When is the most cost-effective time to book a flight?

In past times airlines pre-allocated a number of seats to particular prices and then forecasted their income from that.

By Steve Hall, director, Mint Business Travel

They quickly realised that they should make this more dynamic so they then employed people to watch booking volumes and change prices accordingly.

This was relatively easy when bookings were done by calling a contact centre to book but when they came into the digital age with online booking platforms then the volumes increased and it became impossible to do this manually.

They responded by programming this in software.

So now when the software sees booking volumes increasing it increases the price and when they decrease the software makes the decision whether to decrease the price or not. It’s now very much a dynamic pricing model.

So when is the best time to book your flights to get the best deal?

Airlines publish their pricing 11 months in advance so they will publish their prices for August 2019 in September this year.

The prices will be at the top of the scale so anyone who wants to book early they will pay the top price.

Over the months the price will gradually drift down until at about four months the price will bottom out.

Depending on how many people are booking at this stage will determine how long the prices stay low before as the departure time comes closer the prices will rise.

So the best time to book your flights is around four months before departure. Of course there are going to be differences such as charter aircraft from Thomas Cook and Tui will sell off their spare seats cheap very close to departure date just because they have seats left whereas Scheduled airlines will try to auction off their business and first class seats at the last minute to see if they can get additional income.