By: John Rauser - Farecast Fareologist
Here’s another look at the year-over-year trend in lowest-price airfares. Each day Farecast finds the cheapest available tickets for trips up to 90 days into the future, between nearly 2,000 city pairs. The graph below compares the average lowest price airfare in 2007 vs. 2006 for flights departing between 14 to 90 days in the future, among a diverse cross-section of popular US cities.
For most of the summer, fares were tracking a little below last year, but the end of summer sales were especially intense this year, and by the end of July, 2007 fares were averaging 10% below 2006. But last week, the gap between 2006 and 2007 closed back up and today we are again tracking just a little below 2006.
What about the future? With the deep discounting we’ve seen already this summer it may be that prices have already hit the bottom for most September-October departures. However, there is hope for the procrastinator; last year we saw the average ticket price creep upward through the end of August, before hitting the annual low with some big sales in early September.