mahasamatman

That's an urban myth. In my experience, I almost always get better prices booking early. I monitor prices, and see price drops less than 5% of the time.

With no more change fees, there's little to no reason to take the risk unless you have cash flow problems.

jsloan

And in my experience, I almost never get better prices booking early, to the point where I've mostly stopped looking. And clearly OP is seeing the same thing -- as are the number of other people who post something similar every couple of weeks. Whatever routes you're flying, keep flying them. But it's certainly not an "urban myth" that the sweet spot for pricing is somewhere between ~3 months and ~3 weeks prior to departure. UA does everything it can to make it difficult to predict that, of course, but it's a good starting point.

I don't choose to loan UA money at 0% interest in fear of some future price increase.

dkc715

Remember to price using the multi-segment feature. I have found that in many cases I can substantially cut the fare. And book one-ways so you can re-ticket if the fare drops. Rarely does a RT save anything domestically.

FlyingRobot

"Saver" awards all but vanished when United switch to dynamic pricing on the points. Seems loosely based on $ cost of the flight now, although I do see some deals last minute.

HNLbasedFlyer

That just tells me UA isn't terribly interested in selling seats that far out unless someone want to pay a lot of money - or - UA wants the flexibility to change the schedule that far out.

JimInOhio

That begs the question why AA and DL apparently see the issue from a very different standpoint if their J fares are showing half of what UA wants.

evol

We all see the world so differently, I beg to differ. I'm with jsloan, I feel like the urban myth is that booking 6-9 months out serves any purpose at all (unless as jsloan stated award space or PZ available) To the OP who wants to buy tickets way out, should go ahead and purchase and monitor for a price drop, or book refundable.

As far as the price difference between competition, kina depends on where we all are based right? IMO, in HNL UA stays very competitive (i'm sure someone can disagree with me here YMMV.)

And to agree on the subject of no change fees, then yes buy now and alter your trip when you find IME Refundable fares are more affordable than they used to be, as of very recently (?), so i've been making use of them, even if I change to a NONREF once I have the trip locked in and then collect some refund.

FlyingRobot

Based on what? Have they announced as much or are you guessing based on something? In the 20+ years I've been flying United, booking way in advance was always the best way to get low fares and Saver awards. It used to be that going to ExpertFlyer and looking up rate codes would return all sorts of 21+, 30+, and 60+ rate codes. I still see 50+% price variance on AA and DL, but UA only has about 5-10% variance for advance purchase fares.

Kacee

If another full service carrier offers better fares, I say book it! Chances are the product will be better than what UA offers, too. Shed the shackles of UA status and get off the hamster wheel!
Agree that UA is likely holding off on discounting, and that we may indeed see cheaper fares later, but OP mentioned flights as early as June, and I don't think it's too early at all to be checking prices for international itineraries four to five months out. Fares for European summer travel never really dropped last year. In fact, I would advise anyone who sees a good fare for Europe or Asia through September or October to grab it right now. That does not mean I advocate buying an overpriced UA ticket, however, quite the opposite.
Not a myth at all. There's quite a bit of data on this question. Surveys have shown the best time to buy domestic tix is about 60 days out. International it's a bit longer, and tends to vary by region, but for Asia and Europe it's about 120 days out.

I certainly don't agree that OP should be tying up large amounts of money on overpriced UA itineraries. That's called "UA wins" since it's going to keep the money regardless where fare prices go, and will likely provide a disincentive for OP to book a cheaper ticket on a better carrier.

dkc715

Actually, yes, management has said just that, as recently as last year. Can't remember which earnings call, but they specifically said they sold too much advance inventory at lower prices and have changed the software to allow for more last minute, high fare bookings. Ever since they made those comments I have also seen the the same situation: fares start out very high, regardless of the competition, and gradually come back to earth. Some of the best domestic fares are now found 1-3 weeks out. YMMV. Ofc, if your particular flights are full you could get screwed waiting.

