Luck, my eye! Bargains only happen in strong recessions. Why do you think we're doing all this Deficit Hysteria??? Tories have their uses...

Fortunately, as we reveal elsewhere, two academics have now struggled through the sums for us and the answer is: precisely eight weeks ahead is the optimum time to buy, for planes at least.

Not know we've been told that it isn't. There's excellent stuff here in the FT on Physics Envy
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2010/08/16/316966/its-not-the-length-of-the-equations-but-what-you-do-with-them/ or as Rick Bookstaber puts it:

http://rick.bookstaber.com/2010/08/physics-envy-in-finance.html

So it is not by chance that there are so many people trying to add complexity to the markets. Whatever rules are put in place, whatever metrics are devised, traders will try to find ways around them. In an engineering system, if you find a poorly designed valve in a nuclear power plant and replace it with a new and better deigned one, the new valve doesn’t try to figure out ways to make you think it is closed when it is really open. But traders will do that.

Which is also why foxhunting is such good training for the army - you get to learn to read landscape while pursuing an adversary which is trying to mislead you about its intentions. Or, as the Iron Duke put it:

All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavor to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called 'guessing what was at the other side of the hill.'

For 1nn1t' re 1:13 AM.

But we all know what's at the other side of the hill------greener grass.

Some even less foreseeable calamity – a herd of migrating wildebeest halting the Heathrow Express?

Fortunately the track is fenced to prevent that happening!

I am heartily sick of having to 'play the system' in order to get anything approaching a reasonable ticket price. 'Yield Management' (as I believe the system is called) which changes the price of your flight depending on when you book, is nothing more than an immoral scam.

It is even more of an immoral scam when applied to rail fares. Fare structures are made deliberately complicated in the hope you get pissed off with the whole process and buy the more expensive ticket on offer. Worse, as you progress through the 'buying process you are met with a raft of hidden and unreasonable padding charges. (Ryanair FFS where it is more expensive to ship your hold baggage than you) All this is dressed up in the guise of 'being able to buy what you want'.

I would expect nothing less from a free market system dependant as it is on the morals and ethics of the east end barrow boy.

Snapshackle
22 Aug 2010, 8:38AM

I am heartily sick of having to 'play the system' in order to get anything approaching a reasonable ticket price. 'Yield Management' (as I believe the system is called) which changes the price of your flight depending on when you book, is nothing more than an immoral scam.

Yield managed:

Return ticket from Yorkshire to France on budget plane between £50 and £100:

Several hundred miles in a two jet-engine Boeing 737 with two highly paid pilots and three cabin crew for ukp50 in one hour fifteen.

Not yield managed:

Airport bus £2.50 single into town:

Eight miles down the hill from the Airport with a one badly paid driver in a low tech box-on-wheels propelled by a single diesel engine in forty-five minutes.

As long as the law of supply and demand is allowed to work without restriction the latest technology will be pressed into serving the quest to squeeze every bit of profit out of demand. When the penchant for getting a supposed bargain is built in the quest for corporate profit is even more irresistible. Therefore the cynical 'two for just £X.99" on seemingly nearly everything in the local branch of any supermarket chain (Well, it seems like that where I live!). I wonder if yield management would work in selling newspapers? Perhaps it would need some hefty sweeteners, though, such as a token for 15% off the price of the latest political biography? Or perhaps the discount might need to be revised upwards?

1nn1t

22 Aug 2010, 11:49AM

Yield managed:

Return ticket from Yorkshire to France on budget plane between £50 and £100:

Several hundred miles in a two jet-engine Boeing 737 with two highly paid pilots and three cabin crew for ukp50 in one hour fifteen.

Not yield managed:

Airport bus £2.50 single into town:

Eight miles down the hill from the Airport with a one badly paid driver in a low tech box-on-wheels propelled by a single diesel engine in forty-five minutes.

If you were comparing apples with apples you would have a point, however the environmental impact of the aircraft is far higher than the bus so the environment is subsidising your air travel. Also Yield Management means the same journey three hours later won't be 50 quid it will be 250 quid whereas the bus fare will still be the same.

A more correct description of 'yield management' is 'profiteering'.

Since you are comparing apples and oranges

Modern sales tactics are what I call "ambush marketing". The idea is to hold out the carrot of the bargain basement product or fare but then stick it to those who don't win the lottery or who were unable to participate.

I'm sick of this kind of practice so I use the products and services as little as possible. This works up to a point but the whole point of this kind of marketing is to make your product or service intrusive so you haven't got a choice about using it or not. (The marketing jackpot here is a service which is mandatory or effectively mandatory -- in the US we make a meal of anyone unlucky enough to be caught without insurance, especially medical insurance. Jackals around wounded prey have more decorum.)

It must be a fad taught in MBA school because I can't imagine anyone setting out to deliberately annoy customers like this (and there's the overhead from managing the price matrix -- it can't pay for itself). Speaking for many consumers we avoid it wherever possible which gives the company that deliberately avoids this kind of nickel and diming a competitive advantage -- not only do they avoid the overhead but they're always the first choice for customers.

BTW -- I wouldn't look too carefully into how much those "highly paid" pilots are paid (or other aspects of their working conditions). You might not want to fly.

martinusher
22 Aug 2010, 9:35PM

BTW -- I wouldn't look too carefully into how much those "highly paid" pilots are paid (or other aspects of their working conditions). You might not want to fly.

Good point.

But I'm sixty and what I see happening to some of my friends is a rather more frightening prospect than the enhanced possibility of sudden death.

I'm taking the view that when the aircrew are too frightened to do it every day, I'll be too frightened to do it every week. Meanwhile I pay careful attention to PPRuNe and listen to the gossip of the local technical crews.

Entertainment Events will get cheaper because if they are for cr*p show they have to be shifted somehow to late bookers.

Flights go up in price as late bookers are caught by the short & curlies.

Even Guardiansta luvvies can work that one out.

I'm always ranting about how exspensive festival tickets are, but every year I get one, usually before seeing the line up. Just one of those things...

Fortunately, as we reveal elsewhere, two academics have now struggled through the sums for us and the answer is: precisely eight weeks ahead is the optimum time to buy, for planes at least.

Except that if everyone reads the results of those 'sums' and does that, eight weeks will become the worst possible time to buy.