The Tribe of Adminsa home for wayward admins

We’ve been hearing for years about which days are the best for travel in order to get a good price, about length of stay, and how far in advance to buy the ticket. Who knew there were key days of the week to buy the ticket?

In the Scott McCartney’s column “The Middle Seat” in the Wall Street Journal is an article titled Whatever You Do, Don’t Buy an Airline Ticket On … that is positively revelatory (at least to me). The worst days to buy are the the weekends—of course…that’s when recreational travelers are planning their vacations, I thought. My forehead still bears the slap marks (and all for nothing, as you’ll find out when you read further). Additionally, the airlines aren’t managing prices as actively over the weekend as they do on weekdays, so when cheap seats sell out, they’re gone—at least until Monday night.

On Monday, the airlines analyze the weekend ticket sales. By Monday night many of them have launched fare sales. By Tuesday morning, competitors are matching and beating the sales. Wednesday can be as good – sometimes better. By Thursday, the party is over. You start seeing $5-$10 increases across the board. If sales don’t lag and competitors match, the prices will rise for the weekend.

Rick Seaney, chief executive of FareCompare.com, studied three years worth of airline prices and concluded that 3 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday was the best time to buy. “That’s when the maximum number of cheapest seats are in the marketplace,” he said.

Now we come to the part I don’t get: weekends are the slowest sales days for airlines; Tuesdays the greatest volume. That makes the whole pricing scheme seems backward to me, but we don’t have to understand why, just what. Take advantage of it while you can – things are changing due to social media and 24/7 updates. You can read the full article here.

And be sure to put all that money you saved the company in your “Dang, I’m Good” file.

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• CONCURing on Exchange Rates

Those of you who use an older version of Concur as your expense client may discover a bug when your manager travels internationally. Once you’ve entered an expense type and entered a city in another country, a box will come up on the right asking for the amount in local dollars and the exchange rate (you can get this with a little math and the actual credit card charge. It will vary by posting date).

The rub comes when you have local expenses to enter. If you’ve already entered an international expense, the exchange rate box will appear and Concur will insist that your city is international. It’s easy to get caught up in it being wrong and miss the forest for the trees, so: you don’t need to do separate reports, or worry about entering the local charges first, or even learn to speak French. Just enter “1″ for the exchange rate. It won’t mess up your accounts payable department at all.

The latest version of Concur has–mercifully–repaired this bug.

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