Timing a Pricy Plane Ticket Purchase

April 16, 2024 10:47 AM

My wife and I are planning a vacation from the U.S. to Australia and New Zealand in December, flying business class, which will be an expensive flight. Is there any particular way of knowing when in the next eight months the price is likely to be the lowest? Is there any advantage to buying through an aggregator site vs. the home site of the airline we choose?

If it matters, we live in Boston but are planning to fly to the west coast using domestic airline miles we already have on JetBlue and leave for Sydney from LA or SF. We'll be returning from Auckland in early January. Potentially those trips will be on separate airlines. We definitely want to fly nonstop on the Aus/NZ legs.

posted by Horace Rumpole to Travel & Transportation around Australia (13 answers total)

Best answer: Is there any advantage to buying through an aggregator site vs. the home site of the airline we choose?

There is a marked disadvantage. Airlines treat people who buy directly from them as customers. They treat people who buy from aggregators as grudgingly tolerated parasites. While you're on the plane, it's all the same, but before the flight, should you run into any issues, you will be treated far, far better if you buy directly from the airline. Airline personnel seem to take a sick satisfaction in giving exactly zero shits about you and telling you to contact Expedia/Booking/Travelocity/Priceline/whoever instead.

Unless your budget won't allow any other way, don't go the aggregator route for such a lengthy and pricy flight. Buy direct.

I don't have specific advice on the best time to buy, but you can set up an alert with Google flights to advise when the ticket cost is trending low. Run a search and click the toggle for "Track Flights."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:53 AM on April 16 [13 favorites]

One more thought to add to the above, if you have an Amex, see if booking through their site is comparable in price. We travel enough that a platinum Amex has been useful/frutiful. If you don't have one, now might be the time. This trip alone, would probably net you 90-100k in points.

But beyond that, a flight that you book via the Amex travel subsite is one that you are protected on in multiple ways. The Christmas before last, we were headed to Amsterdam and a huge snowstorm was headed in on the day of our planned departure flight. We called Amex (via whom we had booked everything), explained the situation, and they changed our flights to be a day earlier and booked us an extra night of hotel, easy peasy.

Having the Amex customer service team on your side is a low stress way to get better help, faster. Assistance is much easier to get when a company that books millions of dollars of flights/hotels calls on your behalf.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:06 AM on April 16 [3 favorites]

I would consult a travel agent.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 11:39 AM on April 16

I use the Hopper app to track the best date/flight to buy, then use that information to book directly from the airline's website.
posted by mezzanayne at 12:26 PM on April 16 [3 favorites]

A colleague took his family back to NZ from Boston last year. I think there is no trick for timing the purchase, unfortunately.

What I hear is that you should just buy a ticket (maybe more expensive?) which allows rebooking for free/cheap, and then watch to see if the ticket price changes between now and your departure date.

We did this for tickets to Paris last winter, and art saved us a boatload of money. Buying the tickets guarantees you a seat, and then re-booking can get you a lower fare over time.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:28 PM on April 16 [1 favorite]

I fly from Sydney or Melbourne to either LA, San Francisco or Vancouver once a year (economy class, though). To get a decent price, I set up a Google alert for my desired dates, and prepare to book about 4-5 months before my flight. It looks like Google Flights won’t let you specify business class, but you’ll see the overall fluctuation in prices. Right now you can get a round-trip SYD/LAX economy flight in December for under A$2k , which is super cheap.

I usually end up booking with Air Canada (they have a Sydney to LA route) or United, which has really lifted its game on that route in recent years.

Completely agree with the advice above to book direct with the airline. This route is fairly infrequent and often sold out, so if there’s a disruption you might be stranded on the other side of the world for days. Not that Auckland is a bad place to be stranded!
posted by third word on a random page at 1:46 PM on April 16 [1 favorite]

I never ever book anything through aggregators, for the reasons mentioned above.

Google Flights ability to help you find routes and fares is indeed great, as is their alerts mechanism.

Here's a dump of my notes on this subject, possibly dated.

Delta agent sez:
- book 6 weeks to 12 weeks in advance. Any earlier and the flights won't be on sale, any later and the others will have already snapped up all the low fares. Award tickets are another animal though...
- On booking super far in advance: "Unless you're booking business/first class, booking super far in advance is always a bad move. Airlines charge higher fares for those reservations. It's just like in the tech world where the early adopters pay more."

