Research shows why hunting for the cheapest plane ticket is a waste of time
phys.org
phys.org
The people hunting for the cheapest plane ticket don't restrict themselves to one airline only. There might be little variation in fare from day to day for one airline but across airlines there can be significant difference, specially on international routes.
Last week, I booked a roundtrip flight from Japan to India for next month. The price variation between airlines was 9x for same dates/week while there was little variation less than 10% for different days within a week for same airline.
If one knows that he is flying internationally six months out, is there a good strategy?
If I'm choosing a vacation goal I might stay flexible and wait for any offer that's attractive and let the flight choose my destination.
- Bad, buggy order flows
- High fees for changing flights if you make a mistake
- Impossibility of getting a cash refund
- Lack of legroom
- Frequent delays
- Understaffed check-in desks
- Lack of human customer service
- Bad safety record
It is the same as coupons at grocery stores.
The article just confirms what people do:
> The same can happen with plane tickets: when people visit a website like Google flights or Kayak and search for a ticket, a wide range of different flights from the same airline appear. Travelers tend to make selections that balance convenience and price. The price of one flight might push people to select a slightly less convenient but cheaper flight.
The article then describes certain aspects of how airlines set prices, but it never substantiates the headline claim about comparing fares being a waste of time.
The catch is the travel agencies that do this are aiming for the absolute lowest total cost to stay competitive, and don't factor in overhead for trivial things like "customer support" in the price. And if something goes wrong, the airline will insist that you have to talk to your travel agency for help. So they can be a great deal as long as you're lucky enough to never have to call them due to irrops.)
As a general rule, this is why most frequent fliers insist that you should always book directly via the airline's website, even if it sometimes costs more.
This is my moment.
I can’t read the actual paper, so possibly it’s just badly reported here, but the summary article has deeply wrong statements.
> “airlines also don't incorporate the prices of their competitors in their automated price-setting”
So wrong.
Spend some time on Flyertalk’s “Premium Fare Deals” forum[1]. One of the most common things you’ll find is that as soon as one airline or alliance starts discounting a route, others will often follow.
Maybe OneWorld (British Airways, American etc.) have a sale on transcontinental flights from the West Coast to London. You can bet that Star Alliance (United and Lufthansa etc.) are gonna follow suit, and there’s a good chance SkyTeam (Delta and KLM etc.) will soon too.
Happens all the time, and if this study didn’t find it, it’s a bad study making flawed conclusions.
Happens in shorter domestic routes too. Southwest just did a huge basically 50% off sale, and you can see tons of other carriers lowering their prices to match on routes where they compete.
> “But for now, the hunt for an undiscovered trick to find lower fares is largely futile. “
The only true part of that sentence is “undiscovered”.
Airline pricing is incredibly, incredibly variable. I once flew business class from Europe to the West Coast for $280, on a ticket that’s typically $3,000. (This was likely an “error fare”, the result of someone accidentally leaving out a zero, but it happened and I flew it).
That’s the top of my “good deals on flights” trophy case, but whether you’re paying cash or using miles, there are so, so many different ways to save money on tickets.
I once thought I’d done everything possible to find a great deal, and tried out one of those ticketing services that promises to save you money for a fee. They moved the ticketing location from the US to Canada, and due to the vagaries of currencies and airline pricing, managed to save me another 12% on the (already quite discounted) flight.
I expect this study’s conclusion is so deeply flawed because they looked at too limited of a data set. Perhaps they’re correct and, for example, the price of an economy class flight between LAX and JFK on a Thursday evening doesn’t change much. But in aggregate, the cost of getting from point a to point b on an airplane, especially over transcontinental distances is incredibly variable, and deal hunting can be incredibly rewarding.