Benchmarking Airfares
Benchmarking Airfare Pages: 1 2 3 4
How do I benchmark airfare? I have several ways. The first one I will discuss is farecompare.com. So, what’s the point of this picture? It’s to show you where you need to go to start getting the best airfare. This is the Where-To-Go map at farecompare.com. This is where I start when I’m looking for airfare deals. When you get to the web site you then want to go to this section. Once there look for the Price Per Mile button. Clicking it produces a slider that you can move to change the cost per mile. The point is to get it lower. When you are lowering it you are finding the best airfare deals available. I also like the fact that the numbers that I see are the final numbers that I will be paying at the farecompare web site. All too often, other web sites tend to exclude many fees and taxes, making it difficult to compare airfares from and to various airports.

In this picture I have the cost per mile down to 15 cents. At 15 cents a mile, there are lots of places I can go. However, the very, very best cost per mile rates during the year seem to be down around 5 cents a mile. The problem is that you cannot get that airfare rate in the summer. Well, it’s not likely you can get that ratein the summer. When I did this exercise in June of 2011, I could only get 4 destinations to pull up at 7 cents per mile. The point of doing this is to get your airfare down as low as possible. It’s really good if you can know what that low cost should be. Here, we know that the best airfare price in the world at the time of the reasearch was 7 cents per mile.

Now, you might say “Big deal. What’s the difference between 5 and 7 cents a mile?” Well, it’s 2 cents a mile or 40%, i.e., of your cost at 5 cents a mile. At 7 cents a mile, your airfare will be 40% higher when the cost goes up 2 cents a mile. I mean, “What’s 40%? Right?” It’s a lot in my book. Notice in the above example I clicked on the flag to Hanoi, Vietnam and it told me that the airfare was sold by American Airlines. I could then click on the Find Flights button and find the best flights for the month I was searching. Remember, you can change months. You can also change airports. Because I often fly out of DFW (Dallas), I can find more deals as Dallas is a much busier airport than OKC.

I also like to use farecompare’s When-to-Fly feature. With this feature I put in the two airports and then pick a date. The calendar then shows me the airfare for all the date in that month. You can go to the web site and try it by clicking in the first image on the left.

The two images here show substantial price differences between going to London from OKC in July and in January. january is absolutely one of the cheapest times of the year to go. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the coldest.

As I change months, the costs change as well, letting me see a variety of fares. You can book most airlines 330 days out from the current date. It’s really easy to find one of the internet’s current best airfares at farecompare’s web site.

I often start my search for airfare deals at farecompare’s web site when I’m doing a random search for airfare, just to get a couple of becnhmarks.