is there an ultra-last minute price drop on long haul flights with regular (not low cost) airlines?

Upvote:0

My research of various credible online sources, ticket aggregators, specialized blogs, The Guardian-level newspapers suggests following:

Last minute price drops are virtually non existent on long haul flights from Europe to Asia. Price drops are in a way "random" or unpredicatable (as opposed to 1990's where "last minute price hunting worked reliably).

I have observed 3 types of triggers for price drops:

First, as airline start to sell long haul flights cca 11 months ahead, they have specific sales targets during the lifecycle of a sale, so if they do not hit the sales mark at 6 month, they do a sale.

Second trigger of price reduction I know of comes from over-capacity on certain Asian routes during some periods of times, especially around major European holidays, during Asians do no seem to fly much.

Third is a new route "welcome" pricing.

In this particual case, my search for the connection started 2 months ahead, and in the mean time I have observed that this routes gets sold out quite readily, so instead of getting a last minute price drop I ended up paying more when I finally bought one week ahead. The flight got sold out soon after.

Upvote:1

Typically not, but you never know, so it doesn't hurt trying.

FRA<->HAN: starting on this Friday would be around $1000 (including the non-stop from Vietnam airlines). A month from now, the non-stop would be around $800. It can be as cheap as $350, but only with awkward routing: multiple stops and/or long layovers.

Upvote:2

Each airline is free to apply the pricing policy they want, so the answer could vary greatly from airline to airline.

A quick search for a transatlantic flight for today gives me a minimum price of $1400, while I can book the same search for $465 with one month ahead.

Usually last-minute travellers are those who are in a hurry to fly, so they don't care much for prices as regular tourists do.

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