Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder, as you can probably hear from the noise. I'm on a plane.

I've actually waited until the descent begins to reduce the engine noise.

And the reason I'm talking today is because I want to talk about pricing of

travel products and in particular when you book well ahead but then find that the price has

fallen in between now for this Ryanair flight from Stanssted to the Swedish city of

Vosteros, which I'm very much looking forward to seeing, I paid 33 pounds. I dare say some of my

fellow passengers paid less than that. With Ryanair, the starting price tends to be about 20 pounds or so.

There's just looking around a couple of dozen empty seats on this, so it hasn't been selling

especially well. Ryanair likes to fill 95% of its seats.

So I know from past experience that Brianair will have tweaked the price of this particular flight

many times since it first went on sale.

And if I can talk more widely about pricing of

course anybody who's prepared to commit a substantial amount of money a long way

ahead for a travel product should morally enjoy a better deal than someone who

puts closer to departure. And whether companies are selling

flights, trains or ferries, they would ideally want to see that happen because it means that

they will be able to reward people who commit and hand over large watches of cash well in advance,

and at the same time maximising prices from people who doodle and don't book in time.

And every company that sells travel will have a kind of dream

booking curve that it hopes to achieve. That would be steadily increasing both the number of

sales and the price of the product. So day one, it goes on sale you might sell a couple of seats.

Two months in you'd expect to sell maybe 30 or 40. You will gradually put the price up

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