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When's the best time to book plane tickets to get cheaper flights?
looking for the best deal on airfare, don’t wait until Tuesday. The idea that cheaper seats can be booked when the clock strikes midnight Monday night is just a myth, according to travel app Hopper. That advice is a relic of a former time, says Hayley Berg, Hopper’s lead economist. Back before airlines had machine-learning revenue models, employees would clock out on Fridays, flights would sell over the weekend, and they’d come in on Monday morning and adjust prices if routes weren’t selling well. That usually took a bit of time, and flights were cheaper to book on Tuesday once those adjustments had gone through the system. But this hasn’t been the case in the past 15 years or so, says Berg.Now there is so much dynamic pricing happening and so many fare classes that the lowest price available on a particular route can be found 16 different times in the course of a week,” she says. Berg adds that airline pricing is volatile and happens automatically on computer-based models.
To determine if there were any kernels of truth in the Tuesday myth, Berg and the Hopper team looked at every data point for two weeks’ worth of flights along a single route: New York’s JFK to Boston Logan, a popular pairing of business travel hubs served by many major airlines. To do so, she pulled every price offered from the beginning of the year up to the departure dates in September. Berg found that the lowest fare was actually offered every day of the week and most frequently on Wednesdays and Thursdays overall, showing no benefit to waiting until Tuesday to book a flight. Busting the Cache-Clearing Myth Another common legend is that airlines and search engines use cookies to track your shopping activity to keep increasing the price you see rather than “allowing” you to find a deal. Clearing your browser history, believers say, can result in more favorable rates. “That’s just not true,” says Berg, who insists that airlines aren’t out to get customers.
If someone does a search for a flight in the morning and it’s more expensive in the evening when they search again, that’s likely because the fare bucket of lower-priced seats had sold out by then, not because it increased just for them as a direct result of multiple searches. So, What Works? So now that the Tuesday myth has been busted once and for all and you can leave your browser cache alone, here are a few things that still do work to lower the cost of those dreadfully expensive airfares—in addition to the old standbys of booking on points and miles and being flexible about a layover.
Source: Times of India