What's a Good Price for a Flight? A Practical Guide to Setting Your Target
"Is £450 a good price for this flight" doesn't have one answer, even for the exact same destination. £450 might be a genuinely good fare for a direct London-Tokyo flight with BA, and only an average price for a one-stop routing via China on a different carrier. Same destination, same number, two different verdicts - because "flights to Tokyo" isn't really one price, it's several overlapping ones depending on routing and carrier. A "good price" isn't a fixed number you carry between routes - it's specific to this route, this routing, this season, this cabin, right now.
Start from what the route actually costs, not a gut feeling
The only honest way to know if a number is good is to know what the route normally costs. Most fares for a given route and season cluster into a rough range - a cheap end, a typical middle, and an expensive end. Once you know that range, "good price" stops being a guess: it's just wherever your number sits inside it. A fare in the cheap third of that range is a real deal. One in the expensive third isn't, even if it feels cheap compared to what you paid last time you flew somewhere else entirely.
This is what tools like Google Flights' Price Insights or milo's own price-insight gauge are actually for - not to predict the future, but to show you where today's number sits against that route's own recent history, so "good" means something more concrete than a hunch.
The lowest fare you've ever seen is probably not your target
It's tempting to anchor on the cheapest price you've ever heard of for a route - a friend's lucky find, a screenshot from a deals account, a fare that existed for six hours in 2023. Treating that as your target usually just means waiting indefinitely for something that may not repeat, or that came with conditions you wouldn't actually accept (a 14-hour layover, a rock-bottom-tier fare with no changes allowed, dates nobody actually wants). A realistic target is a genuinely good price within the range you'd actually see again - not the best price anyone has ever seen once.
Flexibility doesn't just help - it changes which prices you're actually competing against
"Being flexible gets you a cheaper flight" is true but says nothing useful on its own. What's actually happening: one fixed date is a single roll of the dice against that day's specific seat inventory and demand. A three-week window across a couple of departure airports isn't a slightly better roll - it's dozens of rolls, and you only need the best one to land. That's not a marginal edge, it changes which part of the route's whole price range you're realistically sampling from. A rigid trip is negotiating with one date. A flexible one is negotiating with the cheapest of many.
Which is why the same route can fairly justify two different targets. Fixed dates, one cabin, no stops - aim near the cheap edge of typical, because you don't get to try again if that one date doesn't cooperate. A genuinely open date window with an acceptable stop - a more aggressive target is defensible, because you're not betting on one fare dropping, you're betting on the best of many doing so.
Back to London-Tokyo
Say direct BA fares for your travel window typically run £700-£950. The one-stop options via Chinese carriers, same destination, typically run £450-£650. Those aren't two prices for the same trip - they're two different price ranges wearing the same city name. £750 is a fair, defensible target if the direct BA flight is specifically what you want. That exact same £750 would be a mediocre target against the one-stop range, where £500 is the honest "good price." The mistake isn't picking a bad number - it's not noticing you were actually shopping in two different markets the whole time.
Once you have a number, the job changes
Working out the target is the hard, thoughtful part. Watching for it is the tedious part - and it's exactly the part worth handing off. That's what milo's alerts are for: show you where a route's price actually sits before you commit to a number, then keep checking for it on a schedule, across whatever date window and trip length you're genuinely flexible on - so setting the target is the only decision you have to make once.
For more on how a target price alert should actually behave once you've set one, see Set a Flight Price Target and Only Hear From Us When We Find It.