18 ms·

Scarcity, Inventory, and Inequity: A Deep Dive into Airline Fare Buckets

130 points by bdev12345 1y ago

JSR_FDED 1y ago
Great overview. It would seem that the old rule of thumb of booking long in advance to get a cheaper ticket isn’t really relevant anymore?
- itake 1y ago
  I didn’t have that take. My understanding is the only time you’re guaranteed to have low-cost ticket availability is when the flight is initially allowing booking. Later, as more tickets are sold they have more information about the flight and thus they may make adjustments to the ticket pricing. Either opening up more low-cost tickets that were sold at the beginning of the flight or reducing the number of low-cost tickets to meet high demand.
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago
    It's worth pointing out that the initial fares will be comparatively cheap fare classes, but they may not be the cheapest prices depending on what happens with demand closer to the flight date. You can often get better fares by waiting if you're flexible.
- CBLT 1y ago
  I worked for an airline fare pricing startup. The key to getting a lower fare is to not be flying for business. Since airlines can't outright ask you if you're flying business, they'll instead offer tradeoffs that a business flier won't make. So plan in advance, but be flexible in trading off day-of-week or time-of-day.
  - 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
    What are some tells of a business flight? The only one that comes to my mind: I am doing whatever is possible to fly out on Monday or Friday rather than give up my weekend for the company. I have always booked corporate flights through an internal portal system. I assumed that this identified me as a belonging to X company, so my options would be priced by some standing agreement with the airline. Is this not true?
    - CBLT 1y ago
      I'm not the best person to answer, but it's really any price<->X tradeoff, whether that's being able to choose at the last minute, going to your preferred airport in the destination city, or even those other bullshit upcharges airlines have.
    - dboreham 1y ago
      Crappy routing. Business travelers aren't going to fly from Salt Lake to London via LAX and EWR for example. Airlines will offer wacky routes at lower prices that obviously cost them more in terms of fuel and airframe time, because they know people who value their time (and aren't paying themselves) will not accept them. This is particularly prevalent with award travel. You can try to game their system though -- find a crazy route that you actually want to fly (12h stopover in some city you want to visit), but which the airline's algorithm sees as unappealing.
    - scheme271 1y ago
      I think a huge tell tends to be flying in on monday and flying out friday. A lot of cheaper tickets require you to spend saturday night at the destination to weed out business travel. Other people mentioned multi-stop routing and odd timing (e.g. biz travel usually won't involve leaving at 3pm on a tuestday). Some of this is obscured by day time flights being more desirable (e.g. no one wants to get up at 3am to make a 6am flight). The other huge tell is last minute purchases. A lot of business travel ends up being decided on a week or two before the flight so last minute flights tend to cost more even though in some sense the value of the seat declines as the flight approaches. E.g. an empty seat is worth $0 and a pure loss to the airline so they should want to sell those seats before the flight even if they get minimal revenue. For biz travelers, clients often pay for travel expenses so inflated pricing for that flight tomorrow is worth it.
- acrooks 1y ago
