equipment. If they change B737-800 to A350-900, there’s going to be much more seats available, which means they’ll temporary unlock lower RBDs.
In short no, they are not playing cat and mouse game with you. They don’t care, if you buy ticket for 100 or 150, because someone else will buy it 2 days before departure for 1200 (instead of 900 if you didn’t buy the one for 100). Airlines will not generate massive revenue from economy class ticket bought 3 months before travel on Wednesday night, or Saturday night, or Monday midday. It’s not how the business works. It’s not how their retro system works.
Possible but unlikely/rare.
Most airlines use static pricing — they group their seats into fare “buckets”, each with different restrictions/conditions (aka an RBD), and put a price on it, and basically sells from cheapest to most expensive. Each bucket is assigned a letter, and so at most, you get 26 prices. Using up an RBD for “tickets sold on a weekday” would be a terribly bad way to optimize revenue in this model.
Some airlines have started adopting a simple type of “dynamic pricing” called “continuous pricing” where they can adjust the prices in those buckets as conditions change, making those “buckets” more blurry, and giving the appearance of more price points.
Lastly, context-specific pricing is the dream of most airlines — to be able to price based on a whole bunch of factors, in real-time, based on the shopper. It gets rid of fare buckets and requires a LOT of modernization to the reservation stack to set up.
IMO, I’d be surprised if there were 20 airlines world wide that even having some basic form of this implemented.
Latest Answers