AI software is increasingly playing games with historically favorable booking windows which are very hard for mere mortals to out-guess.

Lux Flyer

No it's not. UA is very disciplined on not discounting things too early and is part of their current financial success, getting people to buy at a price point the market will bear. Here's a search for a mid-week set of flights next November. UA is barely making any discounts available in both first and economy. Zero chance UA is going to fill a 739 mid-con with full J fares, or solely YBME fares. There's no incentive to discount heavily at this point. People who are booking 6+ months in advance, whether domestic or internationally, tend to be locked in on their dates and times they need to fly. You can always lower prices closer in if you aren't seeing bookings come in like you expect. You can't raise prices on people who already purchased their flights if you short-changed yourself and discounted too early.



Because DL and AA aren't as bullish as UA is, which AA/DL's decisions are also reflected in their financials. And as much as people want to say UA's success is due to death of the product by a thousand "Kirby Kuts", TRASM doesn't grow by 26% because of cutting the product. I don't think many people are interested in following AA's example right now when it comes to pricing decisions.

prestonh

That's quite bourgeois. Not everyone trying to save has cash flow 'problems ' perhaps they have less risk appetite than you do or does not trust the airline with their money.

gold23

Wife and I booked INTL J to Europe in early Decembe for a trip in March, finding a price we were comfortable with and pulling the trigger. Requires a connection using an EU carrier, and had the typical UA options as to where we'd connect. Parents want to come if their health holds up, so I've been monitoring same time period on an almost daily basis since. It's been fascinating. Some days it has been slightly more expensive than our cost (one reasonably timed stop with an EWR or NYC departure is our only requirement), while most days J is now literally twice the price. The doubling price is generally seen on LH routes, with LX remaining reasonable but switching up their connecting flights for some reason. In terms of available space, what I can see on UA and expertflyer really isn't a whole lot of movement.

Is this the EU carriers playing around, making less space available to UA, UA algorithm gone wiggy, or what?

jcturnbull

FWIW regarding advanced pricing, I bought business(/first/whatever you wanna call what they market, but it's a polaris wide body) RT tickets EWR to Hawaii over Christmas last year near schedule-open (early 2022) for arond 3k pp. Monitored the prices all the way to departure. Business class never went lower (bought the last two of the fare bucket) than about 4k. A couple spikes to 6k. Economy, on the other hand, started out at 1200 pp and dropped below 500 close-in. So, maybe dkc715 is onto something that they realized they sold too many cheap fares early on. That said, I recently booked a transcon for like 700 in P for mid-June two weeks ago. Now I don't see anything below $1,000 for EWR-LAX. But then again, SFO-EWR is 2200-3400 mid-June, probably because they feel they have strong pricing power? I think the far-out pricing could be route and seasonally dependent such that cheaper fares can be found if you know when and where to look.

All this said, I was looking at Coachella tickets for the new special flight they are running the second weekend, and yesterday mid-day it was available for $640 RT for 2, and now the flight is nearly sold out for $3,300 for 2. This anecdote is to say that if you have a particularly popular event on need-to-be dates, in my experience booking as soon as possible saves substantial money. Even if it is an interest-free loan to United. To me, this bet of booking early seems worth it if you are willing to make use of the no change fee policy the big 3 now have if the price drops on a carrier you intend to fly again.

My $0.02, YMMV

Edit: same phenomenon as the above Hawaiian anecdote when I went skiing in Aspen, booking 1-stop flights 8 months out. Price never dropped, per my monitoring (shoutout Google Flights, you're an amazing tool),

angetenar

If you are based in LAX, try looking at flights out of SFO as well, and then tacking on a short repositioning flight. For example, there was the $2.2k SFO-FCO R/T J fare a few months ago, but nothing similar out of LAX. On the topic of award flights, I've never booked an award that wasn't at a saver rate, so keep looking I guess?