• This topic has 18 replies, 14 voices, and was last updated 7 years ago by gonzy.
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  • Flight pricing variations ….. how does that work then?
  • sharkbait
    Free Member

    Off to Croatia again this August and about 8 weeks ago I’d priced up 5 x return flights to Zadar at £850 + bags unfortunately I couldn’t spare that cash at the time so I left it.

    Three weeks ago I looked again and the price had not surprisingly risen to £1150 + bags. A bit of a shame but only to be expected I guessed ….. still didn’t buy.
    Today I thought I’d better bite the bullet so I looked again – £560 + bags. Needless to say I bought them!

    I thought the prices just went up the closer to the date of the flight, obviously I was wrong 🙂

    [edit: all prices from the same carrier]

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    Empty seats aren’t earning them any money, so even selling them at a loss is better than nothing.

    I suspect the pricing is as much to do with the rate the seats are selling as much as how many are left though, so it’s probably the case that most people book seats ~8weeks out, so prices tend to peak then?

    whatyadoinsucka
    Free Member

    i find ryanair can get cheaer over times, also if you and friends are banging in the dates and cookies are tracking from different locations prices go up.

    cheapest i find tend to be easyjet when they first release or ryanair when no one has booked and they drop the price a few months before to shift..

    if you cant fly across europe for £60 return then your being ripped off..

    my last flight back from zadar manchester was £65 for two with a bag, late july 2014

    gonzy
    Free Member

    when demand increases the airlines put the price up…when the demand decreases they drop the price

    10 years ago i had to catch an emergency flight back from tunisia for me and the wife. we were quoted a price about £700 on the morning of the flight for the both of us. i didnt have my credit card with me…and they wouldnt accept a debit card payment so my brother paid for it. when we got to the airport we got the booking reference and got the tickets and came back. it was only when we got the c/c statement we saw that Air France had bumped the ticket prices up at the last minute to £1700!!
    that explained why they never gave the booking reference right away…they waited 4 hours and decided to charge us the highest price they could at the last minute…the good thing was i managed to claim the cost and the interest on the card back from the our travel insurance
    but in a nutshell thats how it works

    deadkenny
    Free Member

    I’ve found a number of airlines jack up the prices just by people looking. Had that with group trips before with everyone in the group checking prices and they kept shooting up. Stop checking and after a while they come down. One person checking and booking is better.

    jambalaya
    Free Member

    Variable as you can see not necessarily a straight line upwards. Other thing to be careful of is cookies, they can track what flights you looked at before and lets say you priced up same route eith that carrier and didn’t buy last time they have a good idea you are more desperate / more keen to go / think they have best price s room to up a bit

    Very interesting comment from Uber exec, they notice customers are far more likley to accept surge pricing if they are low on battery. They claim not to use this info but it shows what data companies are capable of collecting

    wwaswas
    Full Member

    when demand increases the airlines put the price up…when the demand decreases they drop the price

    It’s a complex model as they also look at historic booking patterns – so say a Friday flight always has a lot of bookings ‘on the day’ they’ll hold seats back from sale until then and then push them out at full price.

    Some airlines check your browser cache – if they find you’ve looked at teh same flights previously they’ll push the price up a bit as they know you’re keen.

    They’ll have a ‘target price’ for a flight – their yield/revenue managers will manage the flow of seats for sale and prices charged around that to maximise the revenue for the flight. They’ll also look at local events at the destination (eg a film or music festival), public holidays, school holidays, historic weather patterns etc. Some are beginning to look at social media to spot which destinations will be popular in the coming weeks and months.

    It’s a complex process…

    MTB-Idle
    Free Member

    supply and demand, it’s not complex it’s basic economics

    wwaswas
    Full Member

    MTB-Idle – it’s about predicting future demand, any fool can look at how many people are looking to book a seat *now* – it’s predicting how many will pay more for the same seat in 3 months time that’s the complex bit.

    sharkbait
    Free Member

    supply and demand, it’s not complex it’s basic economics

    But if that was the case I would have thought that the fewer the seats left on the plane the more they would cost – there’s only one flight from Manchester to Zadar on that day.

