Last updated on January 31st, 2016 at 05:38 am
This reader question is probably more specific than some readers may be expecting to see (booking a flight from MSP to Toronto), but I wanted to share the result for two reasons: 1) It gave me the opportunity to share my thought process for booking flights within North America and 2) the story has an ideal ending. Maybe it will be helpful for others facing a similar situation. Note, this conversation occurred over email, so some of my answers were not as fully researched/well articulated as a normal blog post…
Jeff,
I had a travel question and Googled your name along with the question and it seems you have not blogged about it (yet). I’m traveling from MSP to Toronto and back 8/31/13 to 9/3/13. I usually follow the rule to purchase my airplane tix at least 2 weeks before the trip before the prices escalate ridiculously. I looked up a few articles that said that purchasing tix 7 weeks before travel date was optimal and that Tues/Wed. was the best day of the week to purchase. Well I obviously missed that deadline. So I used the Bing Travel price predictor today and it tells me “Tip: Wait·Fares dropping $50+·80%+ Confidence”. I also have 35k Delta Skymiles so I might be able to pay for this trip with them. I know you game the system in different ways to make your travel plans, but I thought I would check with you on how you would handle this?
Ward
I love solving these problems!
With flights between North American cities, there isn’t a ton of wiggle room, so here are the criteria I make when I need to book a flight:
- What is the max you are prepared to pay for this flight (based on what you can afford, what you have historically paid to visit the destination, etc.)? Does the flight that you are looking at cost more or less than that?
- What have you paid in the past for a flight between these cities? How much more expensive is this flight?
- How much does it cost in miles? In general when researching flights, I feel that it’s a no brainer to use miles if the value you get is $.02 per mile. For example, spending 25,000 sky miles for a $500 flight is a great deal. I sometimes go as low as $.014 to $.016 cents per mile. So 25k sky miles could cover around a $350 flight. I try not to go as low as 1 cent per mile and usually pay cash in those instances.
- If you are going to be making this flight frequently, I highly recommend that you start stockpiling British Airways “avios” miles, which will allow you to fly this route for less miles based on the distance traveled. Not something for this flight, but for the future.
- If Bing Travel says price will go down with 80% confidence, I say trust them. But make sure you don’t wait too long before your travel dates. My rule of thumb is to look at the number of seats that show as available on the flight seating chart to see if it’s fully booked or empty. If it’s empty, there’s a good chance the price will go down. If it’s close to fully booked, then you’ll want to jump on it.
- The 7 weeks rule/Tuesday/Wed might have some merit, and when I am waiting for prices to go down I often search constantly to see if it goes down. However, I don’t search directly on Delta, because I am pretty sure that they use that data to raise prices! Try using the ITA Matrix – http://matrix.itasoftware.com/
Hope that helps! I can answer more specifics if you have them.
Later that day I received a response back from Ward. The advice worked and
Jeff,
This is how the story ends – I ended up getting a $589 flight for 25k Skymiles. Checked for open seats as you suggested and they were staring to get tight. Bing travel still said 80% confidence fares would drop by today but I’m 21 days out so I pulled the trigger on my frequent flyer miles. Next time I will start planning earlier and use ITA Matrix to plan. Next step is to look into British Airways “avios” miles. Feel free to use this if you decide to blog this exercise.
Thanks again,
Ward
I’m very happy I was able to help Ward find what he was looking for. I consider this to be a best-case scenario for using miles to book a ticket for travel within North America, so it proved to be a good teaching experience.
Some readers may find that my recommended value of redeeming Delta Skymiles is too high, but I have personally used this method to redeem Skymiles for at least $.02 cents per mile on every flight that I have taken for years – so I know it’s possible.