For finding cheap flights, the day you book is also important
Regular readers of this column might be sick of me mentioning that traveling on Tuesdays and Wednesdays (and sometimes Saturdays) is the best way to get cheap airfare, but a new study displays that the actual day of the week you book (not just the day you fly) matters greatly as well.
The Associated Press actually had 2 reporters spend nearly 3 months researching airfares and strategies to get the best deals. They interviewed as many people on each flight as possible and discovered that for some flights there were as many as 12 different fares paid by people in different seats.
The whole plane lands at the same time
This situation would be easier to understand if we were talking about premium seats or flights at better times of the day, but in this case they surveyed people all with similar coach seats on the exact same flight. The findings are very interesting, though many are things many of us have known for a long time, thanks partly to sites like airfare watchdog.
For example, the report says that fares tend to be cheapest between 4 and 6 weeks before departure. We’ve heard (and written about) 2 to 8 weeks before departure, so this only narrows things a bit more. The reason for that one is that people who book several months in advance usually have specific dates in mind and they want to lock them in, while people who book only a week or two in advance will feel that their choices are shrinking so they’ll have to pay more as well.
The best days of the week to buy plane tickets
The interesting part of the report is about which day you buy a plane ticket. Evidently, most fare sales by major airlines start on Tuesdays, and they tend to end by Thursdays. You may not realize that other airlines are often compelled to match prices of the sale airlines, so everyone else’s price is likely to head down as well.
For this reason it appears to be best to shop for plane tickets between Tuesday afternoon and Thursday evening. There will be exceptions to this rule, of course, but it’s interesting to use this as a main strategy. If you are flying from, say, San Francisco to Toronto, you might find that fares dip to US$299 on Tuesday, but by Friday they are back to US$380.
The weekends are evidently the worst times to shop, since there are few fare sales going on, and probably people searching on weekends are more inelastic (they’ll buy a ticket regardless of price). Personally I’m going to start searching for ticket prices on Mondays and then look for changes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. If I see a fare that has dipped down by the middle of the week it surely means it’s time to buy right then.