Revealed: Why finding the cheapest plane ticket using ‘hacks’ is a waste of time (but there’s an exception to the rule, say researchers)

Browse your browser’s incognito mode or use a VPN to pretend you live somewhere else – trying to get cheaper flights with popular hacks like this is largely a waste of time.

That’s according to a new study that examined how airfares are set by a major US airline. Dylan Walsh explains on the website of the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, that the pricing system discovered in the study – which is typical of airlines around the world – is contrary to the expectations of most travelers.

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

First, the research shows that airlines do not consider how customers seek a balance between comfort and price when they fly, sometimes forgoing comfort in favor of a cheaper ticket. Instead, they set the price of seats for each individual flight separately, “although changing the price of a flight affects the way people think about all their options,” Natan told Walsh.

Second, the study found that airlines have a small, fixed-price menu that they assign to tickets for each flight, with large differences between prices, Walsh reports. He says: “Maybe they sell the first 30 economy tickets at the lowest price, then the next 30 tickets at the next higher price and so on.”

The investigation found that even when the airline wanted to raise the price of a ticket by £80 ($100), it only did so about a fifth of the time, so the figure fits into this menu of pre-determined options. Prices, reports Walsh.

Third, the study found that there was a “lack of coordination” between airline departments. Natan told Walsh that airline pricing teams “select the price menu without using their internal demand forecasts,” which can lead to underpricing of tickets.

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

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

Nevertheless, there is a ray of hope for bargain hunters: Natan, who conducted the research together with scientists from the university ChicagoYale and the University of Texas in Austin, Walsh said that there is a fixed booking time, which you should avoid if you want to secure better prices.

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

The investigation comes amid reports of “calculated misery” – a theory that airlines can deliberately worsen the customer experience 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 article for the New Yorker, in which he described an attempt by the airline industry to increase its profits by producing inferior basic products and then offer upgrades in exchange for a fee.

He said: “For fees to work, there has to be something worth avoiding.” This requires, at some level, a strategy that can be called “calculated misery”.