prgboy

Hello fliers:
I am trying to understand the changes in pricing at Norwegian Air. I do understand that prices in general are dynamic, and sometimes there are sales that are announced and change the price temporarily. I also understand there may be conditions for getting the good price 7, 14 or 21 days ahead of the flight (though maybe not with Norwegian).

But I now see the price changes all over the schedule, stretching for many months. Two weeks ago, I booked a direct flight CPH-JFK on January 15 for $152.50 (the flight with 3-hour layover in London was $2.50 cheaper).

Two days ago it was already $189, and today I see the price at $209.90. It was not a glitch that let me book for $152 -- the price was available for maybe a couple of weeks. Also, it does not look like a large group bought many seats on this particular flight, as all flights months around also have adjusted the price to $209.90.

How can I learn about such sales -- if it was a sale? Do I need to check the prices every day? I do

irishguy28

If you do this, you are likely to drive the price up. Repeated requests for prices on a particular route(s) on particular date(s) indicate a propensity to book a ticket - which some airlines may wish to encourage by responding to the frequent queries by raising the prices.

Often1

Until DY has a solid database from which to operate, it will have to depend on more external inputs that established carriers. RM software is sophisticated, but it is data-driven.

My advice is to find a fare which is largely acceptable and to book that. If you spend your days worrying that you might have saved $10-20, you will find that fares can increase by a lot more and then you are in a pickle.

prgboy

No, I usually look at the fare calendar for the whole month and several months around. My question was not driven by the need of saving $10, I am just trying to understand how the pricing policy works... I would understand that a particular flight would go up if I keep checking the price (I have also seen it going down!), but I wondered what triggered the airline to raise the price on ALL of those flights within 4-5 months range.
Maybe it is just something simple, like oil price surge etc.

irishguy28

All airlines do this all the time.

Set a price alert (using Google Flights, Hopper, Skyscanner, etc) on any route you like and see just how often prices fluctuate.

Here's an example of a KLM route (AMS-TXL; no other airline flies this directly, so while indirect options can be offered, they rarely if ever turn out to be the cheapest) for well into next summer and the fluctuations of the past 2 weeks [I'm waiting for it to sink to €99/€109, as it will eventually]:

klmml

There was a nice discussion of airline pricing (especially as applied to LCCs; one of the guests is from EasyJet) in this episode of the BBC Radio 4 show The Bottom Line: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04w449g

As I recall, the EasyJet representative said they used a number of factors, including competitors prices, how well sold the aircraft is at various dates before departure, how the flight performed on the same day last year, and events and special circumstances at the O&D airports.

I also wouldn't be surprised if these days some airlines use machine learning to help set prices, trained on historical results.