London - Friday is the worst day of the week to buy a plane ticket and should be avoided at all costs, a study of air fares has revealed.
Industry analysts said that tickets bought on a Friday were 13 percent more expensive than those bought on a Sunday.
The experts added that the weekend was the best time to book holidays and that you should ignore flash sales that pop up during the week.
In the past, the advice was to book plane tickets on a Tuesday because you were most likely to bag a bargain.
The thinking was that airline executives came into work on Monday, looked at the weekend sales and tried to offload the remaining seats on Tuesday.
But according to Greg Schulze, Expedia’s senior vice president of global tours and transport, things have changed.
The online travel agency and Airlines Reporting Corp, which processes tickets booked through travel agencies, studied hundreds of millions of tickets bought in the past 12 months around the world to determine new trends.
Mr Schulze said that there was no clear single day to find the cheapest deal for all fights.
However, for most flight destinations, the cheapest tickets were sold on Saturday or Sunday.
Mr Schulze said that the reason Fridays are so expensive is because airlines launch price hikes on that day and have already run out of cheap seats by that point in the week. Airlines are posting their best deals at weekends because they know that price-conscious consumers will grab them.
On Saturdays and Sundays there are also no business travellers needing last-minute fares. Mr Schulze added: “I personally would shop at the weekend and the beginning of the week and avoid Friday.”
Mid-week sales are pointless because they have too many restrictions and often involve flights at odd hours, according to the study.
It also found airlines are increasingly using social media to target a specific group of passengers.
Mr Schulze said: “Fare sales as they used to be are few and far between – [now] airlines are constantly making adjustments up and down.”
The study, of 10 billion passengers’ booking habits, also revealed that air fares around the world were eight percent lower in October than the same time last year. The reason is that airlines have been adding to their fleets and the increased competition, coupled with lower oil prices, drove fares down.
In previous reports, Expedia and ARC have suggested that Tuesday is the best day to book flights, by a small margin.
Looking at 2016 and based upon 2015 data, Expedia and ARC found that on average, weekends provide an opportunity to find great deals, with Tuesday still close behind.
Passengers are also advised not to book when tickets initially go on sale but to wait until a few months before their flight.
Rick Seaney, chief executive of US price comparison website Fare Compare, said: “Airlines don’t start actively managing the price of seats on a particular flight until about three months before departure for domestic flights and five or six months for international trips. That’s when price cutting typically begins.”
Average return fares were five percent cheaper worldwide in the first eight months of this year than they were in the same period in 2014. This supported a rise of three percent in passenger traffic in the year to date.
Tony Tyler, director general of the International Air Transport Association, said: “In most parts of the world we see strong demand for travel exceeding the growth in capacity. Load factors [number of seats filled] are averaging over 80 percent and consumers are the big winners with fares trending downwards.”
Daily Mail