“Book as soon as the sale opens, seats vanish fast”
This one is mostly true, which annoys me because it means setting an alarm. Two years ago I was flying Manchester to Chicago for a January term start, and the Black Friday window on that route closed in about eleven hours. By the Sunday the cheap cabin was gone and the fare had climbed £190. Airlines load a fixed block of discounted seats into a fare bucket, and when the bucket empties the sale technically continues while the actual saving does not, so the banner stays up for a week after the useful inventory has gone.
Where it falls apart is long-haul connecting itineraries, because the first leg and the second leg price from separate buckets and one of them sells out first. I have watched a Manchester-Chicago fare survive four days while the Chicago-Manchester return collapsed on day two.
“The sale price is a genuine discount on the normal fare”
Mostly false, and this is the one that costs students real money. Plenty of Black Friday fares are the same fare that was available in October under a different label, and a handful are worse. What I do now, before I pay anything:
- Check the same route on the same dates the week before the sale opens, and write the number down
- Check a fortnight before that, because some carriers nudge fares up in early November
- Compare the sale fare against the whole-month view on a site that shows thirty days of prices at once, not just your two candidate dates
- Read whether the fare includes a cabin bag, since a £38 “saving” that costs £45 in baggage fees is not a saving
- Look at the return leg separately rather than trusting the round-trip total
The whole-month view is useful for finding cheaper flights precisely because it shows you whether Black Friday is an outlier or just a Tuesday. On a Milan-Lisbon return I booked in November 2025, the Black Friday headline of €41 each way was €6 more than the same fare had been in mid-October.
“Tuesday is the cheapest day to buy”
No. I believed this for two years and it made no measurable difference. The day you buy does not set the price; demand on the day you fly does. What is true, and what gets mangled into the Tuesday myth, is that Tuesday and Wednesday departures are usually cheaper than Friday and Sunday ones, because leisure demand drops midweek. Buying on a Tuesday changes nothing.
The same confusion surrounds private browsing. Clearing cookies does nothing to a fare, because the price comes from the airline’s inventory system, not from anything stored on your laptop. I tested it across six weeks on the same route and got identical numbers in a normal window and an incognito one.
“There is an ideal number of weeks to book ahead”
Only if you say which trip. Short-haul European leisure routes tend to bottom out around four to seven weeks before departure, so a Black Friday sale on a February flight is often early enough to be genuinely cheap. Long-haul and anything landing on a holiday date behaves the opposite way, filling and rising from roughly three months out, which is why my Christmas-Chicago mistake two years ago was booking in late November for a December flight.
The one variable that decides it: whether your dates are fixed by a term timetable or by a flight you have not booked yet.
Suzana