  I anecdotally find flight prices tend to follow a cosine wave. Starting high, dipping a couple months before, and shooting back up. You can see these sorts of trends on Google Flights which will show historical pricing for your search query. And it can be helpful if you’re very flexible. If my dates are very strict then I’ll tend to book further in advance, whereas if I have a lot of wiggle room then I’ll wait it out.
  - zavec 1y ago
    > it can be helpful if you’re very flexible My biggest takeaway from this article is that I should go and see which of these systems have APIs I can query, because if I have a lot of flexibility I think it'd be easier to script it than clicking through a whole bunch of different options on google flights trying to find what the cheapest fare is. I want to be able to write a script that says "here are my dealbreakers, here are the range of dates I can leave on, here's the range for coming back, go and find the best deal" I guess that's the type of service people typically build and charge for.
- scheme271 1y ago
  The real answer is that it depends. With fare management, a small allocation of cheap tickets might be made available when the flight is listed (e.g. 350 days in advance) however more cheap tickets may be added or removed over time depending on how sales go when compared to airline projections.
username135 1y ago
Was not expecting to read the whole thing. Very interesting.
- Majromax 1y ago
  Was it really interesting? To me, it has certain hallmarks of an AI-generated article. In particular, it introduces the same concept several times, in different sections. For example, fare classes, nested booking, and the SABRE system each get two different introductions. The content seems legitimate, but I felt like my time was being wasted through at minimum a lack of editing.
  - itake 1y ago
    Yeah, there was a lot of repetitive information which made me lose interest
  - stronglikedan 1y ago
    Should have passed it through AI for a summary!
  - andy99 1y ago
    > To me, it has certain hallmarks of an AI-generated article. I wondered that too. I don't want to offend anyone, and have no idea how it was written, and I already know most of this stuff so am not the audience. But respectfully I feel like it had a lot of words for a fairly shallow overview, which feels AI-ish, plus the "delve" at the beginning got my radar up. This is sort of what I expect from Manus or one of those ersatz "research" LLMs. Anyway, it's got lots of upvotes, hopefully people are finding it useful. (Edit to add: it's actually content marketing for some kind of [questionable, subscribe to access some hidden refund thing] travel company so I don't feel bad criticizing anymore)
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      What's funny about it is that even though it follows the instructions your writing instructor gave you to always write a conclusion for your articles (and that probably are the instructions in the prompt for an LLM) it does not follow the instructions that I got from everybody I ever did content marketing with: to always end an article with a "call to action", which is why this article was up for hours before anybody noticed the site it was on.
therealbilliam 1y ago
recently, i bought a full economy fare on an international flight. When i went to check in, they offered a really cheap upgrade to first. it was a no brainer and i was excited since the flight was gonna be ~6 hours. i had a rude awakening when i got to the airport. This "first class" ticket was actually more like a premium economy ticket. I didn't get access to the first class check in line, no access to the lounge, no priority boarding, and the seats themselves had no extra bonus other than being in the front of the plane and slightly wider. it was at that moment i realized there was no beating airlines and good deals aren't really that good unless you got the money to spend.
- quotemstr 1y ago
  What airline?
  - dboreham 1y ago
    Has to be Iceland Air.
    - AlotOfReading 1y ago
