How to buy a ticket as cheaply as possible or hit by monitoring on dynamic pricing

What is the most profitable way to buy a ticket?

Any more or less advanced web user knows options like

• buy in advance
• search routes with transfers
• hidden-city ticketing
• monitor charter flights
• search in incognito browser mode
• use cute airline cards, all kinds of bonuses and promo codes

The Tinkoff Magazine somehow did the full list of life hacks , I won’t repeat it

. Now answer the question - how often did you end up in the situation when you bought a ticket, and then it became cheaper?

I got in and it was a little disappointing. This happens most often in the summer season because of a thing called dynamic pricing.

Here is a real schedule of price changes for today's flight A4 203 Rostov-on-Don - St. Petersburg Azimut Airlines. The x-axis is the hours before departure, the y-axis is the ticket price



The schedule shows that 20 hours before departure, a ticket can be bought at the lowest possible price - 4090 rubles. At the same time, for 72 hours a ticket costs more than 2 times more expensive - 9,390 rubles. The chart was received stupidly by parsing cron once every 15 minutes, entering the results into the database and visualizing the data using Chart.js. Who cares - this is proof. Now there is data only on flights between Rostov and St. Petersburg, but it’s not a problem to fasten other cities of the route network.

Such price fluctuations, as I understand it, are caused by the fact that the dynamic pricing algorithm for sales dynamics feels that not all tickets can be sold out and reduce the price, guided by the logic “it is better to sell the remaining tickets a little cheaper than leave empty seats”. In other words,the higher demand and fewer seats, the higher the price of tickets .

An analysis of 84 flights between Rostov and St. Petersburg gave a picture like this (on the x axis - days before departure, on the y axis - ticket price)



From it we see that the really best saving strategy is to buy tickets in advance (starting from 80 days before the trip, the price starts to rise ) However, from here we see that if we say 30 days before the trip, it’s best not to rush and wait a little longer - there is a chance that the price will drop from 9100 rubles to 6100 and you will save 3000 rubles. And given the information from the example above, it is likely that 20 hours before departure, the price may again be the lowest possible.

In connection with the foregoing, I have the following questions for the habrasociety

1) Questions for those who work in the industry .
Is the price dynamics similar for other airlines or is it a special case of Azimut Airlines?
What factors influence a priori pricing? The number of days before departure, day of the week (holidays or school holidays), time of year, time of day, what else?

2) Questions for representatives of agents (Aviasales, Skyscanner, OneTwoTrip Yandex.Flights, Tinkoff.Travels, etc.).
Do you collect data on price dynamics? If so, what do you need to access this data? Are there any affiliate APIs already, if not, can you upload from the database?

3) A question for everyone who flies .
What services of notifications of cheap flights to the destination you are using? Do you need a price drop forecast service in the direction you are interested in in the selected date range?

Personally, I use an Aviasales subscription that looks like this:



It has two significant drawbacks:

1. Low responsiveness. Notifications can only come by email. Personally, I rarely look at mail, I would prefer a Telegram bot
2. There is no forecast. Personally, before signing up, I would like to see how likely it is that the price will go down based on historical statistics.

In addition, letters come very badly. Now, it seems that the Aviasales subscription does not work at all - the link to confirm the new subscription does not come.

There are also subscriptions of Yandex.Flights and tutu.ru but, as I understand it, they allow you to track price changes only for a specific date.

Plus, it’s not clear how often all these services check prices - once a minute, hour, day?

PS: By the way, infa is relevant not only for airlines, but also for travel by train. There is an article on dynamic pricing on the Russian Railways website .

PPS: What else can I read about the topic
https://habr.com/ru/company/iqplanner/blog/297540/
https://habr.com/ru/company/friifond/blog/291032/