The data behind Airfare Coach
Every number on the homepage and the About page comes from here. This is the long version.
It isn’t just one trip
The homepage shows Houston to Phoenix. Here are nine more real tournament trips, each measured against its own price 120 days out. Chosen to span the range we see — from barely moving to wildly.
Across 1,420 trips, 82% went both lower and higher than their four-month price at some point. The typical trip moved about 30% top to bottom. Which one you’re looking at is the part you can’t see from a single search.
What sits behind it
- flight prices recorded
- 7 million+flight prices recorded
- routes
- 1,100+routes
- tournament departure dates
- 10,000+tournament departure dates
- airports families fly from
- 157airports families fly from
Watched every day through the stretch when prices actually move, with history reaching back to February 2026. And it isn’t a generic route list — each one comes off the club volleyball calendar: a club’s home airports to the cities its teams actually play in, and only where enough teams would be flying it to matter.
When you look changes what you see
Out of all that, these are the trips we have followed from a fixed point before departure all the way to the gate — so the best price is finally known and we can say what the price did afterwards.
| When you look | Trips | Price went lower | Price went higher | Median dip | Median rise |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 months out | 1,420 | 91% | 91% | $75 | $48 |
| 3 months out | 2,547 | 90% | 83% | $70 | $48 |
| 2 months out | 2,802 | 83% | 85% | $50 | $48 |
| 6 weeks out | 2,640 | 76% | 84% | $44 | $43 |
Four months out it is a dead heat — the price is as likely to rise as to fall. What changes as you get closer is the upside, not the risk: the dip shrinks from $75 to $44 while the chance of paying more barely moves.
That movement is real on almost every trip, in both directions, right up until departure — and none of it shows up in a single search. But watching every day is only the easy half. The hard half is knowing whether the number in front of you today is a good one, and that takes history a search page doesn’t have: what your route does, at your point in the booking window.
How we measured it
- A trip is one route and one departure date that we tracked every day until it flew, so the best price is finally known.
- Prices are the cheapest fare on the route in Main Cabin — seat selection and a carry-on included. Never Basic Economy, which is why our numbers sit above the headline price on a search site.
- The two percentages overlap, because most trips do both: the price dips below that day’s price at some point and climbs above it at some point. Four months out, 82% of trips did both. Which comes first is close to a coin flip, and slightly more often it rises first.
- We checked whether this holds if you only fly nonstop. It does. Restricting to nonstops leaving between 2pm and 8pm — what most tournament families actually book — the price moves the same or slightly more, not less. A smaller set of acceptable flights has fewer substitutes, so it moves harder.
- These describe the market, not our results. How our own buy calls have actually done, wins and misses, is on the track record page.