How airlines set their prices

An airline does not set one price per flight: it sets about twenty, and sells them in order. The practice has a name — revenue management — and once you understand it, almost everything that seemed absurd about airfares becomes predictable.

The product being sold is not a seat

Here is the image that unlocks it: do not picture a plane with 180 seats at one price. Picture a chest of twenty drawers.

Each drawer holds a few seats and carries its own fare. The cheapest drawer opens first. When it empties, it does not refill — the next one opens, more expensive. Then the next.

Physically, the seats are identical. Commercially, they are twenty distinct products sold in sequence.

Why fares jump instead of climbing gently

That is the direct consequence. You check a flight at $480 on Monday, it is $610 on Wednesday, with nothing visible having changed.

Nothing mysterious happened: a drawer emptied. Three people bought the last seats in the $480 band, and the system moved to the next one. The price did not rise gradually, it cleared a step.

This is why refreshing the page ten times achieves nothing, and why coming back three days later can change everything.

The four levers behind the door

What decides how fast the drawers open:

• Booking pace. The system compares today's bookings against what it expected for this date. Ahead of plan, it closes the low bands; behind plan, it reopens them.
• Time to departure. As the date nears, the customer changes: the business traveller who must fly Tuesday will pay what it takes. Low bands vanish, not from a shortage of seats, but because the airline knows who is left to convince.
• Competition. An Air Canada fare on Montreal → London does not exist in a vacuum. These systems read neighbouring prices several times a day.
• Season and events. School holidays, conferences, festivals: expected demand is modelled months ahead.

Two consequences you rarely read

Prices come back down too. This is the part people forget. If a flight fills more slowly than forecast, the airline reopens low bands to catch up. A drop six weeks out is not a promotion: it is a course correction.

"Earlier is cheaper" is false at one end. Very far out, only the middle bands are open; the genuinely low bands often arrive later, when the airline adjusts. Booking eleven months ahead protects you from the peak, rarely delivers the floor.

What you can do with this

You cannot predict when a drawer opens. Nobody can from the outside — it is a closed system recalculating continuously.

What you can do is be there when it opens. A reopened low band is visible for hours or days. Without monitoring, you will miss it, not for lack of instinct, but because you were asleep.

That is the work Kestrelia does for you: the route is queried continuously across several providers, and each offer is compared against its own history — which is what separates a genuine band reopening from ordinary noise.

For the logical next step, read why two seats side by side do not cost the same — the same mechanics seen from inside the cabin. And if you were looking for the right day to buy, the Tuesday myth explains why that trail is a dead end.