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Reader Maya
recently asked when the best time was to book her airfare. Now, I’m no
fare-hacking travel expert, so I’ll preface it by saying that the below is my
educated opinion, but I have had a lot of experience booking airfare and miles
tickets. Hopefully my experience can lend a hand to those looking for tickets.
Airfares
First, a bit
about how airfares work. Every airline puts up every spot available for sale on
every flight it flies. These spots, or “seats” as the airlines call them
(misleading because they are not tied to a specific place to sit on the
airplane) are not all the same price. They’re split into “fare classes”. The
major airlines, except Southwest and Jetblue, have something like 20+ fare
classes. One fare class might be a deeply discounted fare class. The airline
might have five of these available on a specific flight. These are the cheapest
fares, and they usually sell first. While they’re the cheapest fares, they also
probably come with major restrictions, such as being non-refundable. The next
fare class up would be more expensive but possibly would come with fewer
restrictions.
An airline
has a set number of tickets available for sale in each of its fare classes,
from the cheapest restricted fares to the most expensive, most flexible fares. Once
the airline sells out of the cheapest fare class, the next cheapest fare class
becomes the cheapest. So the lowest price for a seat goes up. This keeps
happening until the flight is sold out.
Now if airlines
only set their fare prices once, this game would be easy. You would just buy
your ticket the moment a flight became available for purchase. But airlines can
change the number of seats they make available in a given fare class as often
as they please. Sometimes they’ll make more cheap seats available if they’re
not selling enough of them. Sometimes they’ll cut the number of them if they’re
selling better than expected.
Waiting out
lower airfares is a very hard game to play. Unfortunately, you have far less
information than airlines do about how well seats are selling, and therefore
when prices are likely to go up or down. Obviously the airlines make it this
way on purpose; the less information you have, the more likely you are to pay
more money than you should.
I recommend buying now. For domestic tickets, if
you’re more than three months away, you might want to wait for a fare sale. Most
of my bookings are done with less than three months’ notice, so I pretty much
never attempt to “wait out” a good fare. I just find the best one I can. International
fares are another ballgame. I recommend always buying now with those.
The waiting
game is a far less lucrative one than the searching game. Kayak is not always
your best friend. In fact, on international fares, it is pretty much guaranteed
that a fare expert can find a better fare than Kayak or another fare booking
site like Travelocity can. It is often much cheaper to purchase two separate tickets
on two separate airlines to your international destination (and sometimes
domestic too) than to buy one ticket with all your flights.
The reason
for this is that airlines set fares for specific routes, not specific flights.
If I’m flying from DCA to ATL, I will probably pay more than someone who is
flying DCA-ATL-MIA. This is because the person flying one-stop is buying a fare
that pretty much every airline can sell. All of the major airlines in the U.S.
can sell a one-stop ticket between Washington and Miami. Not all airlines can
sell a nonstop ticket from Washington to Atlanta. The less competition, the
higher the fares. Even though we’re flying the exact same first flight, we’re
not paying the same amount. Counterintuitively, I’m paying more to fly fewer
flights.
Miles
Miles are
another story. The way miles seats work for almost all of the major airlines
(again except Southwest and JetBlue) is similar to the way fares are set, with
one major exception. Instead of setting an available number of seats on a
specific route, miles seats are made available by flight. For this reason, unlike with fares, it’s often easier (and
cheaper) to use your miles to fly nonstop instead of one-stop because it is
easier to find miles seats on one flight instead of two.
For
instance, I’m going to Saint Louis in a couple months. The direct fares are
$180 one-way vs. $164 for one-stop. But using my miles I can see pretty much
every nonstop is available to me, and at the exact same price as the one-stops.
This illustrates the point that it is easier to find a seat on one flight (the
nonstop) available for miles than it is to find a seat on two flights
(one-stop) available for miles.
The nice
thing about miles is, if you don’t find the flights you want, you can wait.
Most airlines don’t charge you any more miles to book 30 days out vs 330. If
they’ve made a seat available at a specific miles tier, it will continue to
remain available as long as nobody books it. And it will become available once
again if someone cancels their ticket. Just watch out: United, US Airways, and
American charge $75 to book less than 21 days in advance.
Mileage
experts also have good ways of finding seats that you might not otherwise see.
Certain mileage search engines reveal more routing options than others do, such
as additional airline partners you might not necessarily see on your own
airline’s website.
