Saving money being impatient

Saving money is in general a good idea. Especially students, crunched between lectures and exams with little time to get a student job done do not have a spare cent to waste. Buying all the books and materials, costs for public transportation, not to forget all the daily things like the rent of a flat. Further on students may get a chance on a semester abroad or some practical courses at a company a few hundred miles away which can be very important for career and personal advancement, but costs even more money. Going by train is in general not any longer much cheaper than taking a flight. Due to the increased efficiency in air transportation train would leave more time learning for the next exam, but the flight makes it less of a pain. Adding to the advantage of being much quicker, flying offers a bigger potential of saving money if booking the tickets with a handful of cleverness.

The early bird catches the worm. In other words; the one booking early pays less. Due to fierce competition between different airlines a single day can make quite a price difference for a simple flight ticket. Certainly there is always a chance to get a bargain just before departure, but it is a chance and not very reliable and for sure no good option if trying to attend a timed course or business meeting. So what are the mechanics behind all this? A question that deserves a simple answer and a raising explanation at the same time. The simple answer is, that an early booking can pick from almost all of the differently offered fares. A late booking can only pick from those that are left. Different fairs are a result of the mixed calculation an airline has to use to determine the price for each person without ending up with a loss. A certain amount of the places an airplane offers is reserved for people booking round-trip flights, with a stay of fourteen days - just to give an example. The above mentioned are the typical holiday customers. Most of them book in advance, because their days off from work are not flexible and the flight has to happen on those days, making it easy for an airline to foresee which capacities are needed when.

The easiest way would be to have planes filled with round-trip flights and the same stopover times for all given seats, but that is rarely possible. Often the airlines have to deal with people booking one-way tickets, with an option to change the date of the flight or even asking for a fall back option to cancel the flight without high penalties. Another underestimated factor is the time of day and the day itself. For instance many travelers want to, or have to take a flight that leaves on a friday and returns on a sunday. Like the old economic principle states; if the demand is high price goes up, those highly frequented days become more expansive to book. Booking economy class on a tuesday for example may come relatively cheap, because not that many people will go for that flight privately. In exchange the business class could be more expansive on that said tuesday, due to the reason that many managers fly a lot throughout the week to attend their meetings and hate staying onsite up to the weekend just to get home to the family and waste the precious free time. 

These are just a handful of parameters airlines have to consider when calculating the price of a ticket. The formula, the more passengers a plane transports the more profit the airline generates, is a universal truth. At the same moment it gets more difficult to have this plane always filled up to the last seat to earn the max profit, because the more seats a plane offers the more different fairs must be used to suit all passengers needs, making them book in the end.

Last Updated :: Thursday, July 10, 2003