Every travel agent has a different story to tell when you ask him about how to get the cheapest air tickets. “A couple of months before travel, or on the 22nd of a certain month, or maybe exactly at 10 PM on a Friday night, is the perfect time to book your ticket,” is what you usually hear. To be frank, these are all myths and unproven theories. Things like a marriage proposal, a job change or a baby might have the perfect time, but not necessarily airfares!
We always wonder - is 3k the right price for travelling from Delhi to Mumbai, or is a round trip worth 10k or more? Is a certain airline cheaper than all others? if yes, then why? Well, have you ever wondered why this is so hard? While booking in advance, travelling during off-season, avoiding weekends, and many other techniques do help, timing exactly how far in advance isn’t helpful at all. This comes out as an obvious observation from this revelation. All your strategies go to waste because of this one little thing.
Tim Lyon, a managing director of revenue management at American Airlines has given out a little piece of advice, which proves all these theories wrong! The cheapest fares are on days when fewer people are travelling is what is derived from his interview with Bloomberg.
The reason behind this, he said, is that the primary factor considered in determining flight prices is the demand to fly a particular route. Airline schedules are set according to longer-term projections, made months in advance, keeping in mind the vacation season, holiday calendar, and the general trends existing in the market. However ticket prices can be changed multiple times in a day, which allows an airline to act in response to whatever level of demand is coming upon a particular route or flight, which is, by reducing prices to fill those empty seats.
Lyon tells Bloomberg, “In the end, the seats are going to fly. The airline’s strategy is to “put the most revenue on the plane, regardless of [the] cost” of operating a route.”
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