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?
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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.
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