It’s fairly safe to say that the airline industry ranks fairly low when it comes to love and respect from consumers. The seats are shrinking, complaints have only dropped because customers have stopped caring, and generally airlines are widely seen as awful. Ready to hate them even more? The only way to get cheap airfare is to plan waaaaaaay in advance…like a quarter of a year in advance.
CheapAir.com, a site with an obvious horse in this race, conducted an analysis of airline fares over 2013 to see when you had to book to get the cheapest possible fare. It turns out, you’d better be planning far, far in advance:
According to the data, sometime around 225 days out (7 1/2 months), on average, fares started to drop and by 104 days out (3 1/2 months) they had fallen to within $10 of their low point. From there they continued to drop, slowly but steadily, until reaching a low 54 days before departure. After 54 days, fares started to climb again, remaining within $10 of that low until 29 days out. Then, the increase began to accelerate and once you were within 14 days the fares really shot up dramatically.
True, it’s not a surprise that the “last-minute cheap fare” is largely a myth. Still, this entire system is designed to screw people who unexpectedly need an airline ticket, or can’t book until a month out. Basically, if you can’t plan ahead for, say, Grandpa’s funeral or that unexpected job interview, you’re going to be taken for a ride.
This would be less galling if we the taxpayers weren’t, for example, eating billions of dollars a year in fines so airlines don’t have to comply with EU environmental regulations, an act that came about a decade after Bush handed the airlines $15 billion of taxpayer money to stay in business. True, America is hardly the only country that basically keeps their airlines on life support, and it’s also true air travel is, at best, a cutthroat business with microscopic margins.
So, essentially, it’s likely that if you have to book a flight less than a month in advance, a company you have paid to keep alive will be screwing you. Enjoy knowing that on your way to the airport.