    imnotverygood
    Full Member

    Yes but they also calculate how likely they are to sell them. I believe the airlines use algorithms to set the prices based on a variety of factors. It can be tricky to work out what rules they are using as a potential customer, but it is always a good idea to keep them in the dark as much as possible. (private browsing)

    M6TTF
    Free Member

    when booking our family holiday to greece this year, it went up £150 from the time we started looking, to when we booked. We booked and paid at 10pm. By 8.30am the following day it had gone down to the original price. So i phoned them up and complained. didn’t expect to get very far…

    they refunded me the difference.

    wobbliscott
    Free Member

    Not every seat on a plane is priced the same. The first 20 seats or so will be dirt cheap, the next 20 will be a bit more expensive, the next 20 more expensive yet. Once the bookings start to fill the aircraft up to 80% or more then the price goes up as these are the seats that are earning the profit, all the others are priced to stimulate demand, keep passengers off competitor aircraft and cover the costs.

    So you might go not EasyJet on a Monday morning to price up a couple of seats, then go back onto the site on Wednesday to buy them and low and behold they’ve gone up.

    Then there are all sorts of other funny and complicated rules when airlines are in alliances with other airlines.

    jambalaya
    Free Member

    See my post the pricing algorithms are quite sophisticated. @m6tff my guess is they where using cookies to track you coming back to the website, its like playing a fish 🙁 One way round this is to use a different computer to make booking vs searching

    chestercopperpot
    Free Member

    Spend all your free time, work time on the phablet 😉 stalking everything like a hawk, plan years in advance and group buy it’s the future!

    Limited normal prices for the winners and high prices for the 98% losers, snooze you lose, get used to it 😐

    mikewsmith
    Free Member

    Depends entirely on the business model.
    It’s vastly different on charter/holiday destinations to normal flights.
    For instance we don’t get any of the watching/interest related pricing here in Oz from what I see, prices are what they are, Virgin Australia will tell you how when they are down to 6 left in each fair bracket.
    In general as the plane fills the price goes up, on the day fairs are more expensive if it’s full. They don’t climb high on unpopular flights (9:30pm Friday night Hobart to Melb always seems cheap) where as 6am Tuesday sells out fast.

    International, fuel prices do have an impact on long haul but so do sales, though I booked my last Oz/NZ as 2 single tickets (one the week before I flew and the return while I was out there) for $1200 AU, best I could have paid 6 months out was about $800.

    Also oversupply in the market helps the consumer – there was an Oz/LA price war kicked off last year so there was massive over supply and prices were cut, along with the routes via UAE/Dubai to Europe with Etihad/Emirates directly competing.

    tenacious_doug
    Free Member

    There’s no Croatia in there but you can see from our data here that some destinations are at their cheapest 2 or 3 weeks prior to booking. Many websites (not just Skycanner) will allow you to set up price alerts for particular flights so you can get alerted as the price fluctuates. (disclaimer- I work for Skyscanner)

    MTB-Idle
    Free Member

    stand outside a football/any sports ground on match day and you will see the same complex algorithms/supply and demand (delete as appropriate) at work.

    tickets, tickets, anybody got any tickets?

    Midday and the ticket tout has tickets and a high demand, you want a ticket with a face value of £50? that’s a ton to you mate.

    as it gets closer and closer to kick off he varies the prices to ensure that he isn’t left with any.

    3-15pm for a match that kicked off 15 minutes ago? The ticket costs a tenner or thereabouts cos the tout is desperate to make something/anything on the ticket (and yes I know you can’t get on a plane that left 15 minutes ago but the concept is the same).

    gonzy
    Free Member

    funny thing is that when we booked our emergency flight tickets it was through the travel insurance company. they found us the cheapest flight and the most direct one as well (shortest stop over). i remember booking the tickets with them at around 4am Tunisia time and we were told the flight was a 10am later that thursday morning.
    the insurance company assured us that that price £700 was guaranteed by Air France. they told us to get ready and they would call back with the booking reference once Air France confirmed the tickets…
    we got to the airport at 8am and still air france hadnt confirmed the tickets. the boarding gates opened 1 hour later and at around 9.30 they confirmed the tickets to us. all that time they were waiting to bum the price up. the insurance company were as shocked as we were….robbing bastids

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