Scarcity, Inventory, and Inequity: A Deep Dive into Airline Fare Buckets
16 comments
·July 21, 2025therealbilliam
AlotOfReading
You can beat airlines. Mistake fares and fares sold below cost definitely exist, though they're a lot less common than they used to be as pricing models have improved. You're more likely to see them if you pay attention to off-season and new routes that aren't popular. Severe weather predictions and similar events can also create large price drops. I once got a $20 flight to Hawaii by simply buying just before a typhoon that didn't hit.
quotemstr
What airline?
username135
Was not expecting to read the whole thing. Very interesting.
Majromax
Was it really interesting? To me, it has certain hallmarks of an AI-generated article. In particular, it introduces the same concept several times, in different sections. For example, fare classes, nested booking, and the SABRE system each get two different introductions.
The content seems legitimate, but I felt like my time was being wasted through at minimum a lack of editing.
andy99
> To me, it has certain hallmarks of an AI-generated article.
I wondered that too.
I don't want to offend anyone, and have no idea how it was written, and I already know most of this stuff so am not the audience. But respectfully I feel like it had a lot of words for a fairly shallow overview, which feels AI-ish, plus the "delve" at the beginning got my radar up. This is sort of what I expect from Manus or one of those ersatz "research" LLMs. Anyway, it's got lots of upvotes, hopefully people are finding it useful.
(Edit to add: it's actually content marketing for some kind of [questionable, subscribe to access some hidden refund thing] travel company so I don't feel bad criticizing anymore)
xp84
"Airlines don't just sell seats - they manage a dynamic inventory of fares, divided into booking classes (fare buckets)"
that "They don't just _____ -- they ________" construction! It's definitely a "once you see it" thing that you start to see constantly in AI-generated content! I wonder why the model loves that so much
htrp
Training on content with parallelism
bigdict
"delves"
dashes
an explicit "conclusion" section at the end
itake
Yeah, there was a lot of repetitive information which made me lose interest
stronglikedan
Should have passed it through AI for a summary!
JSR_FDED
Great overview.
It would seem that the old rule of thumb of booking long in advance to get a cheaper ticket isn’t really relevant anymore?
itake
I didn’t have that take. My understanding is the only time you’re guaranteed to have low-cost ticket availability is when the flight is initially allowing booking.
Later, as more tickets are sold they have more information about the flight and thus they may make adjustments to the ticket pricing. Either opening up more low-cost tickets that were sold at the beginning of the flight or reducing the number of low-cost tickets to meet high demand.
AlotOfReading
It's worth pointing out that the initial fares will be comparatively cheap fare classes, but they may not be the cheapest prices depending on what happens with demand closer to the flight date. You can often get better fares by waiting if you're flexible.
acrooks
I anecdotally find flight prices tend to follow a cosine wave. Starting high, dipping a couple months before, and shooting back up. You can see these sorts of trends on Google Flights which will show historical pricing for your search query.
And it can be helpful if you’re very flexible. If my dates are very strict then I’ll tend to book further in advance, whereas if I have a lot of wiggle room then I’ll wait it out.
CBLT
I worked for an airline fare pricing startup. The key to getting a lower fare is to not be flying for business.
Since airlines can't outright ask you if you're flying business, they'll instead offer tradeoffs that a business flier won't make. So plan in advance, but be flexible in trading off day-of-week or time-of-day.
recently, i bought a full economy fare on an international flight. When i went to check in, they offered a really cheap upgrade to first. it was a no brainer and i was excited since the flight was gonna be ~6 hours.
i had a rude awakening when i got to the airport. This "first class" ticket was actually more like a premium economy ticket. I didn't get access to the first class check in line, no access to the lounge, no priority boarding, and the seats themselves had no extra bonus other than being in the front of the plane and slightly wider.
it was at that moment i realized there was no beating airlines and good deals aren't really that good unless you got the money to spend.