To Wait or To Buy: A Recommendation Service for Airline Ticket Purchase Timing

Abstract

In recent years, several optimal airline ticket purchasing strategies have been proposed and most of them are based on predicted price information. However, risks of ticket sold out and price uncertainties have not been modeled or considered by these strategies, which limits their effectiveness. Therefore, we design a recommendation service that is based on a new optimal airline ticket purchasing strategy PACES (Path Cost Expectation-based Strategy), which models and considers the risks and uncertainties of ticket purchasing explicitly. Extensive experiments are conducted on a real-world dataset and the results show that this strategy significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques.