Because prices have important effects on these individual decisions, microeconomics is frequently called price theory.

– Edgar K. Browning

Black Friday is coming! This means that your close relationships with money will break down soon. However, before this separation, there is another big challenge in this relationship- Thanksgiving is coming too. What is your plan for this small vacation? Sleeping? Studying? Or traveling? Although traveling costs a lot of money, especially air tickets, we can still save a lot of money from some small strategies. 

Here are some saving tips!

• When to buy tickets?

First, before we buy tickets we need to know why air tickets price will be cheaper. Suppose that an airline wants to attract more passengers, so they schedule more frequent flights. Since the number of passengers who want to buy air tickets at that time is fixed which means each flight has fewer passengers, the airline will operate those flights with empty seats. For the airline, each flight cost has already been incurred (In economics, such cost is called “sunk cost” ). So if the airline wants to recover their cost, they would decrease the price of those empty seats to attract more passengers (According to the”law of demand” which means lower the price of a good would increase quantity of consumers wish to buy). In other words, the airline set the price higher than the cost of the airline meal it provides, they would decrease their cost a lot.

Usually, air ticket prices will suddenly decrease the price one week before it flies.

Note! Before the vacation, this way cannot use since it is impossible to see before the flight there are many tickets left

• Buy non-peak hours tickets!

Since there are too many airlines one day need to flight, airports have been more congested during peak hours which delays many flights. In order to deal with these problems, airlines need to allocate flights more rational. For those peak hours, they add peak-hour fees into your air tickets. And for those non-peak hours, they lower the price of some unusually hours like early morning and midnight. These are the times when airports has less congestions. Such a price differential would induce passengers to rearrange their schedules and reduce congestion during peak travel hours (This technique is called peak-load pricing ).

So, although some flights at midnight or early morning are uncomfortable sometimes, you can save a lot of money for your later travel plans!

• Try to find some discounts!

To those airlines, our taste or preferences also affect their profit, so since they provide more discounts, we are more likely to buy tickets.

So，some airlines provide some member deals.

For example, if you always buy tickets from one specific airline, they will count flying miles as reward points which you can use to exchange coupons. It seems really attractive and economical. Of course, it doesn’t mean that those companies sacrifice their profits to benefit buyers. Although they raise some costs, since these reward services are relatively rare which means among one hundred flights they provide one “worthy” coupon. Thus, the average cost is really low and close to zero for those big companies. In fact, if the airline invests one dollar on rewards system and the feedback profits are higher than one dollar (Economists would conclude that marginal revenue higher than marginal cost), it will earn more profits. So, member deals benefit not only our consumers, but also sellers.

^0^ Hopefully these tips will help you when you plan your trip!