Total of Number of Seats In the Air With or Without Passengers
I was on Skype chatting with our CTO (Graeme Wallace) tonight, playing with the world wide flight schedules and we uncovered something quite unexpected.
Delta and US Airways significantly drop the number of seats in the air (flown) (with or without passengers in them) on Tuesdays.
All of the airlines drop the number of seats flown on Saturday (which was pretty common knowledge)
What this means for air travelers is pretty simple — as I have noted on several occasions — the cheapest airfares are for travel on:
- Tuesday
- Wednesday
- Saturday
This little nugget about the drop in seats flown on Tuesdays, seals the deal for me on which is the absolute cheapest day to travel.
The logic is pretty simple, supply of seats is lower on Tuesday and Saturday. Airlines use supply and demand as the major factor on deciding to release the cheapest seats — assuming the demand is about the same Tuesdays and Wednesdays (possibly even relatively on Saturday), Wednesday has the most supply.
So there you have it, at least on Delta and US Airways (on average across the nation) the absolute cheapest day to travel (based on supply of seats flown and having the cheapest published airfares) within the U.S. is — WEDNESDAY.
I posted the data in the screen shot above with a graph, it might be of interest to some to see how many more seats Southwest Airlines flies in the U.S. compared to the legacy airlines.
does the term “daily seats flown” mean empty seats?
this is a bit confusing if it doesn’t, heck it’s even confusing if it does.
Or, does it mean the number of seats filled or unfilled that are in the air on any given day. Anyway, is there a better way for you to explain it.
Soryy for being the dumb one in class.
thanks
Comment by james elwood — September 20, 2007 @ 9:00 am
Comment by Rick Seaney — September 20, 2007 @ 9:42 am
The graph is titled October 15, 2007. Is that the # of seats they are selling for that day (since it is in the future)?
Comment by Sue — September 20, 2007 @ 11:05 am
Wouldn’t the number of seats flown, however, be connected to demand? If the airlines have fewer flights on Tuesdays, that seems to poke a pretty big hole in your argument that there is equal demand on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
I think if you want to make any conclusions about the best day to buy tickets, you’d need to look at the fare and availability data, not the timetables at all.
Comment by Ian Turner — September 20, 2007 @ 12:22 pm
You show us supply, but what is the demand?
Comment by David — September 20, 2007 @ 1:10 pm
To Ian Turner. The airlines can’t adjust the number of seats flown to exactly match the demand. There are two primary reasons. They need to maintain reasonably attractive schedule, and to move the aircraft in, what they must think, is the most efficient way.
This may be irrelevant to this particular topic, but here is something one can’t possibly explain solely from supply/demand point of view. Every weekday Northwest flies two DC9-50s from Memphis to Detroit just two minutes apart. It would certainly be cheaper for them to either fly a larger aircraft, or to have just one flight on DC9-50 instead of two. It just appears that Northwest needs both aircraft in Detroit by 4:30pm.
Comment by Seva — September 20, 2007 @ 3:48 pm
Comment by Rick Seaney — September 21, 2007 @ 1:18 am
Comment by Rick Seaney — September 21, 2007 @ 1:24 am
I do not agree with your wed, tues or sat as the cheapest days to fly. I am flying on northwest to west palm beach florida on thursday march 13th from detroit and returning thursday march 20th. These are the prices as of today nov 8th. Thursday $247, wed and tues $307, sat $472. Your theory may be true on some airlines sometimes but it is clearly not the case with the numbers i have shown
Comment by Don Szachta — November 8, 2007 @ 3:11 pm
These seem to be all for domestic travel. Do you have tips on the cheapest days for travel to or from Europe. I think they are probably different.
Comment by Michael Dieterle — November 8, 2007 @ 8:39 pm