You’re the consumer, if you’re smart then you realize it’s your job to get the lowest price possible on airfare to get to where you’re going. The airlines are in business to make money, that means it’s their goal to get you to pay as much as possible. Getting the best airfare involves so many factors that’s it’s almost impossible to win at the game (unless you just decide to stay at home).
A month or so ago I’ve been planning a group trip with a bunch of my friends the weekend before Christmas. When everyone was okay with the itinerary I started looking for the cheapest tickets out of the three NYC airports (EWR, LGA and JFK). Generally it’s easy to get the cheapest airfare on any given day but the flight was 2 months away. The tricky part is trying to time when you’ll be able to book the lowest fare between now and the flight.
The first tool I used was SideStep which aggregrates airfare from numerous sources and gives me a pretty good picture at what the lowest fares are at the time. The cheapest flight I found was $325.
The second tool I use is Bing’s travel search engine which acquired FareCast. There you can learn what the chances are if the lowest fares are going higher or lower based on past historical data and other factors. Since the greater NYC airports are in their prediction markets the search gave me an indiction to wait since fares have a good chance of dropping within the next 7 days.
The third tool I use is the website of the airline who was offering the lowest fare. In this case it was Continental. I plugged in the itinerary which I found earlier on SideStep and before you even get deep into the booking process you can see the seat map which told me that over 60% of the seats on the planes were not even assigned! Although people are ticketed but not assigned seats this told me that a good portion of the seats on the plane was unsold. Therefore I could afford to wait.
Over the next couple days the lowest airfares I could find actually rose and continued to rise! Over the course of a week it went from $325 to $380. A lot of my friends started saying that they should just book already before prices rise even higher. I told them to hold off since I firmly believe that those prices are way too high. Over the next couple days prices fluctuated up and down but nowhere near what I was comfortable paying.
Then finally it went down to $269 after two weeks and I booked the flight thinking it was a short term drop so I better lock in the price. It continued to stay at that price for 4-5 more days and then dropped another $15! I’m not gonna cry over $15 since I have the peace of mind that my itinerary is booked already. I’m glad I paid 30% less than originally planned. In the end all it took was patience whichs mean you should plans your vacations and trips as far in advance as possible to watch airfares (but not book them) and it helps if you are flexible with the dates a little bit (I wasn’t).
