Sometimes, knowing when the best time to do something is really all about knowing when the worst time is, and avoiding it like the plague! When it comes to purchasing plane tickets, they are almost always expensive, so if you know when the most expensive time is to purchase them, you have a much better chance of scoring a better price. In the world of airline tickets, the most expensive times to purchase are generally close to the time of the flight, and on weekends.
Best Time to Buy Online
Most people today are purchasing plane tickets online, yet a lot of the timing on the best time to book a flight is based upon patterns that were established before the internet even existed. In earlier days, people used to book airline tickets through their travel agents, who were closed on the weekends. Because of this, airlines would advertise their fare sales in the newspaper and on the radio early in the weeks. Airline executives would come back into their offices on Monday, decide what the fares were going to be, and advertise it in Tuesday or Wednesday’s papers so that people would call their agents and purchase tickets before the week was out. Although that is no longer the dynamic and most people just purchase their tickets for themselves, the pattern seems to have remained. The lowest fares can be found on Monday evenings or Tuesday mornings, and then the prices tend to go up as the week progresses. By Thursday or Friday the fares are higher, and the rates are highest on the weekends. Interestingly, the weekends are also the time when the least tickets are sold.
Best Time to Buy Tickets Before a Trip
The rule of thumb on the best time to book a flight is to do it as early as possible. There are a couple of tricks that many people swear by, including looking for flights on Tuesday afternoons, booking directly through an airline’s website rather than on the telephone or via a ticket aggregator like Expedia or Travelocity, and even booking single tickets separately from multiple tickets in order to get the lowest possible prices.
The worst prices are going to be all that is available the closer you get to your date of travel. This is because airlines assume that tickets purchased closer to the date are for business travel, and people don’t care about the fares that their companies have to pay the way that they do about things that are coming out of their own pockets; additionally, business travel is often unavoidable, where personal travel is more flexible and people can shop around more.
International
Buying airline tickets to travel internationally often has its own complications, particularly if you are flying around the holidays. If you want to take advantage of the cheapest days to fly, try to book your travel dates for midweek, as the weekends are the most expensive flight days.
In terms of purchasing the tickets themselves, try to purchase on Tuesdays, as that is when the fares are lowest, but don’t buy before four months before your travel dates, as it is not until then that the airlines start checking to see what the competition is doing for a given date.
Once four months rolls around, book your tickets as soon as possible, because rates only go up the closer you get to the date of travel, and there are a limited number of seats available.