How to tell if a flight price is good

You are looking at a fare. It says $612. Is that good?

You cannot answer that, and neither can anyone else, because the number carries no information on its own. $612 is a poor fare on a route that usually sells for $380 and an excellent one on a route that usually sells for $900. The banner on the page saying “great deal” is not evidence. It is a button that is always on.

What follows is the method for answering the question properly. It takes about ten minutes per route the first time, and it works whether or not you ever use a tool to do it for you.

The only comparison that matters

A fare has to be compared against itself: the same route, the same rough season, the same cabin. Everything else is noise dressed as a benchmark.

Three specific reference points are worth establishing, in this order.

The normal range. Not a single number, a band. Almost every route has a price it sits inside most of the time, with a floor it rarely goes below and a ceiling it hits during peak weeks. On a busy transatlantic route out of a major hub, that band might run from $450 to $800. Knowing the band is most of the work, because it turns any fare you see into a position rather than a number.

The seasonal shape. The same route has different bands in different months. New York to Lisbon in February and New York to Lisbon in July are, for pricing purposes, two different routes. A fare that would be remarkable in July can be unremarkable in February. Comparing across seasons is the single most common way people talk themselves into a bad booking.

The recent low. Where the fare has been in the last month or two, as opposed to where it theoretically could go. This is the number that tells you whether today is a dip or a plateau.

Get those three and the fare in front of you stops being ambiguous.

Working out the normal range by hand

You do not need special access to do this. The tools are free and the technique is unglamorous.

Start with a flexible-date view. Google Flights, Skyscanner, and Kayak all have a calendar grid or a “cheapest days” view that shows a month of departure dates at once, with a price on each. Open it for your route. Ignore the single cheapest cell, which is usually an awkward itinerary at an awkward hour. Look at what most of the cells say. That clustering is your normal range, and it is visible in about thirty seconds.

Then widen to a few months. Change the month and repeat. Four or five months of grids will show you the seasonal shape clearly enough: which months sit low, which spike, and how large the gap is. Write the numbers down. This is the part people skip, and it is the part that does the work.

Check the price graph if there is one. Google Flights shows how the fare for your selected dates has moved recently, along with a note about whether the current price is low, typical, or high for that route. Treat that note as a useful second opinion rather than a verdict. It is tied to the exact dates you have selected, and your dates may not be the interesting ones.

Look at both ends of the route. If your city has more than one airport, or your destination does, run the grid for each. Differences of $150 or more between two airports 40 miles apart are common, particularly where a low-cost carrier operates from the secondary field, a pattern worth checking by name for several major metros.

Ten minutes of that leaves you with something no banner can give you: a range you trust, for the route you are actually flying.

What counts as meaningfully below

Once you have a range, the second question is how far below it a fare has to sit before it is worth acting on.

A useful working threshold is 20% below the route’s normal price, with two adjustments.

The first is absolute value. A 25% drop on a $110 short-haul fare saves you less than a tank of fuel. A 15% drop on a $1,400 long-haul fare is real money. Percentages are how you spot a drop; dollars are how you decide whether to care.

The second is volatility. Some routes move constantly and a 10% swing means nothing on them. Others sit flat for weeks at a time, and on those, a 10% move is a genuine event. You learn which is which from the grids you already pulled.

What does not count: a $20 move on a $600 fare. A “sale” that lands the fare inside its ordinary range. A price that is lower than yesterday but higher than last month. Movement is not the same as a drop, and confusing the two is why most advertised flight deals are not deals.

Different routes behave differently

Three rough archetypes, because the method above needs calibrating to what you are looking at.

Competitive short-haul. Several carriers, multiple daily departures, at least one low-cost operator. Prices move often and the band is wide. Cheap fares recur, so patience is cheap and a single dip is rarely your last chance.

Thin long-haul. One or two carriers, maybe a single daily flight, often a smaller aircraft. The band is narrower and higher, and it moves in steps rather than smoothly as fare buckets sell out. Real drops are rarer here, and missing one costs you more.

Seasonal leisure. Beach and ski routes where demand collapses and returns on a calendar. The band barely describes the route; the month does. Compare only against the same season, never against the annual average, which is a number no traveller ever pays.

The part where this falls apart

Everything above works. The problem is not the method, it is that the method has an owner, and the owner is you.

Establishing a range takes ten minutes. Keeping it current does not take ten minutes once. It takes ten minutes, repeatedly, for every route you might fly, for as long as you might fly it, with the discipline to check on a schedule rather than when you happen to remember. Fares move whether or not anyone is looking. The drop you wanted almost certainly happened on a Tuesday afternoon while you were doing something else.

That is the honest reason most people end up paying the normal price. Not ignorance of the technique. The impossibility of running it by hand, indefinitely, across every trip they would consider.

Flydar exists to run exactly that comparison on your behalf: you describe the routes you would actually take, and the only time you hear anything is when a fare has dropped clearly below what that route normally costs. Nothing when it rises. Nothing when a sale banner appears over an ordinary price.

You can also just do it yourself. The method is above, it is free, and it is more than most travellers ever apply.