Elliot Fourteen months of raw fare data. The sale was not the story. What sat under it was worth far more.
By Elliot Marsh, TopTravel News
Last autumn I wrote what every travel writer writes in October. Hold off. The sale is coming. Book on Black Friday.
Then a reader named Diane emailed.
She had booked Chicago to Paris in mid-October and felt guilty about buying early. Her sister booked the same route on Black Friday weekend and paid sixty dollars more.
Was Diane smart, or lucky? I could not tell her. Nobody publishes what a fare cost on the day it appeared.
So I asked someone who keeps the receipts.
A flight app had been writing down every fare it saw, for years
RatePunk scans airline and booking-site fares around the clock. Every time it checks a route, it logs the price. Over a month, on one route, that is thousands of prices.
I emailed the founder, Janis, and asked for the raw file. His answer, roughly – we have said this for years and nobody believes a company that sells flight alerts. Take the numbers. Print what you find.
The Black Friday sale did not even beat October
I took 446 routes from the US to Europe the system watched in all fourteen months and averaged every economy fare, month by month.
Fares found in October averaged $755 a round trip. In November, sale month, $766. January was the cheapest of all, at $716.
So Diane was not lucky. October simply was not worse.
Winter is still the cheaper season to book. Fares found in summer ran $360 to $480 higher. That advice is free and I stand by it.
But the month was never where the real money was.
Inside one bad month, the same trip swung by $661 in two days
July is one of the worst months to buy a flight. So I went into July and picked one trip.
San Francisco to Rome. Out 17 August, back 26 August. Economy.
Nothing about it changed for five weeks. Same airports, same dates. The only thing that moved was the day somebody checked.
For the first half of July it sat between $458 and $609.
On 27 July it was $606.
On 28 July it was $285.
On 29 July it was $946.
The same San Francisco-Rome round trip, priced every day in July 2026.
And the $285 did not last the day. It showed up that morning. By evening the same trip was $701.
No sale, no announcement, nothing on a calendar.
It was not a freak. It happens on most trips
I ran the same check on every US to Europe trip the system watched for five straight weeks. 5,082 of them.
On the typical trip, the best day came in $158 below an ordinary day. On one trip in four, $256 or more.
And the cheap ones do not wait. Close to half the fares the system flags are gone inside a day. Seven in ten within two.
So the question was never which month, or which weekday. It is whether anything is watching on the morning your trip drops.
You are not. You have a job.
You tell it your trip once, and it does the watching
In the RatePunk app you create a price alert: where from, where to, your dates, how many are flying, and the most you will pay.
San Francisco to Rome, 17 to 26 August, $400. That alert would have buzzed on the morning of 28 July with the route, the dates, the price and a link straight to the booking.
Dates not fixed yet? Set a window: earliest departure, latest return, how many nights.
No trip in mind? Skip the setup. From your home airport, it sends only the fares its AI Deal Score rates 80 or higher against their own history. From US airports this summer:
→ Houston to Madrid: $173 round trip, usually $691 (rated 98/100)
→ New York to Cairo: $175 round trip, usually $838 (rated 98/100)
→ Miami to San Francisco: $130 round trip, usually $440 (rated 93/100)
→ Chicago to London: $46 round trip, usually $693 (rated 98/100)
It is not a booking site. You book with the airline or booking site yourself.
If you fly twice a year, do the sums
Two trips a year, and you rarely travel alone. Four tickets.
At $158 a ticket, the ordinary case and not the Rome one, that is $632 a year lost to the morning you happened to look. On one trip in ten the gap ran to $362 or more. Land in one of those and the same four tickets keep $1,448.
No hack, no secret site. Ordinary published fares that dip for a few hours while nobody is looking. And not only from big cities. The same happens from Phoenix, Seattle and Denver.
Put an alert on the one trip you know you are taking next year, and see what lands in a month.
I wrote back to Diane with the numbers. This October, my column says something different.
