When to book

  Airfare 101: Find the Lowest Fares

Other than shifting around your travel dates, the other major factor that affects your ticket price is how far ahead of time you purchase your ticket.

Knowing when to buy your airline tickets is tricky. If you buy too early, you may wind up regretting it—the airline might have a fare sale, get involved in a price war, or need to lower prices to fill the plane. If you wait, the airline might sell out all the cheaper seats and you’ll wind up needing to pay more.

There is no surefire way to book at the lowest possible price. But some useful rules of thumb and price prediction services can improve your odds of getting a good ticket price. And with the major US airlines, you may be able to lock in the current fare and re-book if prices drop.

Jump to

• When possible, book early (and re-book if the price drops)
• Rules of thumb
• Setting price alerts
• Price prediction services

When possible, book early (and re-book if the price drops)

Rules of thumb

Due to change fees, you can't easily re-book your tickets to take advantage of price drops on most airlines, basic economy tickets, or flights that originate overseas. And even if there aren't any change fees, it is beneficial to avoid needing to re-book and winding up with a "credit" that needs to be used for a future flight. As a result, it is helpful to book when you are most likely to be getting a good price.

• The best time to buy domestic tickets is usually one to four months before you are going to fly. In most cases, ticket prices tend go up as you get closer to the travel dates, especially when you get within the final three weeks. However, if you book too far out, the airlines haven’t bothered to start pricing tickets aggressively yet. For summer travel, try to book by the middle of May.
• If you're buying for the holidays, earlier is often better. Prices usually start going up much sooner. However, the very best rates are available only about a month before each holiday, when airlines may need to unload unsold inventory. But that’s risky. If flights are already reasonably full, there may not drop prices.
• You are sometimes better purchasing international tickets further ahead-of-time. Historically about three to six months out was a good window for long-haul flights. However, recent competitive turmoil often results in airfare sales closer to the departure date. Prices may wind up going down or they might just keep creeping up. It is a bit of a gamble. On the other hand, for most ultra-cheap airlines, ticket prices will often start out cheap and just keeping going up, the longer you wait.
• Check the Google Flights calendar to see if farther-out flights are still artificially high. If the airline hasn't bothered to competitively price seats in future months, you'll notice that the prices are consistently higher than for closer-in months. In that case, waiting will usually result in lower fares. Since the fares around any specific date may be affected by higher demand, you need to look at the month as a whole. Try to use the filters to eliminate airlines or flights you wouldn't take or focus only on flights you are interested in, so that the calendar reflects the prices for the actual flights you want.
• Contrary to what you might have heard, there isn’t a magical time during the week to buy tickets. Airlines adjust inventory and prices on a continuous basis and there is no time during the week that has consistently lower pricing.  Just shop when it is convenient for you. You might read that average ticket prices are cheaper on the weekends, but that is a statistical by-product of more leisure and less business flights being bought during those times.

You may also be able to take advantage of "Price Prediction Tools" and "Flight Alerts" to help you decide when to buy.

Setting price alerts

Set up a flight alert to decide when to pull the trigger. You'll get a notification whenever the price for your tickets drops. Flight alerts are built into Google Flights. Just look for the option on the flight result page.

Try to use the filters to rule out flights you aren't interested in. Google will only notify you about the cheapest flight available for the search criteria. You want to make sure to be alerted about a lower price on an acceptable flight.

If there are still a few months left before you fly, there is a good chance that the fares will wiggle up and down rather than just going up. Maintaining a flight alert for a week or two may help you purchase at a temporarily lower price.

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Price prediction services

Some travel websites recommend looking at current prices and buying if they seem like good fares. The problem is that, in many situations, you don’t know what a good price for the route looks like.

A better option is probably to take advantage of several services that try to predict whether airfare prices are likely to go up or down. These services have the advantage of being able to leverage historical data for specific routes and specific times of year, rather than relying on sweeping generalities. They benefit from dedicated teams of people trying to crack “the best time to buy” problem.

If you are worried about buying at the right time, our recommendation is to see what these services say. They may not be right 100% of the time, but there is no more accurate alternative.

But airline behavior is constantly changing, so while these tools are probably better than nothing, they aren't always right. Just don’t be too upset, if they recommend that you wait, and the price winds up going up; or they tell you to buy, and the price winds up going down.

• For many flights, Kayak and Momondo automatically show fare prediction information in the upper-left corner of the page. The two websites use the same backend, so you get the same prediction on each of them.


You can see a chart showing the lowest price for the route over the last 90 days. The purchase advice is based on a prediction of what will happen to the price over the next 7 days.

• Momondo also provides some extra information that can help you make decisions about when to purchase your tickets and how to get the price down. When available on your route, simply click on the “Flight Insights” link in the upper-right corner, to bring up a set of information about the route you are shopping for: 


The “days before departure” chart provides a nice visualization about the typical best window to book a flight:


• Hopper is a Smartphone application whose whole purpose is giving you advice about when to fly and when to book your tickets. For some reason, they don’t provide a web-based version that you can use on your computer. iOS App Store. Google Play.

When you enter your flight information into Hopper, it will give you a recommendation for whether you should buy now or wait for better pricing. It also displays a prediction of how much money you are likely to save by waiting (if any), and when prices will start rising.



If you want, you can have Hopper watch the flight and notify you if the price drops.

• Google Flights doesn't make a prediction, but it lets you know if the currently selected date's prices are lower or higher than normal.


Expanding the relative pricing indicator displays historical pricing information for the specific route and date.






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