Can I get there whenever?

March 10, 2009 2:34 PM

Can I search for the best price for an airline ticket to a specific destination for some random unknown future date?

I'd like to fly to a location, but I don't care what the date is. I know I'd like to stay for X number of days, but other than that, I just want the best price. The problem is that all sites I've found require a window of time. Is there a good site for this?

posted by mcarthey to Travel & Transportation (7 answers total)

Use Kayak's Buzz.

Set it to "Lowest fare" (instead of Top 25) and input your origin and destination. Select "Anytime" for the departure date, or a specific month if that works better.
posted by nitsuj at 3:05 PM on March 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

You can use random dates, but the dates of travel are one of the key factors in determining flight prices. You could probably figure out something baseline, like how much it costs in fuel to get from point A to point B (assuming fixed fuel costs -- a bad assumption). Length of time until travel greatly affects prices. Often it follows a parabolic pattern -- prices are highest at both the time when the flight is very far in the future and immediately before the flight. They are at their lowest somewhere in between.

These even fluctuate hourly, as sometimes airlines change prices during the day to target different audiences (businesses vs. families, etc.) You can use some hypothetical dates with farecast.com and see what it recommends. You can also obtain data from farecast on the average price of a ticket for a given date in the past.

I would say that historical prices are not a great predictor right now, either, as fuel prices are lower than they have been in recent history and tickets in general are cheaper than in recent history due to decreased demand.
posted by proj at 3:07 PM on March 10, 2009

Travelocity does this for destinations within the US. Just select "flexible dates" and tell it you want to search for fares between now and, say, december. That will take you to a list of published fares for that route; select one, and it'll show you a calendar with the dates on which that fare is offered.

I also occasionally use the fare search run by ITA, which is more of a power-user tool. You want the "month-long" search (button near the top right), which will search within 30-day periods for trips of a specified length.
posted by chalkbored at 3:21 PM on March 10, 2009

Farecast.com predicts trends in airfares, but I don't know if it was correct in predicting the current low fares.
posted by TDIpod at 3:36 PM on March 10, 2009

TDIpod: It was. I didn't get my notification mail and now I'm paying $30 more than I would have if I'd seen it.
posted by batmonkey at 3:41 PM on March 10, 2009

Skyscanner lets you search for flights over the entire year (in the search area, click on the calendars as if to search specific times and click "whole year"), and then displays the best prices per month - which are then displayed in a bar graph of when the cheapest day of the month is. That sounds weird, but it's exactly what you want.
posted by mdonley at 5:31 PM on March 10, 2009

Continental.com does this for their fares if you pick the flexible travel dates option and it includes all cities. You get a calendar with all the fares by date of departure. Some of the big name travel sites only have this feature for major destinations, not so useful if you want to go somewhere else. Other airlines may have similar options.
posted by caddis at 5:34 PM on March 10, 2009