Originally Posted by
jsloan
The internet has been abound with this type of advice for years — and fares keep going up. To the extent that any of these patterns are real — as soon as the pattern becomes public, the airline will go and change it. UA changes prices thousands, if not millions, of times per day. There is no single best time to buy airfare, and there probably hasn’t been in at least 20 years. The best strategy is to learn the market and strike when the price seems reasonable (and, with no change fees, you can keep checking afterwards to see if the fare has dropped, and capture the difference as a future flight credit).
OP: You’re probably running into some daily inventory adjustment. Maybe somebody was trying to set a job for midnight GMT and messed it up. In general, patterns are mostly in the eyes of the observer.
We've heard of these 'conspiracy theories' before, and I too have thought a few times that there MUST be some funny-business going on with United's pricing.
Trying to find logical explanations, could it be possible that in OPs case, a TA (or suchlike) was somehow reserving multiple seats on OP's flights for a prospective group of travelers, thus reducing inventory. But then never completing the purchase, and thus releasing that inventory again a few hours later, once they couldn't secure a confirmation by the travel group. Maybe repeating the process the next day at the exact same time in exactly the same fashion?
Trying to work out plausible scenarios that would appear in a way that the OP seems to have witnessed....