How to buy a plane ticket at the best price?
Any reasonably experienced internet user knows options like
- buying in advance
- looking for flights with layovers
- monitoring charter flights
- searching in the browser's incognito mode
- using airline mileage cards, various bonuses, and promo codes
Complete list of hacks Tinkoff Journal, I won't repeat myself
Now, answer this question — how often have you found yourself in a situation where you bought a plane ticket, and then it became cheaper?
I have, and it was a bit frustrating. This happens most often during the summer season due to something called dynamic pricing.
Here’s a real price change chart for today's flight A4 203 from Rostov-on-Don to Saint Petersburg with the airline 'Azimut'. On the x-axis — hours until departure, on the y-axis — ticket price.
The chart shows that 20 hours before departure, the ticket can be purchased at the minimum possible price — 4090 rubles. Meanwhile, 72 hours before, the ticket costs more than twice as much — 9390 rubles. The chart was generated using cron parsing every 15 minutes, entering results into a database, and visualizing data with Chart.js. For those interested — here’s the Currently, there is data only for flights between Rostov and St. Petersburg, but it's not a problem to add other cities in the network.
Such price fluctuations, as I understand, are caused by the dynamic pricing algorithm sensing that not all tickets might be sold and lowering the price, operating under the logic of 'better to sell the remaining tickets a bit cheaper than to leave empty seats.' In other words, the higher the demand and the fewer the seats, the higher the ticket price..
An analysis of 84 flights between Rostov and St. Petersburg produced the following picture (on the x-axis — days until departure, on the y-axis — ticket price).
From this, we see that the best strategy for saving is to buy tickets in advance (starting from 80 days before the trip, the price begins to rise). However, we also see that if there are about 30 days left before the trip, it's best not to rush and wait a bit — there’s a chance that the price will drop from 9100 rubles to 6100, saving you 3000 rubles. And considering the information from the previous example, there’s a chance that 20 hours before departure, the price could be minimally possible again.
In light of the above, I have the following questions for the Habr community
1) Questions for those working in the industry.
Is the price trend similar among other airlines, or is it a specific case for Azimut Airlines?
What factors influence pricing from the outset? The number of days before departure, the day of the week (holidays or school breaks), the season, the time of day, what else?
2) Questions for agent representatives (Aviasales, Skyscanner, OneTwoTrip, Yandex Flights, Tinkoff Travels, etc.).
Do you collect data on price trends? If so, what is needed to gain access to this data? Are there already any partner APIs available, and if not, could you perhaps export from the database?
3) A question for everyone who flies.
What notification services for cheap airline tickets on your desired route do you use? Do you need a service that predicts price drops for your chosen route within a selected date range?
Personally, I use the Aviasales subscription which looks like this:
It has two significant drawbacks:
- Low responsiveness. Notifications can only come via email. Personally, I check my email infrequently; I would prefer a Telegram bot.
- No forecast. Before subscribing, I would like to see what the probability is that the price will drop based on past statistics.
Moreover, the emails come in terribly. Right now, it seems the Aviasales subscription isn’t working at all — the link to confirm the new subscription doesn’t arrive.
There are also subscriptions from Yandex Flights and tutu.ru, but as far as I understand, they only allow tracking price changes for a specific date.
Plus, it’s unclear how often all these services check prices — once a minute, hour, day?
P.S.: This information is, by the way, relevant not only for airlines but also for train travel. On the RZD website, there is directly a .
P.P.S.: What else can be read on the topic
Source: habr.com
