Travel advice has a long half-life and the industry changes quickly. A number of tips that circulated widely — and were genuinely true once — now do nothing, and a few will cost you money.
Stopped working: incognito searching
The belief is that airlines track your searches and raise the price. They do not. Fares live in airline inventory systems and are set by route, date, remaining seats and competitor pricing.
What people observe — a fare rising between searches — is usually a genuine inventory change, where the last seat in a cheap fare bucket sold to someone else, or a cached result from the first search.
What works instead: flexible dates. The calendar grid view in any search engine shows a whole month, and shifting departure by two or three days routinely changes a long-haul fare more than any browser trick ever claimed to.
Stopped working: booking on Tuesday
This was real once. Airlines filed fare changes manually on a weekly cycle, and Tuesday was when the discounted filings landed.
Pricing is now continuous and algorithmic. The day you book is close to irrelevant.
What works instead: the day you fly. Tuesday and Wednesday departures remain consistently cheaper than Friday and Sunday. And the booking window — two to four months out for international, five to six for peak — matters far more than the weekday.
Stopped working: waiting for last-minute deals
On flights, this reversed years ago. Airlines now price the final three weeks upward on the assumption that late bookers are business travellers with no choice. Waiting costs money.
It survives in one place: package holidays on charter routes, where tour operators would rather discount than fly empty seats to a resort they have already paid for. If you can leave within three weeks and are flexible on destination, that is genuine.
Risky: hidden-city ticketing
Booking a flight that connects through your real destination and walking away from the last leg, because the longer itinerary is sometimes cheaper.
It does work on price and it is prohibited by every airline's conditions of carriage. Consequences range from the cancellation of your return leg — the rest of an itinerary is voided once you miss a segment — to closed frequent flyer accounts and, for repeat offenders, legal action.
It also fails completely if you check a bag, since luggage goes to the final ticketed destination.
Stopped working: charming your way to an upgrade
Dressing smartly, mentioning a honeymoon, asking nicely at the gate. Upgrade lists are computed before boarding from status tier and fare class, and gate agents work from that list.
Free operational upgrades still exist but are rare, because airlines now sell those seats — at online check-in, through bid auctions, at the kiosk and at the gate.
What works instead: bid auctions on flights unlikely to fill, and asking what a paid upgrade costs at check-in, which is frequently a fraction of the published fare difference.
Still true
Open-jaw tickets. Fly into one city, out of another, usually for the same price as a return. Saves a backtrack day.
Shoulder season. 30 to 45 percent cheaper for near-identical weather.
The US 24-hour rule. Tickets touching the United States, booked at least seven days out, can be cancelled free within 24 hours. Genuinely useful for holding a fare while you check whether the dates work.
Booking transport early and accommodation late. Transport prices move enormously with booking date; accommodation prices barely do.
Paying in local currency. Declining dynamic currency conversion saves 3 to 7 percent on every transaction, which over a trip beats almost every hack on any list.