Revealed: Why Using ‘hacks’ to Search for the Cheapest Airline Ticket Is a Waste of Time (But There’s One Exception to the Rule, Researchers Say)

Searching through your browser’s incognito mode or using a VPN to pretend you live in a different location – trying to get cheaper flights with popular hacks like these is largely a waste of time.

That is according to a new study that investigated how airfares are determined at a major American airline. Dylan Walshwriting on the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley website, explains that the pricing system discovered by the study – which is typical for airlines around the world – goes against what most travelers would expect.

The study is co-authored by Olivia Natan of the Berkeley Haas School of Business, who told Walsh, “There are so many hacks out there to find cheaper airline tickets. But our data shows that many of these beliefs are wrong.”

First, the research shows that airlines are not taking into account how customers try to balance convenience and price when flying, sometimes sacrificing convenience for a cheaper ticket. Instead, they decide the price of seats on each individual flight separately, “even though changing the price on one flight will affect the way people think about all their options,” Natan told Walsh.

Second, the study found that airlines have a small, fixed menu of prices that they assign to tickets on each flight, with wide variations between each price, Walsh reports. He says, “Maybe they’ll sell the first 30 economy tickets at the lowest price, and then the next 30 tickets at the next highest price, and so on.”

The research found that even if the airline wanted to increase the price of a ticket by £80 ($100), it only does so about a fifth of the time, so the figure fits into this menu of preset options. prices, reports Walsh.

Third, the study found that there is a ‘lack of coordination’ between airline departments. Natan told Walsh that airline pricing teams “choose the pricing menu without using their internal demand forecasts,” which can result in underpricing of tickets.

However, “the revenue management team corrects a large portion of these underpricings before they ever reach consumers,” reports Walsh. He explains that the team uses demand forecasts to determine final prices, significantly reducing the number of underpriced tickets shown to customers.

The research shows that flight prices increase significantly in the three weeks prior to a flight

That said, there is one bright spot for bargain-hunting travelers: Natan, who conducted the research together with academics from the University of ChicagoYale, and the University of Texas in Austin, Walsh said that there is a fixed booking time that you should avoid if you want to secure better rates.

Natan told Walsh: “What I can say is that prices increase significantly 21, 14 and seven days before a flight. Then just buy your ticket before then.’

The research comes amid reports of “calculated misery” – a theory that airlines may deliberately make the customer experience bad in the hope that passengers will spend more money on previously free services such as baggage fees and seat selection.

Professor Tim Wu of Columbia Law School first coined the term “calculated misery” in a 2014 piece for the New Yorkerwhere he described an attempt by the airline industry to increase profits by making low-quality basic products and then offering upgrades for a fee.

He said: ‘For fees to work, there has to be something worth avoiding. That requires, at some level, a strategy that can be described as ‘calculated misery.’