Seasonality
Seasonality is a huge factor in the price of airline tickets. Here’s a quick seasonality guide:
| Early Year | Late Year | |
|---|---|---|
| High Season | June – August | December 10 – January 10 |
| Shoulder Season | April – May | September – October |
| Low Season | January – March | November – early December |
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* Note: these dates are not hard and fast. Each airline and country has their own variations on seasonality dates.
The reason for price changes over seasonal dates is pretty logical: more people around the world have time off to travel or wish to visit friends and family during specific months and airlines take advantage of it. If that’s when you have time available, expect pricing to be higher. We recommend booking about six months in advance if you’ll be traveling during peak season so you can take advantage of the lowest fares. If you’re traveling for an extended period of time, work around seasonality in order to keep your costs lower.
Priorities
Where you want to go and when will most certainly affect the cost of your tickets. When putting your trip together, consider the places you’re trying to hit and how close together geographically (or far apart) they are. We recommend starting by brainstorming everything you’d love to do. Then take a step back and look at that list, along with a good atlas. Think about how much time you have to travel and how important your time is in each of the places you’ve listed. Use a ranking system to put those destinations in order of importance.
When thinking about this in terms of your ticket budget, consider that some places can be more expensive (with regards to flights and daily spending) than others. You may have to balance the places you really want to see with how much money you have to spend to get there. Does seeing the St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow and its $1000 price increase make you rethink going there? Perhaps omit it this time around.
Flexibility
Generally speaking, the more flexible you are the less money you’ll be paying for your tickets (depending on, of course, where you’re going). If you have partial dates and airlines, or a very specific and non-linear order of stops, it limits the choices of fares your agent can use to assemble your trip. If you’re more flexible with your travel dates and airlines, they’ll be able to shift your itinerary to the least expensive, most direct route, dates and airlines.
Conversely, when you’re on the road it will be more expensive to maintain your flexibility. While many tickets are date-changeable, generally speaking it costs money every time you want to change your travel dates.
The general rule of flexibility: The more flexible you are before you buy the tickets the less money you’ll spend overall, the more flexible you want to be after you buy the tickets the more money you’ll spend overall.
Destination order
Generally speaking, the least expensive route is the shortest way around the earth geographically. But not always. Sometimes it’s a matter of availability, and sometimes of airline routing and schedules.
When constructing your route, be sure to tell your Personal Travel Consultant where you want to visit, not what you think may be the cheapest way to do it. If you live in Las Vegas and are planning on going to Vietnam, tell us that. While a flight from Los Angeles to Bangkok may be cheaper than flights from Las Vegas to Hanoi, you will still have the expenses of getting to and from the major gateways.
Ganguar Festival, Jaipur, India
Airlines
Again flexibility is key. If there’s a specific airline that you simply must fly on it may force you into a more expensive ticket. That airline may not be available on the dates you want, may not have the best schedule to line up with other flights or simply might not be the cheapest on that particular route. Sure, flying to Singapore may give you the opportunity to fly on Singapore Airlines, but that’s not usually the cheapest way to get there.
If you’re looking to fly on an airline because of a frequent flier program, it may be worth spending a couple extra hundred dollars to you to get the miles, but then again, maybe it won’t. Be sure to advise your travel consultant if you have airline requests and we’ll let you know the difference in price to use something specific. Use your airline budget to decide which of these options to do and which to skip.
