The Best Time To Buy Airline Tickets

That's right, a useful topic for once. After you've gotten over your shock at the fact that I've posted twice in the same month, consider this: the cheapest day of the week to buy airline tickets is, apparently, Wedneseday. Specifically, Wednesday morning, but no later than 4pm if you've got the time. Clearing out all of your browser's cookies may help out if you're trying to convince nasty sites like orbitz and expedia to pull up those lowest prices that you saw the other day, but timing is, apparently, more important than I've been led to believe by some people (http://abcnews.go.com/Business/BusinessTravel/story?id=4519704&page=1&page=1). Here the author asserts that the Wednesday morning theory is just a myth, perpetuated by idiots on the internet. I despaired, reading that, because I had recently blown my chance at tickets for $261 each. I held off on buying them, thinking I should perhaps look at a few other sites before buying, and when I came back to orbitz to complete the purchase, ticket prices had risen over $100 each. This in just a few hours. I cleared the cookies, and tried all those other tricks that people suggest, but nothing worked.

Then I decided that, since $362 was the going rate (a number of airlines listed the same fare, and none of the searches on orbitz came up with that "only a few tickets left at this price" message), I could afford to hold off over the weekend. I checked a couple times on Saturday and Sunday, but no change. Then Monday, again with no luck. By this time, I figured the Tuesday midnight thing was worth a try, so I woke up at 1am on Wednesday morning, and went online to check fares. They had, in fact, gone down for some legs, but only at times I couldn't work with. So I gave up entirely, thinking I'd be stuck with those tickets for $362.

On Wednesday, just after noon, I thought I'd give it one last, desperate attempt, so I did the orbitz search with all my ideal conditions (dates and times I wanted), and presto!, up popped my $261 fares! I don't know why, nor do I care. All I know is that I spent nearly a week looking at fares for this trip, and over that week the cheapest tickets were unavailable from Friday afternoon through Wednesday morning. Then they were briefly available on Wednesday, only to be unavailable again today, Thursday.

Now, I didn't make this theory up, but I now have personal anecdotal evidence to suggest that it may work sometimes. I don't recommend not buying those cheap tickets when you first see them. But I also don't recommend buying the far more expensive tickets immediately, having given up hope. Check out fares the following Wednesday, after you've cleared your cache and cookies, and see what happens. You might just get lucky, like I did!

I found the tip on some websites, thusly:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/587163/the_only_day_of_the_week_to_buy_cheap.html?cat=16

http://static.seekingalpha.com/article/15113-tip-for-best-purchase-time-of-airline-tickets

http://www.petergreenberg.com/2008/03/06/the-best-day-of-the-week-to-buy-cheap-tickets/