Ticket tips and tricks
The Airline Reporting Corporation’s annual trend report: what travellers need to know
Some people wait for the arrival of the Beaujolais Nouveau or the start of baseball season. But for this travel writer, the day the Airline Reporting Corporation’s trend report comes out is an early Christmas. That’s because the report, prepared in tandem with Expedia for the past four years, is a bouquet of helpful airfare tips based on granitesolid data.
The Airline Reporting Corporation (ARC), you see, has the largest database of ticketing information on the planet. It serves as a middleman between travel agencies large and small, and some 400 airlines. That means it handles some $500 billion in air tickets yearly. Once a year, it analyzes the patterns those transactions create, and, interestingly, the patterns shift from year to year.
Last year, for example, ARC found that, statistically, those who booked their tickets on Saturdays and Sundays paid the least amount of money for them.
This year, apparently, to get the best prices you have to wait until Sunday. Why? The guess is that corporate travel agents don’t work on weekends, and especially don’t work on Sundays, so the airlines drop their prices then to try and entice more cost-conscious leisure travelers.
When is the most expensive day of the week to book fares? That would be Fridays (this year).
In addition, how far in advance one books makes a difference. Airfares — domestic and international, economy and premium — are cheaper if bought 30 days out.
The vast majority continue to drop in price the farther out one books, though in some regions, fares can spike upward at certain times in the cycle, like after 30 days of being available for sale.
Some other nuggets:
■ Thursday and Friday flights yield the lowest average price per ticket on international economy tickets. For domestic flights, the results varied too widely to name a cheapest flight day.
■ Fridays and Saturdays are the days to depart if you want to snag international premium seats (i.e., business or firstclass) for less. The cost difference, weekend to weekday, ranged from 9 to 43 percent.
■ February is the cheapest month for international flights originating in either the United States or Canada. The most expensive month is December for the U.S. market, and July for Canada.
■ September is the leastexpensive month for domestic flights in the United States; May is the month to travel within Canada. The months to avoid, sticker-shock-wise? June in the United States, and August in Canada.
And what were the average savings when one booked or flew at the right time? The figures varied widely, but none was less than 15 per cent, so taking the advice of this gigantic number-crunching company could well pay off.
Pauline Frommer is the Editorial Director for the Frommer Travel Guides and Frommers.com. She co-hosts the radio program “The Travel Show,” with her father, Arthur Frommer and is the author of the best-selling “Frommer’s Easyguide to New York City.”