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Comment by JSR_FDED | Hacker News Reader

Great overview.

It would seem that the old rule of thumb of booking long in advance to get a cheaper ticket isn’t really relevant anymore?

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I anecdotally find flight prices tend to follow a cosine wave. Starting high, dipping a couple months before, and shooting back up. You can see these sorts of trends on Google Flights which will show historical pricing for your search query.

And it can be helpful if you’re very flexible. If my dates are very strict then I’ll tend to book further in advance, whereas if I have a lot of wiggle room then I’ll wait it out.

> it can be helpful if you’re very flexible

My biggest takeaway from this article is that I should go and see which of these systems have APIs I can query, because if I have a lot of flexibility I think it'd be easier to script it than clicking through a whole bunch of different options on google flights trying to find what the cheapest fare is. I want to be able to write a script that says "here are my dealbreakers, here are the range of dates I can leave on, here's the range for coming back, go and find the best deal"

I guess that's the type of service people typically build and charge for.

I didn’t have that take. My understanding is the only time you’re guaranteed to have low-cost ticket availability is when the flight is initially allowing booking.

Later, as more tickets are sold they have more information about the flight and thus they may make adjustments to the ticket pricing. Either opening up more low-cost tickets that were sold at the beginning of the flight or reducing the number of low-cost tickets to meet high demand.

It's worth pointing out that the initial fares will be comparatively cheap fare classes, but they may not be the cheapest prices depending on what happens with demand closer to the flight date. You can often get better fares by waiting if you're flexible.

I worked for an airline fare pricing startup. The key to getting a lower fare is to not be flying for business.

Since airlines can't outright ask you if you're flying business, they'll instead offer tradeoffs that a business flier won't make. So plan in advance, but be flexible in trading off day-of-week or time-of-day.

What are some tells of a business flight? The only one that comes to my mind: I am doing whatever is possible to fly out on Monday or Friday rather than give up my weekend for the company.

I have always booked corporate flights through an internal portal system. I assumed that this identified me as a belonging to X company, so my options would be priced by some standing agreement with the airline. Is this not true?

I think a huge tell tends to be flying in on monday and flying out friday. A lot of cheaper tickets require you to spend saturday night at the destination to weed out business travel. Other people mentioned multi-stop routing and odd timing (e.g. biz travel usually won't involve leaving at 3pm on a tuestday). Some of this is obscured by day time flights being more desirable (e.g. no one wants to get up at 3am to make a 6am flight).

The other huge tell is last minute purchases. A lot of business travel ends up being decided on a week or two before the flight so last minute flights tend to cost more even though in some sense the value of the seat declines as the flight approaches. E.g. an empty seat is worth $0 and a pure loss to the airline so they should want to sell those seats before the flight even if they get minimal revenue. For biz travelers, clients often pay for travel expenses so inflated pricing for that flight tomorrow is worth it.

Crappy routing. Business travelers aren't going to fly from Salt Lake to London via LAX and EWR for example. Airlines will offer wacky routes at lower prices that obviously cost them more in terms of fuel and airframe time, because they know people who value their time (and aren't paying themselves) will not accept them. This is particularly prevalent with award travel. You can try to game their system though -- find a crazy route that you actually want to fly (12h stopover in some city you want to visit), but which the airline's algorithm sees as unappealing.

I'm not the best person to answer, but it's really any price<->X tradeoff, whether that's being able to choose at the last minute, going to your preferred airport in the destination city, or even those other bullshit upcharges airlines have.

The real answer is that it depends. With fare management, a small allocation of cheap tickets might be made available when the flight is listed (e.g. 350 days in advance) however more cheap tickets may be added or removed over time depending on how sales go when compared to airline projections.

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