AIRFARE By flying in off hours, you'll get cheapest seats

The red-eye is likely the cheapest way to go.
By JACKIE COHEN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
SAN FRANCISCO -- Election Day may have divided the country, but it united the airlines. U.S. carriers agree that xs reverted to fall 2001 levels for that day, in part because consumers feared elevated security risks.
Traveling on Election Day, though, was no guarantee of a bargain airfare. Even with demand so low, fares still varied widely.
But the question of pricing on Election Day does illustrate several points about airfares today and helps illuminate strategies that can help you find the lowest prices in other periods.
On any given flight, not many tickets are priced alike, even when there's a fire sale as there was on Nov. 2. Indeed, the quest for the lowest fare is more of a moving target than airline promotions let on.
Fluctuations
"Discount fares fluctuate, and the lowest fares can sell out, [although] sometimes they might return closer to flight time," said Geoff Silvers, director of merchandising at Orbitz. "The airlines change the number of economy seats available for purchase based on what kind of yield they're getting for their fares at any given date or time."
While many people argue that the earliest fare hunters catch the best deals, that doesn't always jibe with the airlines' supply-and-demand models.
Airlines want "the maximum possible revenue on each departure we can get," said David Messing, a spokesman for Continental Airlines. "We look at past booking behavior to determine which combinations of fares yields the most revenues, while remaining competitive with other airlines."
The actual math gets tricky, but success or failure depends on the integrity of the booking data. So specialists closely monitor booking behavior and take careful note of changes.
"If market conditions change, either because the economy has shifted or demand has fallen off, that's where the more subjective analysis comes into play," said Messing.
Tickets set aside
While the analysis is intended to prevent overbooking, airlines deliberately set aside tickets for last-minute purchases in order to fetch the highest prices for some seats. The challenge lies in predicting just how many people want to fly by the seats of their pants.
With pricing in mind, some discount airlines don't allow advance ticket purchases of more than a few months.
Generally speaking, booking at least one week in advance, if not two, brings down costs.
For further penny pinching, look into midweek departures, especially midday. Go in the morning or after work, even midday though, and the price moves up with demand.
"People want to fly on business in the morning, say between 9 and 11 a.m., and then return at the end of their work day, between 5 and 7 p.m.," said Tim Gordon, senior vice president of the airline tickets group at Priceline. "The cheapest times to fly during the week are before or after these business-travel times."
Saturday evenings
Another off-peak travel time: Saturday evenings, when airports seem deserted. This contrasts with the first half of the day, when airports are teeming with families starting their vacations.
Of course, some Saturday morning traffic is a carryover from Friday, the most popular day of the week for departures, with Sunday being the most popular return date. Monday morning gets some of the Sunday spillover, while Thursday evening finds people trying to beat the Friday crunch. In a nutshell, flights on these days price higher.
"Our average customer books a four-day trip, usually over a weekend," said Kari Swartz, product manager for leisure travel at Expedia. "Most people have a finite amount of vacation days and want to make the most of it while rationing it out. But that costs money. If you can be flexible about flight times, you will find bargains."
Taking the red-eye
The most flexible travelers opt for red-eye flights, which tend to be the cheapest of all. Despite the fact that many midnight planes fly half empty, the airlines continue to schedule wee-hour jaunts in order to position their fleet for the morning's departures.
Other pricing factors have nothing to do with timing. The greater the number of air carriers traveling a particular route, the lower the fares get; conversely, when an airline has a monopoly on a particular destination, things get pricey.
Of course, things can get cheap when booking online, but many shoppers don't realize that Web fares are exclusive to the medium.
"If you book over the phone, you get charged a processing fee just for calling and you might not be told the lowest fares, which are on the Web," said Tom Parsons, CEO of BestFares.com.
"The airline industry doesn't want you to talk to a human, but instead go through a computerized system because it will reduce their costs by hundreds of millions of dollars."
Where the airlines' costs run the lowest, so do the fares.