      I remember Iceland Air being a reasonably nice flag carrier when I was a kid. The pivot into low cost after the financial crisis and competition from WOW air had a lot of negative ramifications.
    - matwood 1y ago
      My guess also as they are one of the few that has intl first/biz class that isn't lay flat.
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  You can beat airlines. Mistake fares and fares sold below cost definitely exist, though they're a lot less common than they used to be as pricing models have improved. You're more likely to see them if you pay attention to off-season and new routes that aren't popular. Severe weather predictions and similar events can also create large price drops. I once got a $20 flight to Hawaii by simply buying just before a typhoon that didn't hit.
miki123211 1y ago
This article got me into the fascinating rabbit hole of airline websites for travel agencies. It turns out most airlines have one, and while some content seems to be gated behind contracts and login walls, a lot of it is just out there. Compared to the consumer-focused sites, there's a lot less marketing fluff and a lot more industry lingo (which Google and/or a frontier model can usually help you with). Most of the content is just weird aviation trivia; those sites won't let you book a flight, but you will learn a lot of minutiae about how an Amdeus PNR looks like, how to indicate that a passenger is carrying human ashes in Sabre, or what order an agent needs to make bookings in. Some interesting things I found, in no particular order: https://www.lufthansaexperts.com/shared/files/lufthansa/public/mcms/folder_102/folder_3212/folder_4631/file_136168.pdf https://www.lufthansaexperts.com/shared/files/lufthansa/publ... https://www.lufthansaexperts.com/shared/files/lufthansa/public/mcms/folder_6672/file_153087.pdf https://www.lufthansaexperts.com/shared/files/lufthansa/publ... https://www.qatarairways.com/tradeportal/en/bookingnticketing.html https://www.qatarairways.com/tradeportal/en/bookingnticketin... https://support.travelport.com/webhelp/Smartpoint1P/Content/Air/Ticketing/Revalidating_ETRs.htm https://support.travelport.com/webhelp/Smartpoint1P/Content/... https://pro.delta.com/content/agency/us/en/site-map.html https://pro.delta.com/content/agency/us/en/site-map.html https://pro.delta.com/content/agency/us/en/policy-library/distribution-and-revenue-recovery/validation-to-sell-delta-plated-tickets.html https://pro.delta.com/content/agency/us/en/policy-library/di... https://air.flyingway.com/books/amadeus/Amadeus_Guide.pdf https://air.flyingway.com/books/amadeus/Amadeus_Guide.pdf
notpushkin 1y ago
Very interesting article... however I’ve looked into the service (JetBack) and it seems extremely suspicious. It’s the first time I’m hearing about airlines refunding fare drops, so I’ve asked a friend who’s an airline points geek and he says it’s bullshit. Eh?
- zavec 1y ago
  Yeah I'm skeptical. > It's standard practice for airlines to offer refunds or credits when prices drop after you book Why would they do that? Unless there's some regulation forcing them to I can't imagine a company would willingly give up money like that, no matter how many hoops they make you jump through.
  - notpushkin 1y ago
    I’ve looked into it a bit more and looks like they’re US only – might have something to do with the fact that US tickets are mostly refundable by law. So yeah, it could work in this particular case, but still not sure it’s a good deal. They say they’re getting you some “credits”, while you could just rebook for the new price and refund the old one and get the difference in cash instead.
daft_pink 1y ago
Wonder how this will look after Delta Airlines AI based price discrimination based on how much AI thinks a customer is willing to pay.
GiorgioG 1y ago
I've gotten to the point where if it's less than a 10ish hour drive, I will drive. Air travel has just turned to complete shit.

