For Travel Hackers: What’s The Best Day To Buy Airfare?
“Damn! Airfare is so stinkin’ expensive!”… is what you might say to yourself if you’ve ever bought airline tickets for a vacation without doing your research.
Flying has never been particularly cheap (unless you subscribe to the religion of miles and points hacking), and airlines the world over spend a lot of money and do a lot of research to figure out how to get you to pay the most for your ticket.
Luckily, though, there’s a whole industry of airline watchdogs, as well, fighting back. They gather millions of pieces of data to help you learn exactly the best times to buy your tickets. I you’re not booking with miles, this is information you’ll want to know—on many domestic flights, the difference between the best and the worst day to buy can be as much as $900!
Read on to learn the rules of smart airfare booking, a pre-caution about which day of the week to buy, and some other smart, travel hacking tips for buying cash tickets.
The Best Time To Buy Domestic Tickets
I’m beginning to do a lot more travel within the states, and I don’t always like to spend my precious miles on lower-cost flights when I can get more value from them overseas.
So, I was happy to learn a number of airfare analytics companies recently reported the very best time to buy a domestic ticket is 57 days from departure—about two months out. If you can plan your trip just 8 weeks in advance, you can get the best deal on your ticket.
You shouldn’t get too caught up on the number 57, though. Why? Because that number represents an average that considers thousands of different flights at different times. If you fly hundreds of times each year to many destinations, that number will serve you well but, failing that, it’s not so important. What really matters to you is your specific destination on the dates that you need to go there.
To get the best deal in that case, you should watch your fares about 3.5 months out and definitely buy before you pass the 30 day mark. This is the window that, statistically speaking, your flight will be within $10 of it’s best price. When, exactly, that best price will come is anyone’s guess—but if you’re watching (most major search engines allow you to set fare alerts), you should be able to book at or very close to the best possible price.
The Best Time To Buy International Tickets
The latest data shows the best time to book an international ticket is somewhere between ten and three months out. The bad news is that’s an enormous window! The good news is that such a large window means prices really don’t change too much within it. The official “low spot” is 171 days out but, again, that’s an aggregate of all possible flights, and not terribly useful information for your specific trip.
Book somewhere between 90 and 300 days out and if you don’t get the best possible fare, it’ll be pretty close.
What’s The Best Day Of The Week To Buy?
When I was younger—and before I started collecting frequent flyer miles for free travel—I would watch airfare pricing like a hawk. If there was a trip I wanted to take, I knew exactly how much the ticket would cost at any given time because I’d check it every day!
What I learned was that Tuesday was the golden day. If I wanted to fly, I’d wait for the price to drop on a Tuesday—it usually did—and then book.
So, I was surprised when I read in The Wall Street Journal recently that, actually, Saturday and Sunday are the cheapest days to book. Based on millions of data points, people pay less for airfare on the weekends than they do on weekdays. So, their advice was to book on the weekend, of course.
But I think they’re wrong, and Tuesday is still the best. The reason is because they’ve misread the data. They looked at all flights and saw that cheaper tickets were booked on the weekends. They forgot, though, to consider who does (and more importantly) who does not book flights on those days—business travelers. People flying for business do not tend to shop for airfare on the weekends and business travelers, as a whole, pay a lot more for their tickets than leisure travelers.
Saturday and Sunday appear cheaper because the highest paying customers simply aren’t shopping—it pulls down the average. If you look at pricing for specific routes instead of as a whole, though, I think you’ll find mid-week is still a better time to buy. And, according to the data, it seems Tuesday is still the most popular day for fares to go on sale.
What About Waiting For Last Minute Deals?
The allure of getting a great deal by waiting until the very last minute to fill a seat that would otherwise go unsold has always been strong, and it’s often bolstered by a story here or there of someone getting an incredibly low fare by taking such a risk. But the data in the graph above shows the reality pretty clearly: Waiting will cost you. A lot.
During the last days and weeks before a plane leaves, the price of a ticket can change dramatically—by hundreds of dollars each day, even. You might see a ticket for $600 one day, and it’s $500 the next. You book immediately thinking you got a great deal, but what you don’t notice is both of those prices are well above what you’d have paid had you stuck to the low-fare windows.
There are lots of things you can get a great deal on by waiting until the last minute. Airfare is clearly not one of them.
The Bottom Line
Getting the best deal on your airfare can seem like a tricky proposition that requires all your time and energy to do right but, really, there are only a few rules you need to stick to, and a few extra tips to remember to get it right:
- Domestic tickets should be booked between 30 and 100 days out.
- International tickets should be booked between 90 and 300 days out.
- Tuesday is (probably) still the best day to buy your fare.
- Red eye and over-night flights are almost always less expensive than mid-day flights.
- More connections often equals lower prices (but not always, so double check!)
- The more flexible you are with your travel dates, the easier it is to book a cheap fare.
You can’t always book with miles. And sometimes you don’t want to. When that’s the case, follow these simple rules and you find the best possible deals.
P.S. Here’s one more tip. Even non-refundable tickets are refundable, by law, for up to 24 hours. If you book and see a lower price within that period, the airline has to refund you and let you book at the new price.
Sources:
The Best Day to Buy Airline Tickets
When should you buy your airline ticket? Here’s what our data has to say
Strategies to get a refund on a non-refundable airfare