Tips for Lower Fares
Some tips for finding the lowest fares:
The first tip to save on airfares is to get them ahead of time. Airlines offer the lowest fares as a standard practice when you purchase your ticket at least 21 days or more in advance. After 21 days prices may increase up to 50%.
If your dates are flexible you have a better chance of getting a better deal. Airfares are more often lower if you fly on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. You can save sometimes hundreds of dollars simply by adjusting your travel dates, often by just a day or two.
Sometimes scoring a cheaper fare is as simple as signing up for the airline's newsletter, which often includes special deals. American Airlines sometimes offers discounts of 10-25% when you sign up for its DealFinder feature and enter a promo code on its site.
Although they're much less common than in past years, some of the best fares show up on Saturday mornings. This is probably because airlines can only change fares once a day (around 5 PM) on Saturday and Sunday. So, if you're an airline fare analyst, and you're trying to sneak one over on your competition, you'll do it with the last fare change on Friday night, which appears in Travelocity, Orbitz, etc. around 1 or 2 AM on Saturday morning. Your competition can't match your sale fares until the 5 PM Saturday update (those fares appear in Travelocity around 8 or 9 PM that night).
Because airfares fluctuate like the stock market, you need to check them every day, sometimes two or three times a day, if you're serious about saving money. Airlines can update domestic fares three times a day during the week, and once on Saturday and Sunday (international fares change less frequently). And another little tip: be sure to clear the "cookies" on your internet browser (on Explorer you do this under the "tools" menu and "internet options" sub menu). Why do this? If a fare changes between two separate searches done over time on the same route, some fare search engines may return the results you viewed earlier rather than the new, lower results.
Usually the least expensive fares apply to roundtrip tickets, and it pays to ask questions, like if you can save money by changing your travel dates or if a "companion fare" is available.
