When Does the Next Airfare Sale Come? Six Weeks of Records and What You Can Book Now

Sales recorded in the last six weeks50bulletinsA record, not a forecast. What follows is an estimate conditioned on it

In the six weeks from 3 August to 13 September 2026 this site logged 50 airfare sales, an average of 8.3 a week. Not one of those weeks passed without a sale. The quietest week had three; the busiest had seventeen.

The swing is wide because the weekly count is decided less by any airline’s own cycle than by whether several airlines happen to announce at once. What the numbers actually argue is that waiting for the next sale is the slower move: look at what is running now and see whether your destination is in it.

The forecast is an estimate drawn from past rounds and is not a guarantee of any airline’s plans. For dates, fares and conditions, the airline’s own site is what counts.

Now on sale

These are rounds we confirmed against the airline’s own announcement and whose deadline has not passed. Once a deadline goes by, an ended banner appears on the bulletin automatically. If you open one and see that banner, come back here and take something current instead.

When is the next one? What the record shows

The table below holds rounds we actually wrote up as bulletins, and for which an English edition exists. It is not copied from anyone else’s round-up. A round that is missing from it was not necessarily missing from the world; it was missing from our record.

Taken by month, the record holds 9 bulletins in June 2026, 19 in July, 25 in August and 28 in September up to the 14th. Coverage began on 27 June, so June is short on both ends, and part of what looks like growth is the net widening rather than the market moving. Even so, the jump from August into September is more than the net can explain. Seventeen of those bulletins landed in the first week of September, where announcements aimed at the autumn travel season stacked up.

Follow one airline and the intervals become visible. Jetstar’s Super Star Sale is on record five times — 29 June, 17 July, 2 August, 1 September and 12 September — at gaps of 18, 16, 30 and 11 days. That averages out to about three weeks, but a series running from 11 to 30 days is not a monthly cycle in any useful sense. The lowest fares were 3,820, 3,820, 3,790, 2,990 and 3,990 yen, with the 1 September round standing well clear of the others. Waiting for a round cheaper than the last one is a bet this sequence wins and loses about equally.

The two full-service carriers are shaped differently. ANA and JAL run a domestic flash sale roughly once a month, with route-specific international campaigns layered on top. On 13 and 14 September, JAL put out four in a row: Taipei, Hong Kong, Hawaii and Delhi. Route campaigns tend to set their deadline a month or more out, so they demand far less urgency than the sudden kind.

Month by month, the airlines on record (last two years)

● on record ○ nothing on record ― outside the observation window. Bulletins began on 27 June 2026, so there is no observation at all before May or after October. September is counted to the 14th.

Four months of grid support exactly one claim: ANA, JAL, Jetstar and Eastar Jet appear in every month observed. Nobody has enough rounds banked to pin a cycle on, so the honest use of those four is to assume something will come each month and check. For the airlines with gaps in the row, the grid cannot separate a long interval from a round we simply missed.

The kinds of sale, and how each one behaves

Do paid memberships and coupons pay for themselves?

Jetstar was the only airline in Japan running a paid membership, and that door is now shut. Paying an annual fee for early access is not a choice that exists for a new customer as of September 2026.

Existing members with valid memberships can still log in and use the benefits, according to the airline. Since nobody can renew, though, every member leaves this table on the day their membership expires. The routes to early information that remain cost nothing: free accounts with each airline, and app notifications.

How not to miss one

Of the three, alerts do the most work. The cheapest fare in the whole six weeks, Jetstar’s 2,990 yen one way, had a deadline the day after it was announced. A habit of looking for flights at the weekend cannot catch that kind at all. Turning on notifications for one or two airlines and letting the calendar handle the rest is the arrangement that fits the way these actually arrive.

Before you book

• The headline fare is usually one way and usually excludes the extras. Double it and add the payment fee before comparing airlines.
• Travel periods differ by route inside the same sale, and a note excluding certain dates is common. The route with the lowest fare is not necessarily on the same terms as yours.
• Change and refund conditions on a sale fare are tighter than on a normal one. Buying the cheapest fare before the dates are settled costs the difference later.
• Where seats and checked bags are priced separately, the total with options can pass a full-service airline’s ordinary fare. How the total is built on a budget fare shows where the order reverses.

The payment fee is the single most overlooked line in a comparison. Some budget airlines charge it per passenger per sector, so two people on a return trip pay it four times. A few hundred yen of difference in the headline fare changes places entirely once that is added. Fare-comparison sites often list the fare alone, which is why the last step has to be each airline’s own booking screen.

One more: the time of day a sale ends. Closing is not always midnight. Jetstar has closed a round at 16:59 in the past, so the evening of the last day was already too late. If the plan is to act on the final day, find out the hour first, from the bulletin or from the airline. Rooms and activities move on the same dates the seats do, and Klook covers most of the destinations these sales reach.

One view changed over these six weeks. Holding out for a round cheaper than the last looks reasonable while the bulletins are flowing, but the week with three of them shows what that costs: the candidates disappear while you wait. If your destination is flexible, take what is running. If it is fixed, turn on that one airline’s alerts and ignore everything else. Between those two the search time drops sharply.

Source: the airlines’ own sites and our own sale bulletins (recorded 27 June to 14 September 2026) / Checked on 2026-09-14 / Featured image: MaedaAkihiko, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)