The right time to buy a flight, minus the superstition

Buying a flight is a bit like a small investment: the price moves every day, and the question of "buy now or wait" generates more anxiety than it deserves. The good news is that airfares aren't as chaotic as they look: they follow curves with a recurring shape, and anyone who knows the shape can stop checking the price every couple of hours.

The typical shape goes like this: fares open months out at a middling level, drift down slowly as the airline calibrates demand, hit a low point in a fairly predictable window, then climb sharply in the final two or three weeks, when the buyers left are mostly people with no alternatives. The low point window sits, on average, between eight and three weeks out for European flights, and between five and two months out for long haul.

The method, in three questions

First question: is the route competitive, or close to a monopoly? On a route served by several airlines in direct competition, prices stay honest for a long time, and you can comfortably wait for the good window. On a near monopoly route, or toward destinations with rigid demand peaks like major holidays, the curve climbs earlier than expected: waiting there almost always gets punished, so buy as soon as the plan is certain.

Second question: how flexible is your travel plan? Anyone with fixed dates in a hot period should buy early and get it off their mind, accepting they won't land the route's absolute minimum: paying five percent above the low point is a good trade against risking thirty percent above it by waiting out of stubbornness.

Third question, maybe the most useful of the three: is today's price good relative to that specific route, not in the abstract? Every route has its own normal price, different from every other route's. Looking at the history and the month's lows, as we show on our flight pages, turns a bare number into a real judgment: is six hundred euros for that route in that month a bargain, or a small tax on impatience?

One last rule that matters more than all the others: when you find a price clearly below the route's average, buy it immediately and close the tab without a second thought. Truly exceptional fares last hours, not weeks, and the next day's regret is almost always the most expensive fare of all the ones you could have paid.