My flight to Berlin cost $200 less just by shifting my dates by two days

I was looking at a trip for early October and the direct flight was around $750. I moved my departure from a Friday to the following Tuesday and the price dropped to $550 for the same airline and route. Has anyone else found a specific day shift that always seems to work for cheaper flights?

4 comments

4 Comments

michaeltorres1mo ago

That $200 drop just from moving from Friday to Tuesday is wild but makes sense. I usually check Tuesdays and Wednesdays myself but Ive never tracked if its actually better for the routes I fly. Did you check if that Friday vs Tuesday thing holds true for other months too or was this just a one off deal for October?

lindag331mo ago

I actually see it a bit different with "wild" being a stretch for $200. I've tracked my own routes for six months and sometimes price shifts are even bigger on random Wednesdays or Thursdays, not just the Tuesday after a Friday. Did you factor in how demand changes on specific routes or just compare the two days broadly?

robins831mo ago

That bit about "demand changes on specific routes" is something I stumbled into myself a while back. I was trying to book a flight to visit my sister in Seattle and kept seeing prices jump around on random Tuesdays for no reason I could figure out. Then I realized it was because there's some weird tech conference every other week that jacks up rates for everyone flying in on those days. So yeah, you can't just look at the day of the week alone. I ended up booking on a Thursday at 3am after checking like eight different city pairs. It was exhausting but saved me $140. My personal rule now is to just set alerts and check whenever I wake up at 2am for no reason.

mason_lopez1mo ago

Read somewhere that airlines use algorithms that adjust prices based on historical booking patterns, and apparently Fridays are just peak demand days for most routes. Checked that Tuesday shift against a few different months on my usual routes and it held true most times, but not always in summer or around holidays. The bigger savings I noticed were actually on Wednesdays for transatlantic flights, which lines up with what that study from The Points Guy was saying about midweek being dead zones for business travelers.