[masraum]

Originally Posted by Schumi

As someone who likes to plan travel erratically I would like to see an average airline ticket cost versus booking date graph..

It is obviously very expensive to book way in advance, at some point gets less expensive, but then close to the flight date gets tremendously expensive.

THE CHEAP TIME IS BETWEEN 3 AND 6 WEEKS OUT.


I know that I have monitored ticket prices to visit my mother, and right about 6 weeks out, the ticket prices will drop. And when I say drop, I'm talking about ticket prices 7 or 8 weeks out being between $400 and $600 and at 5 or 6 weeks the same ticket is $225. I can also tell that if you're buying 1 week out you may pay $600 and up for the same ticket. Less than 3 weeks and it will be somewhere in between cheap and expensive, maybe $330-400.

I have also had this happen 3 times (so I don't do it any more). I was shopping for tickets to go someplace, with a flexible itinerary, maybe a vacation that I can shift 3 days forward or backwards. So I would search for the tickets over the weekend and then check out the same tickets during the week. I may have done 5 to 10 different searches for the same tickets over the course of an hour or two. Suddenly, bam, I decide, "I'll buy the cheap one" except that what was costing $250 2 minutes ago is now $400. I was amazed that they had an algorithm that monitored queries and would push tickets up.

Here are some other related threads.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/off-topic-discussions/485625-timing-airline-ticket-purchase-best-price-advice-please.html

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/off-topic-discussions/274578-airline-tickets-someone-want-explain-me.html