Our proprietary airline ticket ticket booking curves summarize current ticket pricing across time horizons.

The purpose of analyzing a booking curve is to provide a visual comparison of airline ticket demand across time. The horizontal variable denotes the number of days before a theoretical airline trip, and the vertical axis represents an indexed measure of the pricing of a ticket. The shapes of the curves indicate trends in present-day ticket pricing versus the number of days until departure.

Higher levels of the booking curve indicate hotter pricing than lower levels. Using this, airline ticket pricing can be compared within a single airline across multiple time periods, or for one time period across multiple airlines. For example, if the booking curve for one airline is significantly higher than the booking curve for another airline at a certain number of days before departure, that is an indication that the first airline is able to charge relatively higher prices for tickets on that day. Similarly, if an airline's booking curve increases dramatically near zero days before departure, that indicates that the airline has high pricing power and full planes.