[Bath_VIP]

Yesterday, I booked a premium economy return from London to Austin with Virgin for my wife and I to visit family for Thanksgiving.

At £1,000 each, this is extremely good value because in the 2 weeks beforehand when I was searching, I was struggling to find anything under £1500 (my usual budget).

But I can’t help but think I was lucky to get that fare. At the weekend, I was searching on Kayak and saw Virgin offering the Austin flight for £1300. I left it for a couple of days and then went to the Virgin site only to find it was now £2000 return.

Annoyed I went back to Kayak to search again and saw the same flight being offered for £950 return! Nearly all were bucket and spade travel agents I’d never heard or trusted but there was one link showing £1000 on the Virgin site.

This time, I clicked through from the Kayak link and lo and behold, I’m on the Virgin site booking the flight for £1000! More than that, a flexible premium return was available for £1200 return.

So a right saga which in the end worked out very well for me but how is it possible for the same flight to have 3 very different prices within 24 hours?

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AndrewinHK

[AndrewinHK]

I’ve had similar experiences, dynamic pricing is ever more present. I find google flights particularly useful in fare searching, and you can set up alerts if ticket prices change.

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Jacob, christ, stevescoots, cwoodward

[YorkshireTraveller]

I have found quite often with Kayak that when you click through to the cheapest fares on the dodgy travel agents you have never heard of, they suddenly “expire” if you try and go further down the booking process, even sometimes right at the end page. Also the more you search from the same device/internet address for a particualr flight, the more likely it is the price will go up. This definitiely happened to me on BA years ago.

[Montysaurus]

Last year every week from 355 days out until the week before I priced a business BA domestic flight that I would typically use. At 355 days the price was horrendous. Over the next few weeks it dropped considerably but then week by week it would go up and down by a maximum of about £50-£60. Occasionally it varied from the week before by a pound or two. By the week before the price had gone up substantially but not to the 355 day price! The cheapest price was around 16 weeks before the flight.
I’ve no idea how their algorithms work but the idea that the earlier you book the cheaper your seat does not apply on BA.

[MartynSinclair]

I think airfares have always been a lottery. I make the same routing to Asia several times a year over the past 20 years and have never received the same ticket twice.

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AnthonyDunn, cwoodward

[AnthonyDunn]

I’m assuming that certain basic rules still apply: for better deals go either low season or during shoulder periods outside price-gouging school holidays. Try to avoid Friday afternoon/evenings or Sunday evening/Monday mornings. For long haul in J/F, check out the continental dog leg routine or simply commence your itinerary in AMS, OSL, ARN or wherever you find decent deals. Otherwise, I have noticed that return itineraries to Asia-Pac are now about two and one-half to three times what I paid for them back in the mid-2010s in nominal terms. There has been some inflation of late. Clearly airlines are opportunistically (and to an extent understandably) rebuilding their balance sheets after both C-19 and the energy price shocks resulting from Putin’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine. Mind you, they are not the only ones. Has anyone else just looked at what is being quoted for their motor insurance renewal?

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pdwtrip

[Author]

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