Can You Save Money on Plane Tickets By Waiting?

Will Your Plane Ticket Fare Go Down If You Wait?

One of the largest purchases you’ll likely make when you book your travel – especially if you’re traveling a great distance or internationally – is your plane tickets.

From cheap puddle jumpers that charge you extra to breathe to premium economy seats and business class upgrades, buying a plane ticket these days isn’t as simple as it used to be.

Further, you can experience a dizzying array of prices for the same ticket, depending on when you buy it. While conventional wisdom suggests you should purchase as early as possible to score a sale, what if you don’t start planning your trip until a few months before you depart?

Even if you’re well-prepared and have a completely finished international vacation itinerary months ahead of your departure, you may find it troublingly difficult to get a good price on a ticket.

The thing to remember is that there is no set of rules you can always rely on to get the lowest price on your tickets. All you can do is employ the advice you read here and any other tips you might find around the internet, and hope you get the best plane ticket price.

(note: some of the links here are to websites with which I am an affiliate, and your purchases help fund my website!)

Should You Time Your Ticket Purchase for a Certain Day?

If you conduct an internet search for the best day to buy plane tickets, you’ll probably see a few different days. Some advice suggests you should book your flights on Sunday night. Others suggest that airlines dump fares on Wednesday, so waiting until the middle of the week is the best time to book.

It’s possible to find recommendations on purchasing plane tickets on virtually every day of the week, but this advice actually used to hold true for Tuesdays. At one time, airlines would begin their sales on Tuesdays. Whenever an airline posted a sale, it would be on a Tuesday, so you could sometimes catch a break on your domestic or international plane ticket by booking that day.

However, sales don’t run like clockwork anymore, and there’s no guarantee that a particular airline will post a sale on a Tuesday – or any other day of the week for that matter. You might not even know there’s a sale going on unless you visit each airline’s website individually.

Further, relying on information solely from the home pages of the airlines means missing out on the possible sales offered on aggregate websites like Expedia.

There are so many places to find, book, and search for tickets these days, that finding a sale can feel like an uphill battle. So, the moral of the story is: there is no specific day when you should, must, or need to buy plane tickets.

How Early Should You Buy Plane Tickets?

For the most part, buying your tickets early is always the best policy. Unless you have the time to check a dozen websites (or more) every single day, to gauge overall prices, you’ll virtually always get the lowest price on a ticket by booking early.

But what is “early” when it comes to booking plane tickets? In my experience, booking at least six months in advance tends to reward you with the best prices.

When I traveled to Vietnam, I started looking at prices quite a few months before departure, but for reasons that aren’t relevant here, I didn’t buy the tickets until about a month before we were scheduled to depart.

Not only was it really tough to get the seats I wanted, but the prices went way up because the airline had fewer seats available, and each of those available seats was more expensive than it would have been a few months prior.

I know it feels tempting to conduct searches endlessly and hope and wait for a great price on a ticket, but after your initial searches where you get a feel for the average price of a ticket, you probably won’t see dramatically different prices – and if you do, you’ll usually only see prices increase.

In addition to paying more for the last few available seats on your plane, you might even end up having a problem getting the class you want. I usually fly premium economy when flying internationally (my partner’s choice; I’m actually not that picky), but we’ve had to stuff ourselves into basic economy due to a lack of available tickets, and it’s just not fun.

Deleting Your Cookies Before Plane Ticket Searches

So there’s a rumor going around that websites may track you when you start to look for airline tickets and that they’ll start showing you higher and higher prices every time you search.

Even though you may have seen a dozen TikToks on this subject and read a few dozen blogs on it, it’s almost impossible to determine whether this claim is true or just internet spamfoolery.

When you go to Amazon and conduct a search for your new luggage, Amazon doesn’t mysteriously change its prices based on whether you’re logged into the website or have visited before.

In all my personal testing, the prices for flights have been the same whether I’ve been searching on my phone (or computer, which is linked to my phone with my Google account) or at one of my jobs, which has a company-based Google email associated with the browser.

Not only have I found the exact same prices on bigger websites that list flights from all sorts of airlines, but I’ve also found identical prices on the home pages of various companies.

Have I misled myself? Do contact me if you have evidence that surfing incognito or deleting your cookies makes a difference on your plane ticket. I haven’t yet found that it does!

Is It Better to Buy Refundable Tickets Or Flight Insurance?

One of the last questions you’ll need to ask yourself before booking your flight is whether to purchase a refundable ticket or flight insurance. Are these purchases worth it, or should you just chance it and book without a safety net?

There are a few different answers to this question. For some travelers, saving money now and taking the chance is totally worth it. For others, the prospect of having to rebook a $1,600 ticket makes paying a little more for a refundable ticket a no-brainer.

One of the important things to remember here is that refundable tickets and ticket insurance are two different things. A refundable ticket will usually cost quite a bit more than ticket insurance. A $500 ticket that takes you from Los Angeles to New York City could easily reach $800 to $1,000 with a fully refundable option.

However, sometimes you can score flight insurance for $20 or $30 per flight. If you’re nervous about having to rebook or reschedule your flight, you might benefit from flight insurance.

Just always make sure to read the fine print when purchasing any insurance or upgrading your ticket to a refundable version. Sometimes insurance only kicks in if your schedule is interrupted through no fault of your own – like the airline cancels your flight.

Further, you might save money on a refundable flight by choosing something in the middle. You can sometimes score a flight that has a modest rescheduling feet (like $100 or so), but which is cheaper than a fully refundable ticket that carries no fee to rebook or reschedule.

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