When to buy airline tickets: Getting the cheapest flights

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2011/02/when_buy_airline_tickets

by mblakele • 15 years ago

29 9 15 years ago

calbear81• 15 years ago

Don't forget the Farecast technology at Bing Travel which predicts whether you should buy or wait for your airline ticket which has a fairly high accuracy rate.

eljaco• 15 years ago

The articles don't seem to give a specific answer (aside from a time and day of the week,) but sounds like the consensus is 3 p.m. EST on Tuesday, your best bet being 8 weeks before traveling.

From personal experience, once you hit the 3 week mark, you're pretty much SOL until the last few days, since most seats have been sold at that point. If there are still plenty of seats (orbitz sometimes shows you the seating chart,) you'll have better results than on fuller flights.

corin_• 15 years ago

Actually it did give a pretty specific answer, which was indeed 3pm EST on Tuesday 8 weeks before.

ojbyrne• 15 years ago

Admittedly anecdontal, but I've always found 4 weeks before to be the optimal point.

blacksmythe• 15 years ago

Except for holiday travel, where the rule seems to be the earlier, the better.

knowledgesale• 15 years ago

On a related note, is there a sensible implementation for cheap flights hunting with flexible dates?

Guys from Hipmunk have been promising it for about a year by now. And yet I still find myself forced to try different dates manually.

rdouble• 15 years ago

I've been using http://adioso.com

joshwa• 15 years ago

http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ has a great feature (among MANY others) that will show you a calendar of a month's worth of fares.

mshafrir• 15 years ago

They also have a fairly powerful route language - http://matrix1.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/help/advanced-to...

When to buy airline tickets: Getting the cheapest flights

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