checking for price drops
 

Is there a time of day or even a usual day that I should check for price changes? Do the prices change more than once a day? Any hints?

Checking for price drops
 

When they have annouced sales to the location I would check to see if the prices have dropped. I also check in the middle of the week to see if they have dropped.

Tendencies, yes; certainties, no.
 

Lately, fares drop at 9pm EDT Monday Night, and rise back to or above the previous levels at about 9pm EDT Tuesday Night. There has been an instance in which the day of the week shifted by one, and the fares were low only on a Wednesday. It doesn't happen every week, and the rules are different every time they do it.
Rational planning by consumers is difficult.

I'm glad someone asked this, because I've been wondering too. I'm planning a trip from LAX to PWM and have been watching fares and trying to figure out how the pricing schedule worked.

Use Yapta-- it will check automatically and notify you of changes.

www.yapta.com

Looking at BOS-SFO-BOS. Fare is an outrageous $750! :mad:
What's wrong with B6?

There are plenty of lower fares published. Welcome to the wonderful world of yield management.

Published yes, bookable no.

I don't get what you mean about a flight being published but not bookable?

I'm shocked to see the prices from JetBlue from LAX to JFK to PWM-- over $900. Their pricing is so high I'm sadly going to have to look elsewhere, and I love JetBlue.

There are several components that go in to airfare pricing. One part is the published fares. Basically that is a list of costs on a route subject to various other restrictions. For JFK-PWM it looks something like this:

Export from Wandering Aramean Travel Tools
Beyond the published fares there is also the need to meet the fare rules requirements. For JetBlue this basically means the seasonality restrictions (some fares are only valid in the summer or winter, for example) and day of travel restrictions (sale fares are often limited to Tuesday/Wednesday only). On other airlines the rules can include minimum/maximum stay issues or even time of day limitations (DL/US Shuttle is the most famous of these).

Finally, the ticket must also meet the inventory requirements. The airline will, for any given flight, be selling different quantities of seats in the different price buckets. They generally are willing to sell all their seats at full "Y" prices but the discounted buckets (U, O, M, E, V on JetBlue) are often limited in quantity. Otherwise they'd sell the whole plane out at $49 o/w and never make any money.

You need all three factors to line up for the price to be right. If you have a specific date that you're looking at I'll be happy to give you more specific details as to why what you're looking at is pricing the way it is.

thanks for all the help. I subscribed to the service recommended and it notified me of a price drop this afternoon. I got $18. Since only a few seats have been sold for my flights in Sept I will keep looking for more drops.

OCT 2010, I flew BOS - Shanghai China - BOS For $850 including all taxes and fees.