Best days to book and travel by plane

Ever wonder when is the best time to buy airline tickets and what days are cheapest to travel? Knowing the answers to these questions can save you money and valuable time.

Best time to book airfare

Many travelers don’t realize that the best time to book airfare is when airlines announce their sales. This happens weekly on Tuesdays, making it the best day to book. And to be even more specific, at 3:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, so sync your watch if you’re hoping to get a great rate.

Best time frame to buy

Procrastination is not a good thing when buying or booking a trip. Many passengers mistakenly think that if they wait, fares will go down. This is not necessarily the case, and as a result, people end up spending even more than they bargained for.

Depending on whether you are traveling domestically or internationally, this is the time frame to consider if you expect the best airfare prices:

> National rates (US): Purchase between three months and 30 days before departure.

> International rates: buy between 5-1 / 2 months and 1-1 / 2 months before departure.

Cheapest days and times to fly

There is not much strategy involved here folks, as common sense tells us with anything, the law of supply and demand governs. A good rule of thumb is that the less convenient travel is, for example, school and work hours, the more likely it is to cost less.

So when it comes to the day of the week and the time during the day, this is the general rule of thumb for the cheapest times to fly:

> Days: Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday

> Schedules: when people normally do not want to fly, such as night and red-eye flights and early morning and dinner time flights.

Most expensive days to fly

Fridays and Sundays, which of course are generally the most convenient days for most leisure travelers.

Great tricks when booking airline tickets

Here’s a helpful little hint. When buying and booking airfare, buy one passenger at a time. The reason is that the airline’s system will find the cheapest flight by searching for one. If you enter more than one, and the inventory shows one ticket at a low fare and many at a higher fare, the system will take the higher fare when searching for more than one ticket.

Another recommendation for finding the best airfare is to use price alerts with online booking services such as TripAdvisor, Expedia, and FareCompare, as they will email you when the rates have dropped.

For cheap travel!