130 points by bdev12345 1y ago

Great overview. It would seem that the old rule of thumb of booking long in advance to get a cheaper ticket isn’t really relevant anymore?

itake 1y ago
I didn’t have that take. My understanding is the only time you’re guaranteed to have low-cost ticket availability is when the flight is initially allowing booking. Later, as more tickets are sold they have more information about the flight and thus they may make adjustments to the ticket pricing. Either opening up more low-cost tickets that were sold at the beginning of the flight or reducing the number of low-cost tickets to meet high demand.
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  It's worth pointing out that the initial fares will be comparatively cheap fare classes, but they may not be the cheapest prices depending on what happens with demand closer to the flight date. You can often get better fares by waiting if you're flexible.
CBLT 1y ago
I worked for an airline fare pricing startup. The key to getting a lower fare is to not be flying for business. Since airlines can't outright ask you if you're flying business, they'll instead offer tradeoffs that a business flier won't make. So plan in advance, but be flexible in trading off day-of-week or time-of-day.
- 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
  What are some tells of a business flight? The only one that comes to my mind: I am doing whatever is possible to fly out on Monday or Friday rather than give up my weekend for the company. I have always booked corporate flights through an internal portal system. I assumed that this identified me as a belonging to X company, so my options would be priced by some standing agreement with the airline. Is this not true?
  - CBLT 1y ago
    I'm not the best person to answer, but it's really any price<->X tradeoff, whether that's being able to choose at the last minute, going to your preferred airport in the destination city, or even those other bullshit upcharges airlines have.
  - dboreham 1y ago
    Crappy routing. Business travelers aren't going to fly from Salt Lake to London via LAX and EWR for example. Airlines will offer wacky routes at lower prices that obviously cost them more in terms of fuel and airframe time, because they know people who value their time (and aren't paying themselves) will not accept them. This is particularly prevalent with award travel. You can try to game their system though -- find a crazy route that you actually want to fly (12h stopover in some city you want to visit), but which the airline's algorithm sees as unappealing.
  - scheme271 1y ago
    I think a huge tell tends to be flying in on monday and flying out friday. A lot of cheaper tickets require you to spend saturday night at the destination to weed out business travel. Other people mentioned multi-stop routing and odd timing (e.g. biz travel usually won't involve leaving at 3pm on a tuestday). Some of this is obscured by day time flights being more desirable (e.g. no one wants to get up at 3am to make a 6am flight). The other huge tell is last minute purchases. A lot of business travel ends up being decided on a week or two before the flight so last minute flights tend to cost more even though in some sense the value of the seat declines as the flight approaches. E.g. an empty seat is worth $0 and a pure loss to the airline so they should want to sell those seats before the flight even if they get minimal revenue. For biz travelers, clients often pay for travel expenses so inflated pricing for that flight tomorrow is worth it.
acrooks 1y ago
I anecdotally find flight prices tend to follow a cosine wave. Starting high, dipping a couple months before, and shooting back up. You can see these sorts of trends on Google Flights which will show historical pricing for your search query. And it can be helpful if you’re very flexible. If my dates are very strict then I’ll tend to book further in advance, whereas if I have a lot of wiggle room then I’ll wait it out.
- zavec 1y ago
  > it can be helpful if you’re very flexible My biggest takeaway from this article is that I should go and see which of these systems have APIs I can query, because if I have a lot of flexibility I think it'd be easier to script it than clicking through a whole bunch of different options on google flights trying to find what the cheapest fare is. I want to be able to write a script that says "here are my dealbreakers, here are the range of dates I can leave on, here's the range for coming back, go and find the best deal" I guess that's the type of service people typically build and charge for.
scheme271 1y ago
The real answer is that it depends. With fare management, a small allocation of cheap tickets might be made available when the flight is listed (e.g. 350 days in advance) however more cheap tickets may be added or removed over time depending on how sales go when compared to airline projections.

username135 1y ago

Was not expecting to read the whole thing. Very interesting.

Majromax 1y ago
Was it really interesting? To me, it has certain hallmarks of an AI-generated article. In particular, it introduces the same concept several times, in different sections. For example, fare classes, nested booking, and the SABRE system each get two different introductions. The content seems legitimate, but I felt like my time was being wasted through at minimum a lack of editing.
- itake 1y ago
  Yeah, there was a lot of repetitive information which made me lose interest
- stronglikedan 1y ago
  Should have passed it through AI for a summary!
- andy99 1y ago
  > To me, it has certain hallmarks of an AI-generated article. I wondered that too. I don't want to offend anyone, and have no idea how it was written, and I already know most of this stuff so am not the audience. But respectfully I feel like it had a lot of words for a fairly shallow overview, which feels AI-ish, plus the "delve" at the beginning got my radar up. This is sort of what I expect from Manus or one of those ersatz "research" LLMs. Anyway, it's got lots of upvotes, hopefully people are finding it useful. (Edit to add: it's actually content marketing for some kind of [questionable, subscribe to access some hidden refund thing] travel company so I don't feel bad criticizing anymore)
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    What's funny about it is that even though it follows the instructions your writing instructor gave you to always write a conclusion for your articles (and that probably are the instructions in the prompt for an LLM) it does not follow the instructions that I got from everybody I ever did content marketing with: to always end an article with a "call to action", which is why this article was up for hours before anybody noticed the site it was on.

therealbilliam 1y ago

recently, i bought a full economy fare on an international flight. When i went to check in, they offered a really cheap upgrade to first. it was a no brainer and i was excited since the flight was gonna be ~6 hours. i had a rude awakening when i got to the airport. This "first class" ticket was actually more like a premium economy ticket. I didn't get access to the first class check in line, no access to the lounge, no priority boarding, and the seats themselves had no extra bonus other than being in the front of the plane and slightly wider. it was at that moment i realized there was no beating airlines and good deals aren't really that good unless you got the money to spend.

