Do flight prices ever go down?

[franke]

I'm looking for flights to China in April. I started searching two weeks ago and since then they've gone up by over €1000 (for five of us).

Do flights ever drop in price? Or am I just going to have to swallow the extra cost?

Generally speaking, flight prices for longhaul climb the nearer it gets to departure day.

each time you search you need to clear the cookies off of your computer. this is because your search history is stored. it will make a big difference to the prices but as Attila says generally prices on longhaul will go up the nearer you get to flying. have you looked at doing a stopover to make it cheaper? use a site like momondo or skyscanner they are really good for this.

Thank you. I've been private browsing. I'll try momondo.

We live in China and my husband regularly goes back to the UK to visit his family. I haven't seen much difference in prices for the past 2+ years we have been here. It's always the sameish (£500-600 direct to London). He once had to go within a couple of days for an emergency back home and it cost the same as booking long time in advance. The only way you can save is having a stopover somewhere, but it makes the already long journey even worse. Cheapest is Aeroflot via Moscow, but I can't recommend them for comfort on such a long flight.

Are you flexible with dates? Outside of school holidays will obviously be cheaper and try to avoid any Chinese holidays.

You might get lucky with a 24 hour flash sale or something that brngs the price down, but these normally have limited availability so might not be when you want to travel anyway

I've learnt the hard way to book as soon as we find flights that work for us

@Franke, May I offer two points of view?

1. Prices are based on algorithms that match supply and demand as well as booking rates for certain classes of flights and almost all the online booking engines usually display published fares only which are higher than other fare classes available to specialist travel experts.
2. As @Zombiehunter says, airlines on the same routes do compete with each other and so fares are generally competitive. Do an online search but also speak to a couple of specialists to see what they can do. Sometimes, you get a better deal if you book flight and either car or hotel(s). Hope this helps.

Thanks for all these replies. I panicked in the end and booked before the price went any higher. The flights were within budget but I'm pretty sure they've dropped since - I'm not going to look too closely. Probably my frantic searching, albeit in private browsing, caused the price spikes. Lesson learned.