The best time to buy airfares and miles tickets

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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.