Piratefly

Piratefly flight price research

10 questions about flight prices, each answered with a number from 5,043,620 fares we observed on 93,729 routes (2026-06-14 → 2026-10-31).

Updated 2026-11-01 · open dataset, CC BY 4.0 · not booking data or surveys: one-way economy fares seen by our price tracker.

The studies

  1. When to book flights: what 5,043,620 real fares say
    The cheapest window to book is 1–1.5 months before departure, across 84,610 flights on 17,827 routes. The full study, with every chart and CSV.
  2. How far in advance should you book a flight?
    Book 1–1.5 months before departure. Tracking the same flights at every lead time (84,610 flights on 17,827 routes, 2026-06-14 to 2026-10-31), that window had the smallest average premium over each flight's lowest fare: +17%, against +49.5% in the last 3 days.
  3. Are last-minute flights cheaper?
    No. In the last 3 days before departure the same flight cost on average 49.5% more than its cheapest observed fare. Comparing 25,169 flights seen both 3–4 weeks and under a week out, the late fare was higher 67.1% of the time (median +9.8%).
  4. Is it cheaper to book flights months in advance?
    Not much. Booking 2–3 months ahead cost on average 22.2% more than the same flight's lowest fare, more than at 1–1.5 months (+17%). On 23,561 flights seen both 2–3 months and 3–4 weeks out, the early fare was higher 46.8% of the time: a coin toss.
  5. What is the cheapest day of the week to fly?
    Wednesday. Comparing each fare with the median of its own route, Wednesday departures were +3.3% and Tuesday +4%, while Friday was the dearest at +10.4%. Weekend departures cost more than midweek ones.
  6. What are the cheapest cities to fly to this winter?
    Milan (median €28), London (median €29), Palermo (median €30). That is the median one-way fare for departures from 2026-11-01, across 308 cities ranked from fares we observed, counting only cities reachable from at least 50 airports.
  7. Are flights getting more expensive?
    Not right now. The Piratefly monthly Fare Index stands at 97.7 in 2026-10, against 100 in 2026-08: comparable flights are 2.3% cheaper than then, measured on the same routes month to month.
  8. What is the cheapest month to fly?
    November 2026. Comparing each route's fares month by month (booked 8–60 days ahead), November 2026 departures were -1.1% against the route's own median, while September 2026 was the dearest at +6.2%. Covers September 2026, October 2026, November 2026, December 2026; fares observed 2026-06-14 to 2026-10-31.
  9. Are domestic flights cheaper than international flights?
    Yes. The median one-way fare on a domestic route was €112, against €155 for international flights within the same continent and €262 for intercontinental ones (71,862 routes, fares observed 2026-06-14 to 2026-10-31).
  10. How much does a flight in Europe cost?
    €110 one way at the median, across 26,202 routes within Europe (fares observed 2026-06-14 to 2026-10-31). The cheapest countries to fly to were Albania (€55), Malta (€60), Italy (€73); the dearest Belarus (€298.5) and Russia (€288).

Open dataset

The full route × departure-month price history behind every number, updated monthly: GitHub · Hugging Face · Kaggle · Zenodo (DOI).

Files on this site: booking-window.csv · fare-index-monthly.csv · winter-cities.csv · fare-research.json

Cite as: “Piratefly, Flight fare history (https://piratefly.com), doi:10.5281/zenodo.23290390”, with a link to this page.

Live data

Fare Index (today's prices vs usual, 0-100) · Piratefly API · MCP server for AI agents.