Beat the Airline Pricing Game

Now that airlines – like Amazon and other retailers – are using customer profiling (stalking your every move) to determine how you spend your money and where you want to travel, you’ll notice that airfares are all over the board. No longer can you depend on predictable discounts because airlines have become tech savvy, and they’re using your information to determine how they’ll hook you into buying airfares at a higher rate.  The airlines cater to their business and first class fliers because they’re loyal and they pay the highest rates.

Short of playing the Manufactured Spending game that gives you free flights and an assortment of upgrades, I find that the best way to get the cheapest airfare is to use Skyscanner or the Hopper app.  Because there is no way anyone could efficiently monitor airfares manually, these companies have created algorithms using airline pricing histories on millions of flights to determine if there will be a drop in price in the future and will alert you of the best time to book your flights. Hopper claims to be able to predict airfare for up to 6 months with 95% accuracy.

The good news is that the airlines know that consumers are looking for ways to find the lowest airfares.  I’m hoping that we’ll go back to the travel days when you could get the lowest fares by flying STANDBY and jumping on a plane minutes before takeoff.  If filling their planes is the airline’s goal, then standby flights would be a win-win situation for everyone.