The booking early "window" for cheap fares only really matters towards the very end

I remember a time many years ago where it was absolutely essential to book flights a very long time before the flight was actually going to take off. I recall that many years ago I booked a flight a full 6 months before it was actually going to happen and this resulted in me getting round-trip airfare from a regional airport, to NYC, to Taipei, and then to Singapore (it was a very long and rather miserable journey) but the entire thing for there and back airfare was around $600. I checked to see what the price was like a few days before my departure and the same flight was $1100. That's nearly double the original price.

While I didn't monitor it the entire 6 months I did notice that it would start to go up slightly, but it never hit $1000 until the last 30 days before the flight. These days a lot of the internal "rules" seem to have changed over the years. Of course you can't get a round-trip flight to the other side of the world for $600 anymore but that is because of a little thing called inflation.

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So far in 2023 I have been on around a dozen international and domestic flights between and inside various countries. It has been my experience that booking months ahead of time does offer some benefit, but it is so small that it isn't really worth bothering with. Lately, I have been monitoring a round trip 1.5 hour flight (each way) that I planned to book around 3 weeks ahead of time. I have been watching the price of the same flight almost every day for the past two months. The flight started out at around $175 and right now, 3 weeks later, that flight is a mere $6 more. There was one instance a few weeks ago that the price of the flight actually went DOWN a dollar.

Previous flights that I have gotten involved with have had a price fluctuation up until just a few days before the departure where the price only went up or down a few percentage points. This doesn't mean that you should hold on until the last minute to book, not by any stretch. It is quite the opposite actually. Of all the flights I have been on in my life, and I have been on hundreds, almost all of them would skyrocket in value in the last two days before the flight is meant to take off. So it is kind of important to get your flight booked before then because while I do not know the exact process that is going on here I suspect that at this point the airline has already made their money, doesn't need any more passengers and will simply take advantage of anyone who is booking extremely late. Perhaps it is targeting business travelers who always wait until the last minute before booking. I don't actually know but all I know is all over the world that the prices that I have been directly involved with do not fluctuate a great deal until right up at the last minute.

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According to Skyscanner, who sells airline tickets and therefore probably can't be entirely trusted, the best day of the week to look for flights is on a Tuesday since airlines typically will have specials starting on Monday night. The prices follow supply and demand probably operated by a computer math program algorithm that adjusts the prices according to how many booking they are getting compared to how many seats are left. Basically they are trying to predict the future. Also according to Skyscanner the best day of the week to fly is midweek, or more specifically Wednesday. The worst days to book a flight on are Fridays and Mondays, for obvious weekend warrior reasons.

Now there is no absolute truth in flight prices. These things are ever-changing and no one can predict what they are going to be and therefore I am by no means suggesting that people wait until a price drops before they book. Typically, prices will very rarely go down from their initial offerings so if you know already what days you want to book for, you should go ahead and do it. What I am trying to say is that this idea that the rate goes progressively up to a very high degree is generally untrue in my experience right up until the last few days before the flight departs. Even in the last few days it doesn't always change and when I noticed this the flight I was on had a lot of empty seats and perhaps the is the reason.

On the flights that I have noticed that the price almost doubled on the last few days of sale, these flights were almost always near or completely full. We just have to imagine that the airlines are a business because they are. They are going to charge as much as they feel they can get away with and if they only have 10 seats left on a 300 person capacity plane, why would they even bother to try to discount them?

The moral of the story here is that there really isn't much reason to book like we did in the 90's and early 2000's anymore. I don't know why it is, but for some reason booking that far in advance offers very little in the way of benefit as far as what sort of price you are getting to get. It is always important to monitor your choice though and as always, if you know that you MUST book on a certain date in the future, then why not go ahead and get it over with? Once you've done that you can focus on the fun part of your travel such as what you are going to do once you get to your vacation destination.