quotemstr 1y ago
What airline?
- dboreham 1y ago
  Has to be Iceland Air.
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago
    I remember Iceland Air being a reasonably nice flag carrier when I was a kid. The pivot into low cost after the financial crisis and competition from WOW air had a lot of negative ramifications.
  - matwood 1y ago
    My guess also as they are one of the few that has intl first/biz class that isn't lay flat.
AlotOfReading 1y ago
You can beat airlines. Mistake fares and fares sold below cost definitely exist, though they're a lot less common than they used to be as pricing models have improved. You're more likely to see them if you pay attention to off-season and new routes that aren't popular. Severe weather predictions and similar events can also create large price drops. I once got a $20 flight to Hawaii by simply buying just before a typhoon that didn't hit.

miki123211 1y ago

This article got me into the fascinating rabbit hole of airline websites for travel agencies. It turns out most airlines have one, and while some content seems to be gated behind contracts and login walls, a lot of it is just out there. Compared to the consumer-focused sites, there's a lot less marketing fluff and a lot more industry lingo (which Google and/or a frontier model can usually help you with). Most of the content is just weird aviation trivia; those sites won't let you book a flight, but you will learn a lot of minutiae about how an Amdeus PNR looks like, how to indicate that a passenger is carrying human ashes in Sabre, or what order an agent needs to make bookings in. Some interesting things I found, in no particular order: https://www.lufthansaexperts.com/shared/files/lufthansa/public/mcms/folder_102/folder_3212/folder_4631/file_136168.pdf https://www.lufthansaexperts.com/shared/files/lufthansa/publ... https://www.lufthansaexperts.com/shared/files/lufthansa/public/mcms/folder_6672/file_153087.pdf https://www.lufthansaexperts.com/shared/files/lufthansa/publ... https://www.qatarairways.com/tradeportal/en/bookingnticketing.html https://www.qatarairways.com/tradeportal/en/bookingnticketin... https://support.travelport.com/webhelp/Smartpoint1P/Content/Air/Ticketing/Revalidating_ETRs.htm https://support.travelport.com/webhelp/Smartpoint1P/Content/... https://pro.delta.com/content/agency/us/en/site-map.html https://pro.delta.com/content/agency/us/en/site-map.html https://pro.delta.com/content/agency/us/en/policy-library/distribution-and-revenue-recovery/validation-to-sell-delta-plated-tickets.html https://pro.delta.com/content/agency/us/en/policy-library/di... https://air.flyingway.com/books/amadeus/Amadeus_Guide.pdf https://air.flyingway.com/books/amadeus/Amadeus_Guide.pdf

notpushkin 1y ago

Very interesting article... however I’ve looked into the service (JetBack) and it seems extremely suspicious. It’s the first time I’m hearing about airlines refunding fare drops, so I’ve asked a friend who’s an airline points geek and he says it’s bullshit. Eh?

zavec 1y ago
Yeah I'm skeptical. > It's standard practice for airlines to offer refunds or credits when prices drop after you book Why would they do that? Unless there's some regulation forcing them to I can't imagine a company would willingly give up money like that, no matter how many hoops they make you jump through.
- notpushkin 1y ago
  I’ve looked into it a bit more and looks like they’re US only – might have something to do with the fact that US tickets are mostly refundable by law. So yeah, it could work in this particular case, but still not sure it’s a good deal. They say they’re getting you some “credits”, while you could just rebook for the new price and refund the old one and get the difference in cash instead.

daft_pink 1y ago

Wonder how this will look after Delta Airlines AI based price discrimination based on how much AI thinks a customer is willing to pay.

GiorgioG 1y ago

I've gotten to the point where if it's less than a 10ish hour drive, I will drive. Air travel has just turned to complete shit.