rule of thumb would be the sooner the cheaper, but how many weeks or months in advance?
For my particular flight there are only three companies and it seems flights are cheaper between Tuesdays and Thursdays. However, if you want to book a flight 2 months from now, it’s considerably cheaper.
Have you found the sweet spot?
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Can’t say timing-wise, but I did notice once that the prices were higher when browsing on my phone than on a desktop PC.
I can’t source it, but a while ago i read that 3 weeks was the best time to get the lowest price.
Was there any reason given for that?
depends on many variables so there can never be a simple rule. Airlines want their planes full of paying customers is the real rule. They change prices based on how full each plane is. Sometimes a nearby city can be orth heading to for a much better deal.
And some airports are cheaper than others. My last international flight was 2x the cost to fly out of Houston (IAH) vs out of Austin. Even for the flight that went from Austin to Houston and then to the destination.
People keep saying 3 weeks which is odd to me. When I book a flight that close, I feel like I tend to end up paying more and/or having a very undesirable flight time or number of stops. Several months out is what I try to do for the cheapest flight at the most desirable time/number of stops.
7:32am
Hopper is an app that can show you when the best price is, and can recommend for you when to book your fight or give you alerts when the price drops. 3 weeks as others have recommended is generally an excellent sweet spot but it can also help give you a little more analysis. I highly recommend using it for that.
DO NOT under any circumstances actually book with them. They play elaborate games with the pricing (up to and including offering you coupons good for cash discounts on artificially-price-increased tickets so your discount works out to exactly $0), they add extra stuff to charge you for (including a $5 “tip”) which the boxes for are checked by default. Booking with any third party as opposed to directly with the airline reduces some key benefits you’d otherwise get such as cancelling for free within 24 hours, which has screwed me before. Overall I’m sympathetic to their struggle to run a business which provides a service to people which gets them $0 revenue, and bravely trying to make it work anyway, but the way they do it is solidly customer-hostile.
Their features of watching the price and telling you when to book, last I checked, still work perfectly well and are excellent, though, and free if you never book with them.
International flights from NZ, 3 to 6 months. Local flights about 3 or 4 weeks.
I don’t think it’s going to be possible to give an absolute timeframe here as the answer is probably that it depends.
I lean toward booking early as that generally seems to be a better idea than the alternative.
I book a lot of flights at my employers expense, and the general guideline is to TRY to book two to three weeks in advance. I don’t check the price myself, so I can’t verify if it holds true, but the thinking is that it’s on average cheaper - After the “we can’t be bothered planning this flightuntil we know it’s going to be profitable”-phase, but before the plane is almost full so they can start squeezing the passenger wallets.
I’d say somewhere before boarding.
