Can we talk about how booking a flight 3 months out used to be the trick?

I booked a round trip to Denver last week for a conference and paid $380. Looked at the same flight on the same day 3 months earlier and it was $280. Thought I was being smart waiting for a deal. Guess the algorithm figured out I needed to go. What happened to the old 6 week sweet spot?

3 comments

3 Comments

faith2716d ago

Wait are we sure that 6 week thing was ever actually a real rule or just something people made up? Ive been tracking prices for a trip to Austin for months and the cheapest I saw was 60 days out at $320. It jumped to $410 at 45 days and then dropped again to $350 like a week before departure. Airlines change their whole system every year with those dynamic pricing models so I think the old rules dont work anymore.

jamesc7916d ago

See I gotta push back a little on that. I've been flying for over 20 years and that 6 week window still works pretty well for me, just not in the same way it used to. What you saw with Austin makes total sense though because certain routes are just weird like that. I fly out of Chicago mostly and for my standard trips to Denver and Vegas the sweet spot is still around 6 to 7 weeks out, but if I'm going somewhere like Nashville or Portland the prices are all over the place. The key isn't to wait for one magic day, you gotta watch the trend and buy when it dips below your comfort zone. Your Austin example actually proves my point - you saw it at $320 at 60 days and then it came down close to that again right before, so the window is more like a range now instead of one fixed date.

carr.luna16d ago

Huh, okay so @faith27 that's a solid point actually. I've been wondering the same thing about those "rules" because airlines are definitely gaming us harder now than they used to. But let me ask you something about your Austin trip - did you notice if the price drops lined up with specific days of the week or times of day when you checked? Because I swear I've seen some weird patterns where prices dip on Tuesday afternoons then spike again by Wednesday morning, which makes me wonder if the whole "book on a Tuesday" thing still holds or if that's another old rule that's dead.