This Is Exactly How Far in Advance to Book Your Flight For the Cheapest Deal

There are of course the little tricks to saving money on flights you’ve probably already heard about. Book at an off-peak time, fly into a non-hub airport and one of our favourites, book the ticket on a Tuesday. As simple as that last one sounds, it really works. Airlines tend to release their sale offers on Tuesdays and therefore will compete with each other quite seriously to offer the lowest prices.

But while all those above tips are great, Jeff Klee, CEO of CheapAir, has a much more definitive suggestion to getting your flight for the best price possible. There is an actual perfect day to book your airline tickets and it is exactly 54 days before you fly. To clarify, that means you need to jump online not 53 and not 55, but precisely 54 days prior to take-off.

In order to come up with this magic number, CheapAir researched and analysed data from 921 million airline fares and the results illustrated an interesting pattern. Between 320 and 106 days before a flight, plane tickets normally stay at a static, fixed price. Then, on day 105, prices begin to drop steadily, reaching their lowest point on, you guessed it, day 54. Following this, the prices begin to rise again until day 20 when they make their most dramatic upward jump.

CheapAir kindly offered a real-world example to showcase the validity of their finding, a $400-ish flight that dropped to $344 on the magic 54th day and then rose all the way up to $593. This means the cost increased by 48% and booking on day 54 did in fact offer the sweetest deal.

Okay then, anybody else already marking their calendars?