Are you a gambler? The reason people turn into maniacs when searching for flights, is they feel as if they’re at a high stakes casino. Is this the best price? If so, do I have time to wait? When will the price change? These are the questions that plague virtually every booking, but we’ve got the answers. Here’s how to know when flight prices are going to change, almost every time.
If you’re looking for easy, you have three main options: Kayak, Hopper and Google Flights. But easy won’t get you complete answers, only guesses. Each of these services offer price prediction tools, which give you advice on whether to book now, or wait.
Hopper – Hopper will tell you whether you should buy or wait. If you choose to wait, it will allow you to “watch” the trip with the press of a button. The Hopper app is one of the best tools to save on flights and very easy to use.
Kayak – Kayak will offer their advice on whether prices are going to go up or down. They quite literally call it “Our advice”. Much like Hopper, you can set up free alerts, if advice is to wait rather than buy. They have a very high accuracy with their predictions.
Google Flights – Google Flights predictions appear only when moves are bound to happen. The site tells you if prices are likely to rise in hours, or days. Google Flights makes it easy to track prices for free and you can even see visual graphs of when prices change over time. The sooner you start tracking, the more you learn.
Every deal has rules. Where you can go, when you can go – and when the deal expires. You can use free tools on the internet to look up when a deal is set to expire, giving you fair warning in advance. You can also use paid tools to look up how many seats are left at the special deal prices.
ITA Matrix – Search for any flight on ITA Matrix. Find the deal you’re interested in, click on the deal and then scroll down. Press “rules”. This will bring up the code for the deal, which will be letters and numbers looking like “Z910X7”. If you read through the (lengthy) rules, you’ll find the expiration date for any deal. Deals can be pulled early, but this will give you a very accurate look of when the deal will officially expire, knowing for certain when to book.
ExpertFlyer – If you’ve found a deal, know it’s not going to expire, but are wondering if there are seats available on a flight – you can look that up too. You can look up availability for any type of fare to see how many seats are left. So for example if there was a great premium economy deal known as a “T” fare (from the rules above), you could see how many “T” seats were left on the flight you’d like to take. You can even set alerts if they drop below a certain number.
If a deal strikes you as being wildly low, beyond anything you’ve ever seen – chances are it won’t be around long enough to wait. We have a section on the site dedicated to these sorts of deals. Any deal can be pulled at any time, so if it feels “too good to be true”, book the deal immediately, especially if there’s a 24 hour free cancellation policy – which many tickets now offer.
What does God have to do with frequent flyer points? What’s an incredibly stupid name for a blog!
Thanks for the clicks and
Yet you’re here.
It was a very good post
Flight price forecasting is one of the hardest things to do.