CheapAir: prices bottom out about 11-12 weeks in advance

WSJ: flight pricing gets competitive around 3-4 months before travel date; April is the best time for "peak season" (summer) fares. WSJ also remarks that "airline tickets are not only cheaper mid-week, but that they also tend to be cheaper in the afternoons on those days. Sale seats are usually released on Monday nights, so buying your tickets on a Tuesday or Wednesday could help you save money ... In addition, airlines don't manage their inventory as much over the weekend as during the week so if cheaper seats sell on a Saturday or Sunday, ticket prices might automatically jump higher before fare analysts return to work the next week and decide whether to lower them again."
posted by intermod at 2:33 PM on April 16 [2 favorites]

I never book through aggregators, but I do use them to research what flights are available and the relative costs. As mentioned above, if there are any issues with your flight, the airline will not help you unless you bought the ticket from them and the aggregator will be worse than useless. Sites like WebJet are very useful for tracking costs and save a lot of time jumping between airline Web sites. They also give you options that you might not otherwise have thought of. Be aware, though, that airlines sometimes make deals available through aggregators that they don't offer themselves.

My experience is that flights are usually cheapest around 3 months out but, if you are flexible about your dates/times and willing to take some risk, there are often cheap seats available at short notice (generally not so much for business class, though).
posted by dg at 3:27 PM on April 16

Best answer: I make the SF-to-Melbourne flight 2-3 times a year and try to take the direct flights offered by United, unless they are being ridiculous and then I take Qantas either as SFO-LAX-MEL, or SFO-SYD-MEL. My goal is to minimize the overall trip time and also to have a long flight on which there's time for the two meals + several hours of sleeping-pill-assisted sleep. I'm not sure that anyone apart from United offers the non-stop flights from SFO, though there are more options from LAX.

I have previously been able to get cheaper flights by flying via Honolulu: United/Alaska/Hawaiian to Honolulu, then Jetstar from Honolulu to Melbourne. However, the flight schedules are such that I have to stay overnight in Honolulu, and that adds to the expense. Plus you said you're intending to fly nonstop from the west coast to Australia/NZ.

That said, if you're going through New Zealand you may find that Air NZ is a better deal: even if it adds a stopover in Auckland, that might work anyway with your itinerary, at least for one direction.

December in general will be an expensive time, especially as you get close to Christmas, as that's when people like me all want to fly back for the summer holidays. Primary schools and earlier years of secondary schools typically keep kids in classes right up until the week before Christmas, but later secondary years and universities finish up earlier in the month. That means flights and accommodation all get expensive from mid-December onwards, so you'll likely save more money by planning to travel in early December vs late December than you will by trying to price-watch the flights. Try leaving on Thanksgiving Day when nobody in the US wants to fly, and coming back a couple of weeks later!
posted by pulposus at 4:52 PM on April 16

Just to give a real-world example of the "aggregator" problem: I booked flights from New Zealand via Expedia on Cathay Pacific. Those flights were cancelled about two weeks after the war in Gaza broke out. It took 12 weeks to get my money back and communication with Expedia was painful. Meanwhile I was getting email from Cathay Pacific that was clearly intended for their direct customers, and they got their money straight away.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 5:13 PM on April 16

Consider OneWorld RTW (round the world). You could get yourselves to JFK and fly nonstop to Auckland (Qantas) onward to Sydney or Melbourne, travel onward via Singapore for a few nights in London before coming home to Boston. Booking takes some patience but BIZ class becomes affordable.

I'm doing a RTW from San Francisco next week to Australia, NZ and including South Africa. Third time that my husband and I have bought a OneWorld RTW ticket.
posted by namret at 6:25 PM on April 16 [1 favorite]

If it matters, we live in Boston but are planning to fly to the west coast using domestic airline miles we already have on JetBlue and leave for Sydney from LA or SF.

You may already be planning to do this, but if not I very strongly encourage you to build in significant buffer time between your Boston-California flights on JetBlue and your California-Australia flights on another airline. (If it were me, I would build in an overnight stop in California).

On separate bookings -- which this will be -- if your initial JetBlue flight is delayed or canceled and you miss your Australia flight, your Australia-bound airline is under no obligation to rebook you and you could be on the hook for a very expensive last-minute ticket to Australia.

I love JetBlue (living in NYC) but it is not part of any alliance and so if things go awry, you are likely to have to wait for the next available JetBlue flight. You want your plan to be able to accommodate delays like this (especially flying from the Northeast in the winter).
posted by andrewesque at 7:41 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Yes, on the way there we are planning to fly the day before the Sydney flight, and on the way back we've got free rescheduling on JetBlue if needed.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 11:04 AM on April 17