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
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.
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