The truth about those ‘bargain’ airfare sales

Were you tempted by the Black Friday and Cyber Monday airfare deals? Were they really the bargains that airlines made them out to be, or are the same deals available at other times?

Traveller surveyed some of the airfare deals available during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. Among the highlights, Qantas was offering flights from Melbourne to Queenstown starting from $549 economy return. That’s a deal you’d find hard to replicate in the post-sale period. Typical prices flying Qantas on this route start from $650- $850.

Sale seats are typically offered for airlines’ less popular routes.

Jetstar was offering a sale price of $89 from Melbourne’s Tullamarine to Hervey Bay, economy one-way. At the time of writing, the cheapest one-way flight with Jetstar on that route costs $109. Singapore Airlines had a Black Friday sale on return economy flights from Sydney to Brussels starting from $1661. Post-sale prices for this route with Singapore Airlines start from $1800-$2000. In peak summer season, this ticket could cost as much as $4000.

Other flights selected at random throughout produce the same conclusion. Even if you were to fly off-peak on the cheapest day in the month, you could not match the sale fares flying aboard these carriers.

Black Friday deals stimulate sales

Evidence suggests that consumers wait for these sales and respond. According to Spanish-based ForwardKeys, which provides data, intelligence and analysis for the travel industry, “during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday period (November 29 to December 2, 2024), tickets issued for future international departures from Australia increased by an impressive 22 per cent year-on-year.

“By contrast, the two weeks preceding this period showed only a modest 12 per cent increase in tickets issued year-on-year, underscoring the significant impact of Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales on consumer behaviour.”

The week-on-week figures are even more surprising. For bookings on flights departing from Australia, ForwardKeys noted a 45 per cent increase during the week of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales over the preceding week. The picture was the same elsewhere, with a 25 per cent week-on-week increase in tickets issued for departures from the US during the sale period. Globally, bookings were up by 51 per cent over the preceding week.

ForwardKeys also reports that international airfares from Australia in November were up 10 per cent compared to the same time last year, following an upward trend that began in July.

Are the deals all they appear to be?

They might look tempting, but missing from this list of Black Friday sale fares in Australia are the most popular routes where loadings are high. There were no deals on the popular Sydney-Melbourne route nor between Melbourne and Brisbane. Nor was there a sale fare from any Australian city to London, Paris or New York.

There’s no reason for airlines to offer discounts on these routes. When they can fill these seats with full-fare paying passengers, airlines have no incentive to offer sale fares. It’s reasonable to assume that a primary motivation for these Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals is to generate interest on routes that airlines find more difficult to sell, often due to a slump in seasonal demand.

The availability of those bargain-priced seats might also be limited. When the airline has reached the target figure for the cut-price seats it wants to sell, customers will be left with higher-priced seats. Airlines juggle prices to squeeze the maximum revenue from every seat, and part of that strategy is dividing the seats they have available on any flight into different price buckets. A flight with high demand, such as an early morning flight between Melbourne and Sydney or a one-stop summer flight to Europe, will usually have very few seats in the cheapest category. A midday flight on that Melbourne-Sydney route, or a flight to Europe in February with two stops, will typically have more cheap seats.

If you miss out on sale fares, look for cheap days to fly or another airline

Airlines have revenue managers who set prices for each flight on each day. At their fingertips is a mass of data that helps them predict the demand for a particular city pair, day by day, every day of the year and even at different times of the day. Historical demand, major sporting or cultural events and the level of competition are just some of the factors that will determine the price at a particular time on any day.

That’s dynamic pricing, the reason flight prices jump around from one day to the next. For a return economy flight from Melbourne to Singapore, departing in early March 2025 and returning a month later, the Qantas website has 12 different fares, from $931 to $1260, depending on which date you’re flying.

It pays to compare airlines, and that’s easy to do with an online booking site. The Black Friday deals might have been the cheapest offered on that route by that airline, but not necessarily the best overall. Singapore Airlines’ Black Friday price of $1661 for a return economy flight from Sydney to Brussels was a bargain measured against the airline’s post-sale prices on that route, but you could fly Sydney-Brussels return with Turkish Airlines, departing and returning in April 2025, from $1379. The cheapest return ticket with Singapore Airlines in April is $2118.