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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. You almost always want to avoid booking at the last minute, but booking as early as possible doesn't always get you the cheapest fare.
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.
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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
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.
Price prediction services