
When to buy airline tickets: Getting the cheapest flights - mblakele
http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2011/02/when_buy_airline_tickets
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calbear81
Don't forget the Farecast technology at Bing Travel which predicts whether you
should buy or wait for your airline ticket which has a fairly high accuracy
rate.

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knowledgesale
On a related note, is there a sensible implementation for cheap flights
hunting with flexible dates?

Guys from Hipmunk have been promising it for about a year by now. And yet I
still find myself forced to try different dates manually.

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joshwa
<http://matrix.itasoftware.com/> has a great feature (among MANY others) that
will show you a calendar of a month's worth of fares.

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mshafrir
They also have a fairly powerful route language -
[http://matrix1.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/help/advanced-
to...](http://matrix1.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/help/advanced-topics)

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ojbyrne
Admittedly anecdontal, but I've always found 4 weeks before to be the optimal
point.

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blacksmythe
Except for holiday travel, where the rule seems to be the earlier, the better.

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eljaco
The articles don't seem to give a specific answer (aside from a time and day
of the week,) but sounds like the consensus is 3 p.m. EST on Tuesday, your
best bet being 8 weeks before traveling.

From personal experience, once you hit the 3 week mark, you're pretty much SOL
until the last few days, since most seats have been sold at that point. If
there are still plenty of seats (orbitz sometimes shows you the seating
chart,) you'll have better results than on fuller flights.

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corin_
Actually it did give a pretty specific answer, which was indeed 3pm EST on
Tuesday 8 weeks before.

