Should I book Sapsan train ticket now or wait for prices to lower?

5/29/2016 6:14:04 AM

Turns out you can cancel the booking by a simple click up to 8 days before the journey, and get a full refund.

So, I’ve booked the Train, but will look at the price every single day. Even if it just lowers to 1999 or 2290, I’ll cancel and re-book

UPDATE: It lowered to 1999 now, so cancelled and re-booked 🙂

5/29/2016 11:31:45 AM

UPD: as you have found yourself, the prices do sometimes go lower, so the answer that I’ve posted originally is not quite correct. I’ll still keep the answer, and I think that it is applicable for most of the situations, but apparently there are exceptions.

No, the prices on Russian trains never go lower. The prices depend on three parameters:

  • For the so-called “dynamical pricing”, enabled on “best” Russian trains (and Sapsan of course), the prices depend on the number of tickets left, so the less tickets left, the higher the price.
  • The prices also depend on date, that is, for the same number of tickets left the prices for different dates may be different. For most of the trains the price depends on a season, but for Sapsan, IIRC, it depends also on the day of week.
  • For some trains (I guess not the Sapsan) the prices depend on the number of days left to train departure. The earlier you buy, the cheaper it is (in addition to dynamical pricing mentioned above).

Or well, there is one exception: the prices may go lower if all the tickets for a particular class has been bought (and thus the lowest price you were seeing was the price for a higher class), but then some passenger decided to return their ticket. In this case you might see this cheap ticket appearing back for sale, but usually on such high-demand trains it will appear for a very short time, because somebody else would buy it very quickly, so I definitely would not rely on this.

Credit:stackoverflow.com‘

About me

Hello,My name is Aparna Patel,I’m a Travel Blogger and Photographer who travel the world full-time with my hubby.I like to share my travel experience.

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