How much extra will it cost to buy a plane ticket at the last minute? In most cases, you will pay the premium price if you buy a plane ticket at the last minute. This could mean paying as much as several hundred dollars more than you would have at an earlier date.
"If you try to purchase an airline ticket at the last minute," says Patricia Blanche, owner of La Cañada Flintridge Travel in La Cañada, California, "the reality is that you're going to be paying a premium price for it. A lot of people have the mistaken impression that good deals can be struck at zero hour because the airlines just want to see all of their seats filled up rather than fly around with a half-empty plane. Very few times, however, will an airline simply let a ticket go at the last minute just to get rid of it. Because their inventory just isn't there anymore - coupled with the fact that so many of today's carriers are operating in the red and struggling to deal with the expense of their fuel costs - it's not in their best interests to discount tickets for a last-minute purchase."
She goes on to explain that there can be as many as ten different fare structures operating on a single flight. "You have passengers, for instance, who purchased their tickets months in advance of the flight. You also have passengers who have accrued enough frequent flyer miles by flying that particular airline that the only cost they've incurred for this trip is a small administrative processing fee."
These scenarios are coupled with the methodology by which seats and fares are parsed out on scheduled flights. "With the obvious exception of your first class and business class passengers, everyone else wants to get the cheapest possible seats," she explains. "What they're not aware of, however, is that there are only a set number of 'cheap' seats that have been allocated in the economy section of that aircraft. If you've planned ahead and made your reservation far enough in advance, there's a chance that you'll get one of these seats and, thus, pay the lowest available fare. Once this quota of tickets has been sold off, however, that low fare immediately jumps up to the next level and then the next level after that."
Exceptions to this, of course, are the "no frills" airlines such as Jet Blue which are able to offer an across-the-board fare schedule for all passengers regardless of when they happen to book their flight. "The other exception," Blanche says, "is if you happen to be a first class passenger who waits until the last minute to make a reservation. Because this particular class of passenger is already spending a high amount to be pampered and attended to during the flight, they're not going to impose the penalty of an even higher fare just because they happened to wait until the day of departure. Such courtesies are also extended to business class passengers," she says, "because they are often not only frequent passengers on that airline but because the airline recognizes the mercurial nature of business travel that requires last minute scheduling of meetings across the country or around the world. For everyone else, the price of spontaneity may be more cost-prohibitive than they assumed."
