Find the best time to book.
Airline revenue management releases seats in fare buckets, and the cheapest buckets are neither open at the very start of the selling period nor available at the end. That creates a window — roughly three weeks to two months out for domestic leisure, two to five months for international, and considerably earlier for peak holiday periods when demand is certain. Booking before the window means the cheap buckets have not opened; booking after means they have sold and only expensive inventory remains, which is where fares climb steeply. Date flexibility is a separate lever worth up to about 20 percent, since midweek departures sit in cheaper buckets than Friday and Sunday ones.
Low-fare window
Book between the window bounds for the trip type
Late booking uplift
Uplift % = 1.4 x (days inside the window's lower bound), capped at 60%
Airlines open a selling period with a limited allocation in the cheapest fare buckets, and those buckets are frequently not yet loaded a year out. Very early bookers often pay a mid-tier fare because the discount inventory has not been released to the market yet.
Fare buckets are priced by day of week and departure time. Friday evening and Sunday afternoon flights carry the highest demand and the dearest buckets; Tuesday and Wednesday departures, and early morning slots, sit in cheaper ones. Shifting by two or three days routinely finds 10 to 20 percent.