What is the best way to buy a ticket?
Any more or less advanced web user knows such options as
- buy in advance
- look for connecting routes
- monitor charter flights
- search in incognito browser mode
- use airline miles cards, all kinds of bonuses and promo codes
Full list of hacks Tinkoff-Journal, I will not repeat myself
Now answer the question - how often did you find yourself in a situation where you bought a ticket, and then it began to cost less?
I got in and it was a little embarrassing. This happens most often in the summer season because of a thing called dynamic pricing.
Here is a real schedule of price changes for today's flight A4 203 Rostov-on-Don - St. Petersburg of Azimuth Airlines. On the x-axis - hours before departure, on the y-axis - ticket price
The schedule shows that 20 hours before departure, a ticket can be bought at the lowest possible price - 4090 rubles. At the same time, for 72 hours a ticket costs more than 2 times more - 9390 rubles. The graph was stupidly obtained by parsing by cron once every 15 minutes, entering the results into the database and visualizing the data using Chart.js. For those who are interested, here Now there is data only for flights between Rostov and St. Petersburg, but it is not a problem to add other cities of the route network.
Such price fluctuations, as far as I understand, are caused by the fact that the dynamic pricing algorithm for sales dynamics feels that not all tickets can be sold out and reduces the price, guided by the logic βit is better to sell the remaining tickets a little cheaper than leave empty seatsβ. In other words, the higher the demand and the fewer seats, the higher the price of tickets.
An analysis of 84 flights between Rostov and St. Petersburg gave this picture (on the x axis - days before departure, on the y axis - ticket price)
From it we see that the really best savings strategy is to buy tickets in advance (starting from 80 days before the trip, the price starts to rise). However, from here we see that if, say, 30 days are left before the trip, then it is best not to rush and wait a little - there is a chance that the price will drop from 9100 rubles to 6100 and you will save 3000 rubles. And given the information from the example above, it is likely that 20 hours before departure, the price may again be the lowest possible.
In connection with the above, I have the following questions to the habra community
1) Questions for those who work in the industry.
Do other airlines have similar price dynamics or is it a special case of Azimuth?
What factors affect pricing a priori? Number of days before departure, day of the week (holidays or school holidays), time of year, time of day, what else?
2) Questions for agent representatives (Aviasales, Skyscanner, OneTwoTrip Yandex.Flights, Tinkoff.Travel, etc.).
Do you collect price data? If yes, what is needed to access this data? Are there already any partner APIs, if not, can you do an unload from the database?
3) Question for everyone who flies.
What notification services about cheap flights to the destination you are using? Do you need a price drop forecast service for the direction of interest in the selected date range?
Personally, I use the Aviasales subscription which looks like this:
It has two significant drawbacks:
- Low efficiency. Notifications can only be sent by email. Personally, I rarely check mail, I would prefer a Telegram bot
- There is no forecast. Personally, before subscribing, I would like to see what is the probability that the price will drop based on statistics for past periods.
In addition, letters come out of the ordinary bad. Now it seems that the Aviasales subscription does not work at all - the link to confirm the new subscription does not come.
There are also Yandex.Air tickets and tutu.ru subscriptions, but, as far as I understand, they allow you to track price changes only for a specific date.
Plus, itβs not clear at all how often all these services check prices - once a minute, hour, day?
PS: By the way, info is relevant not only for airlines, but also for traveling by train. On the Russian Railways website .
PPS: What else can you read on the topic
Source: habr.com