Do flight prices ever actually drop? I had to find out...

This one started as a question I couldn't shake: do airlines actually drop prices in the last few days before a flight — trying to fill empty seats rather than fly with them — or would they rather hold the price steady and just eat the empty seat?

I'd always assumed the first one, the same way most people do (it makes sense, right? Why fly with empty seats?!). So instead of guessing again, I pulled 39 million fare snapshots, tracked daily, for flights up to 45 days out — and watched what the same route and date actually did to its price as departure got closer.

I got my answer, and it's the opposite of what I expected.

📈 Prices don't drop as departure nears. They climb.

Same route, same date, tracked daily. Indexed to the 30–45-day-out baseline (1.00×).

Days before departure	Price vs. baseline	Avg. seats still showing
30 (baseline)	1.00×	6.5
21	1.00×	6.4
14	1.10×	6.2
7	1.20×	6.1
3	1.25×	6.1
1	1.35×	6.4
0 — departure day	1.68×	6.3

By the day of departure, prices are running 68% above the five-week-out baseline. No last-minute discount window, despite most planes sometimes still having ~20–30% of their seats empty. Just a straight climb in pricing, the whole way.

If you're waiting for a deal to appear closer to your trip, you're waiting for something that, in this data, never happens. As this Reddit thread discusses, it comes down to training customer behaviour: if travellers knew prices dropped right before a flight, people would stop booking early, destroying the reliable advance revenue airlines depend on. Still, it makes me sad...

🎒 The other surprise: your bag can cost almost as much as your seat

Median fare vs. median checked-bag fee, UK/EU routes.

Trip type	Median fare	Median checked bag	Bag as % of fare
Short-haul	€106	€75	78%
Long-haul	€101	€69	65%

On a typical short-haul booking, the checked bag runs about 78% of the ticket price. Cabin bags were usually included in the fares collected for this exercise, but these days it's rare (in the UK/EU at least) to find an airline offering more than a handbag or backpack without paying extra.

The caveats

Worth saying clearly: this is still a limited sample — a handful of routes over one window in time, not the full picture yet. I'm digging into a lot more data now to see how far this holds. But the direction of the answer to my original question is already pretty clear: book early, and don't count on a last-minute rescue.

A fuller write-up of the methodology — charts, caveats, everything — is on its way. In the meantime, see which deals are trending today.