When is the best time to buy an airline ticket? Depends on your risk profile, it could range from 30 to 150 days out. At least, based on one case.
I was talking with a buzz-buddy friend about flight prices verses what I saw a year ago. I had quoted flight cost observed when I published the blog which seemed reasonable. I was looking at airfares back then which were 30 days in the future. Since then, we have seen much higher fares planning a year out. We did not like that.
With all of this AI stuff, I thought, we should be able to look at flight cost history somewhere to see how the airfare’s trended to determine when it is best to buy. This turned out to be harder than I thought to identify when was the best time to purchase. The reason is that airfares change hourly based on tickets sold, fare class, specific flights, market rates etc. Basically, the airlines publish list price rates up until they feel they need to be competitive to sell all the seats.
However, you can track flight prices as they change for a future trip similar to tracking stock prices to try to make the best purchase. Just like the stock exchange, nothing will tell you what the price will be tomorrow. In the link below, you can see a case where someone tracked flights to Iceland over the course of a year and see when fares dipped.
https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/5046/how-to-find-historical-airfares
You can see in the chart when prices were most competitive over the course of the year flying to Iceland but it will have little to do with the best prices in future. My conclusion is that prices will remain high until the airlines say, hey, we need to sell these seats. If demand spikes, the airlines will raise prices thinking that they were too early.
For those who would like to track airfare prices for a route, below is a story of options to try to out perform the airline market.