But for someone booking on a promotional fare, timing could be key. Each flight has a certain number of seats allocated to the discounted fares and these seats would in the main follow the discount amounts. Let’s take someone booking a seat to Dublin at £12 – if the next day’s promo offer was a £3 rate, then you could save £9 simply by booking after midnight (following closure of one promo and opening of another).
The promos for Ryanair are a little different from other airlines – there is always a promotional offer on – although some are much better than others, and also there is a uniformity to the sales – the price is the same for all countries sites (although charged in different currencies). They appear to follow no order whatsover. There is a Google doc site which tracks the promotional sales as such here.
There is a possible way of finding out the next days sales by simply looking at the graphic for the sale. For example, today’s sale has the graphic:
Let’s look at the link in more detail:
http://www.ryanair.com/img/cday/100702/cday-GB-mon.gif
It’s pretty straightforward to decipher what this means. Here we have the date in yymmdd format, along with the corresponding graphic, with a two digit country code (GB in this case = Great Britain) as well as the day of the week for the graphic to be shown (Monday in this case).
There are two versions of the graphic: GB-mon.gif and GB.gif. The -mon.gif can only be used on Monday (because the banner will say – book until midnight tonight), but the -GB.gif will say booking until midnight Monday – this has a more general use so that the image can be used on any day in the previous week and the time is correct.
The second URL is the one you want to edit. By messing around with the URL and entering tommorow’s date, you can often find the graphic to be used for the next day, and hence, what the prices will be. Note that in many cases the graphic is only available late in the day and time of upload varies a lot – in many cases you will get an ‘image not found’ page.
So, not guaranteed by any means but certainly a useful way of checking particularly if you are booking in the evening coming up to the close of a promotional period.
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