Ryanair prices - how do they work?

manic

How do the prices work for Ryanair & other "budget" airlines?

I am trying to book flights for May & the prices seem to be low towards the end of April, then they jump up when you get into May.

Would I be better off waiting a couple of weeks and be a little bit flexible on dates, or are the May flights likely to increase even more?

alanrowell

Supply & demand, Ryanair & the like know exactly when people are likely to want to travel therefore they can price their tickets to get the maximum return.

For a given flight there will be a few tickets (number depending upon the popularity of the flight) that are priced low to encourage people to book early.

The giste of this is that if you want to get the lowest prices then you book early & for flights other people don't want.

So booking a Friday-Monday trip over a bank holiday weekend is always going to be more expensive than booking Tuesday-Thursday in the middle of January

Always sign up for their newsletters though to find "special deals" where they are desparate to get bums on seats

Woby_Tide

bank holiday at the beginning of May mean people more likely to go away, also school holiday season during May i.e. Whitsun and a second bank holiday, plus a lot of airlines start summer schedules so not sure if some routes may lose aircraft to service 'summer' routes meaning less tickets available in general, hence higher prices

jules372

Hi,
I think AlanRowell is right. They must have some cheap seats, then prices go up as they are sold. An example of this is 3 seats I booked from Liverpool to Salou in December for travel in Half term at the end of May. I paid £58 inc taxes for each ticket, they are now £190 inc tax each !! So the morale of the story is definately to book as soon as you can !
Jules

jagman_3

Booking early isnt always the way. I booked flights to Milan from Liverpool around November time. The price for 4 people was around 500 pounds. I checked again 2 weeks ago out of curriosity and the flight was down to 300 pounds. I contacted Ryanair hoping that they did the same as Easyjet ie: refund the differance if the price goes down but i was told the price you pay is the price you pay.Fortunately the flight time had changed as well and as it was a good few hours i could cancell my original booking. So that is what i did then re-booked it at the cheaper price.

budgetflyer

As Jagman says,prices can go down as well as up depending on the amount of seats on any day available. We got rattled a few months ago. Paid £60 rtn to Spain . 3 days before the flight, price dropped to £3.99 + tax EW. A real sore one for a tight git :-)

I suggest if you see a price you are happy with-BOOK IT- and don't check again

TIP

MAY 13 is a FRIDAY.
Lots of people wont fly due to superstition . You may get a cheap weekend

marylee

jagman wrote:

Booking early isnt always the way. I booked flights to Milan from Liverpool around November time. The price for 4 people was around 500 pounds. I checked again 2 weeks ago out of curriosity and the flight was down to 300 pounds. I contacted Ryanair hoping that they did the same as Easyjet ie: refund the differance if the price goes down but i was told the price you pay is the price you pay.Fortunately the flight time had changed as well and as it was a good few hours i could cancell my original booking. So that is what i did then re-booked it at the cheaper price.

Planning to go to Lourdes at the beginning of June, leaving on a Thursday and coming back on a Tuesday and staying there for only 6 days. Do you think I have to book early, the fares is quite cheap one way is £29.99 and the other is £19.99, but with taxes, it has increased to nearly £80. Also how do you contact them, I have also read that you have to re-confirm your tickets and how do you that, not very keen as they have a 0870 number. Thanks

chappy

This is what we do to get a flight even cheaper,

Instead of booking a return flight with Ryanair say £49 there £49 back, book the outbound flight oneway, say East Mids to Murcia £49, then book a seperate inbound flight from Murcia to east Mids, the Murcia to East Mids comes up at 49 euros instead of £49, you do have two booking charges then but still works out a lot cheaper doing it this way

ila

Any one know if the 'voucher collect' newspaper offers, particularly for Easyjet, are a regular thing, or even if they still do them anymore? I think they used to happen a couple of times a year but cannot recall seeing any recently.

trisontana

All airlines (plus major hotel chains and the French TGV rail system) use a very sophisticated computer program called Yield Management. This monitors the bookings on a minute-by-minute basis and adjusts the prices accordingly to achieve the twin aims of filling the most seats and generating the most income. So if the computer sees that the bookings are a bit slow it will drop the price until demand builds up. I imagine that factors affecting bookings (such as bank holidays) are built into the program.

This (long) article explains all about it :-

http://www.luc.edu/faculty/eventa/archive/su483we/yield.htm

manic

chappy wrote:

This is what we do to get a flight even cheaper,

Instead of booking a return flight with Ryanair say £49 there £49 back, book the outbound flight oneway, say East Mids to Murcia £49, then book a seperate inbound flight from Murcia to east Mids, the Murcia to East Mids comes up at 49 euros instead of £49, you do have two booking charges then but still works out a lot cheaper doing it this way

That seems to work when going through the booking process. Have you actually done it yourself?

As for the booking charges, aren't they per person & per segment of the journey? If so, then the booking fees aren't any different.