According to FareCompare.com, the cheapest day to fly is Wednesday for domestic flight, followed by Tuesday and Saturday (Friday and Sunday are most expensive); the cheapest day to buy is Tuesday afternoon.
Sounds strange? Not necessarily. Working in an industry dealing with large amount of data,
I can totally understand that based on researches on travel demands, purchasing trend and behavior, airlines can easily identify the price elasticity in specific time periods and the flights with lowest average price. Why Wednesday? Because many fliers are business travelers, and when they go to meetings, they usually travel to the destination earlier in the week, for few days or the whole week; also, leisure travelers tend to take few days off before or after the weekend for the vacation, so that generally rules out Wednesday. One year I started my trip on Wednesday evening, to fly to Italy, the ticket price I paid was more than $50 less than if I had to travel on other days. Saturday can be inexpensive too, because business travelers have already flew back home on Fridays and next week's travels start on Sundays; also Leisure weekend travelers would fly on Thursday or Fridays.
In terms of cheapest day to buy, I think the most straightforward reason is that during other times people are just less price sensitive, which airfares are heavily driven by the theory of price elasticity of demand, this will explain it. Perhaps the airlines are rolling the weekly discounts after evaluating the ticket sales on Monday, but then the deepest discounted fares are usually sold out quickly. When booking travel to Europe for my parents, I realized that the price dropped at least $30 between booking Sunday and Tuesday!
One last key is to be flexible, if you are not in a hurry to go somewhere, then you will have plenty of chances to find cheaper tickets. Sign up for Fare Tracker from websites such as Kayak.com that gives you notifications when it spots the lowest airfare during your targeted travel time
Good luck and safe travels!
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