Guindalf

/Rant mode on...

Got a fare alert today for our trip home in September. $943 from Atlanta to Heathrow via Toronto on Air Canada. This is $200 less than the price on Wednesday, so I contact my wife to book.

Go back to the site (where I'd actually confirmed a slightly higher price of $992) and it had timed out. Logged back in again and the price was $440 higher for the two of us!!!

That's the equivalent of a week's car hire plus $200 extra spending!

I guess it's back to watching and waiting.

Like someone said to me, buying airfare is like buying a lottery ticket these days.

/Rant mode off.

notonuksoil

I seem to recall somewhere reading that the best time to buy airline tickets online was a Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon. Not sure why???

GeoffM

Use a different browser and/or clear your history. Apparently they have some sort of tracking to ratchet up the prices the more you go back to it - presumably to make you think "buy now!".

GeoffM

I think that should be the the best days of the week to fly, not the best days to buy! Early/midweek is usually quieter so the fares aren't so expensive. Applies more to medium and short haul than long haul, though weekends are often more expensive on long haul too.

civilservant

I booked my move over - August 21st, LHR-ATL. £613 please.

Mummy in the foothills

Dump cookies and start over. See what happens.

Bob

Clear the cache/cookies.

They see you coming back and raise the price hoping you panic buy the higher price instead of seeing it go up.

If you appear like a first time browser, you should get that rate again.

Chrisdc

Never buy flights at the weekend - the prices are more likely to be higher then. Tuesdays to Thursdays are when most fare sales (and hence fare wars) break out. Sometimes a cheaper flight is available for just a matter of hours. Wed/Tue/Sat are usually the cheapest days to travel.

(Source: Spent wayyyy too long surfing frequent flyer websites)

And I recommend Kralev's book:
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/20/139786...travel-secrets

civilservant

Add to that later in the day. If the flight has multiple departures per day the later ones are usually cheaper.

Chrisdc

My favorite search tools are a combination of Kayak and Google Flight Search. The Google tool is amazing - if you click the graph icon it shows you a bar graph of all the flight prices. You can tweak dates/length of stay etc... and see the prices change in real time. It's amazing.

Michael

I used to use the search engine from the msn.com menu (now gone) which searched about 6-8 travel websites including Kayak, Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire.com, Cheaptickets.com, and I think a couple of more and list the best prices from any of the sites. Usually the search produces the same results or one site was better than the others so the application only displayed the flights from one site. I suspect when one site is better than the others, it was updated faster with current information than the others or may be slightly behind the others for updating. I think when a site is searched it scans to the airlines to determine prices and usually once doesn't get better prices than others and is more of a timing issue.

materialcontroller

The best two search engines I use are ITA Matrix (Google) and Skyscanner, but as others have already mentioned, you need to clear your cache/cookies/browser history between searches to avoid having the price inflated artificially.

Bob

Or just browse using the "Incognito" mode or whatever the browser you use calls it, that's in Chrome, FF has something similar.

GeoffM

You mean "Porn mode"?

Bob