Prices on scheduled flights will be very high last minute. The stories you hear about cheap last minute deals refer to chartered flights by holiday companies chartering planes to take their holidaymakers to Malaga or wherever.
That’s because seats on charters are a perishable commodity – once the plane’s taken off that’s it, all spare seats are dead money.
If you are an airline scheduling flights, you have a fixed cost in that you have to run the scheduled planes, and you have a certain number of passengers wanting to fly. So you massage your prices to even out demand as much as possible.
They have a nominal price for a flight, which you can book 12 months in advance or whatever it is. Then, as the flight date looms, if it’s getting full they raise the price and if it’s looking half empty they lower it. But it’s not in their interests to slash the prices shortly before the flight leaves because then everyone would wait til the last minute. And it’s really important to them to be able to plan ahead, so they really like to know how many people will be on the plane.
The only consistent way to get cheap flights is to book them as soon as possible
It’ll be average if you do that. In my experience the best way is to monitor constantly and see when a few airlines start to put their prices up – then book on the ones that haven’t, before they do!
OP – next week is low (or medium depending on where you are going in Canada I suppose) season, 2 months’ time is July which is obviously high season.